The Startup Owner's Manual

CHAPTER 8Introduction to Customer Validation

Along the journey we commonly forget its goal.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

E.PIPHANY’S FOUNDING HYPOTHESES WERE typically pretty straightforward and “investable” in the mid-1990s, when software companies were automating everything from accounts payable to network security, sales force processes and even wine-cellar inventories. “Why not automate the marketing department?” asked the founders, meeting in their modest living room. “After all, most of the tasks like press releases and data sheets and customer letters are repeatable processes.” Venture capital was raised and the company began to build its product based on the founders’ vision.

However, the company’s initial idea of who the customer was and the problem they wanted to solve was just plain wrong. The company’s later success was due to the four passionate entrepreneurs’ willingness to listen to customers and to the three painful pivots driven by customer feedback.

The Browser Breakthrough

During the ’90s, large corporations acquired different software applications to automate each part of their enterprise—finance, customer support, manufacturing, and sales among them. But the data these applications collected were accessed via reporting tools from the IT organization. More important, the data existed in “virtual silos,” with each functional system walled off from the other. The ...