Cover Background Image: Amy Hirschi on Unsplash
A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.
– Mahatma GandhiGet closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.
– Steve Jobs
Customers are the lifeblood of every company, and their satisfaction is a lead driver of the business. For a deep tech startup focused on innovation, Customer Development is critical to its success.
So, understanding the needs and pain points of the customer is essential to creating innovative solutions. It is the only sure way for a deep tech startup to tailor its technology to fulfil customer needs well.
As an enterprise deep-tech startup, our customer development journey has been iterative. It has been crucial to our success in identifying and serving our target customers.
Through 2021 and 2022, we conducted multiple experiments to ensure that we had a deep understanding of the needs of our potential customers. Below is a synopsis of activities and findings.
Customer Interactions
We interacted with several hundred potential customers to understand their problems and to identify if and how best we could solve them.
Market Segments
We experimented with several market segments and customer personas to discover the niches with the best market and growth opportunities. As a result, we found a handful of untapped market segments and potential beachheads.
Channel And Revenue
We experimented with scores of channel and revenue models to find the best ones. But, we needed to scrape a majority due to business viability issues. However, we found a handful of them a great fit and a few suitable for our beachhead strategy.
Overall, our customer development journey has been instrumental in building a sound understanding of our target markets and customers. As a result of this process, we uncovered valuable market segments and beachhead opportunities, identified areas for product improvements, and validated our business hypotheses.
Most importantly, we have made necessary pivots that have helped us evolve a very refined business model, thus enabling us to deliver the best value to our customers through our products and solutions.
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