Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

STEP 9

Identify Your Next 10 Customers

IN THIS STEP, YOU WILL:

• Identify at least 10 potential customers, besides your Persona, who fit the End User Profile.
• Contact them to validate their similarity to your Persona, and their willingness to buy your product.

Explicitly identifying the next 10 customers after the Persona increases your level of confidence that you are on the right path and may also help you refine earlier steps.

While it is important to identify and develop a Persona to represent your end users, you must also be sure to identify other potential customers to ensure your product's success. This will dramatically increase your confidence that you have identified a scalable opportunity, not just a one-customer solution, as well as your credibility.

One potential danger of focusing solely on your Persona is that you could build your business to be too specific, focused only on the Persona without the ability to sell to other customers. If the Persona is done correctly, ...