The Startup Owner's Manual

CHAPTER 10Customer Validation, Phase Two: Get Out of the Building and Sell!

IN THIS PHASE OF CUSTOMER VALIDATION, it’s time to try to sell. Customer discovery had you get out of the building twice, first to understand customers’ problems and how they work and second to determine how well the new product solves that problem. And while you’ve no doubt conducted hundreds of tests to iterate and pivot your business model, there is no better “pass/fail” test than asking a customer to give you an order or spend time with your app or website.

In a physical channel, nothing validates a hypothesis better than a signed order, especially when it’s signed before the product is either complete or actually shipping. In the web/mobile channel, the equivalent validation is attracting users or payers at the rate your hypotheses said you would. (In a multi-sided market, even if you’re getting great traffic and growth, be sure the “other” side, usually the advertisers or payers, are eager to spend to reach your traffic.)

Your job in this phase is not to scale a revenue plan but to validate your business model hypotheses with pass/fail tests that feel an awful lot like selling or building web traffic. But revenue or traffic at full scale doesn’t happen until the next step, customer creation. Customer validation is the test sales process that—while it makes real sales—is principally aimed at answering ...