Disciplined Entrepreneurship, 2nd Edition

STEP 9Identify Your Next 10 Customers

In This Step, You Will:

• Create a list of the next 10 potential end user customers in your Beachhead Market after the Persona who closely fit the End User Profile.
• Engage them in a dialogue on your plans and validate or invalidate the work you have done so far.

Explicitly identifying the Next 10 Customers after the Persona increases your level of confidence that you are on the right path and they will be invaluable to refining the steps completed so far.

Why This Step, and Why Now?

To date, you will have made a first draft of three crucial elements of your plan (Full Life Cycle Use Case, High‐Level Product Specification, Quantified Value Proposition) based on the input of one person, the Persona. This step follows those steps because you will now do a deeper dive to refine those steps with 10 more real target customers, grounded in your work in the market realities—and you will dramatically reduce the risk of building a product that no one wants.

Let's Get Started

One danger of focusing solely on your Persona is that you could build your business to be too specific, thus limiting your ability to sell to others in your target market. If the Persona is done correctly, this will not happen, but your Persona will not be perfect.

This ...