Left-Handed Tennis Players (in Paddington)

Project 2012: Day 19

This week we’ll be contributing towards the Project with answers for start-ups. Of course like most of the topics we discuss, there are learning’s for other facets of your life/career. But hey, I’m passionate about high-tech start-ups. So here we go.

First a question for you: “What is the single most important success factor for your business?”

Speak to any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you, it’s your customer. Not your idea, or your product.

Look at the greats: Jobs, Branson, Zuckerberg, and they all have one thing in common. They know their customer. They focus on delighting their customer.

This comes before product development. It’s knowing your customer intimately that leads to understanding their needs (& wants), then designing the best product/service for that need.

One of the biggest mistakes for start-ups is either taking “off strategy” work because you’re focussed on cash-flow (cash-flow is king, right?).

Worse still is feature creep because every new customer wants a slight variation of the service. If that’s the case you either don’t know your customer well enough (who should you say “no” to) or you haven’t targetted your customer segment tightly enough (who exactly are you marketing & selling to)

Shout out to Mick Liubinskas of Pollenizer fame for the Left-Handed Tennis Player (in Paddington) metaphor.

The idea is when you’re planning your initial market segment you write down characteristics about your customer. Who they are, their gender, age, marriage status, income, what they drive, where they hang out, what they read, keep going until you really know your customer…

Hint: Great idea to observe your customer. Just learn their behaviour. Especially their shopping behaviour.

…keep getting to know them more and more, like Branson, narrowing your initial market until you’re at the stage where you’re selling to “left-handed tennis players in Paddington.”

Now you can do the Jobs’ trick of paring away unessential features until you have the simplest, but most appropriate product for your customer.

Then, like Zuckerberg you can penetrate your narrow market (1 college in Harvard) and as you reach success you move to the next market (university) gradually expanding, before adding features.

Who is your customer?

Tagged as: Customer, Product, Start-up