Customer development

[Deleted21704]

After getting burned (more time than money) on my last venture, I've become a big supporter of the Lean Startup model. Financially, I've always been a fan of bootstrapping, so the mentality is quite natural to me.

One thing I wonder: how much emphasis do you successful fastlaners put on talking to customers before developing a product?

I'm reading "Running Lean" by Ash Maurya, in which he systematically describes how to determine the right product to build.

I get the impression that focusing on talking to customers is more important when building a brand-new, blue-ocean-type product no one has ever seen before (i.e., the kind of stuff you see on TechCrunch, etc). If your product is more of an incremental improvement on an existing solution, is it really necessary?

Obviously you have to get in front of customers at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, but as a solo founder, one has to initially prioritize one over the other.

Thoughts?

 

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