customer research focus for early stage startups

1. T.A. McCann –Strategies for market and customer research
Founders Institute, Seattle, 3/19/3012

2. • Customer research vs. market research
• Know your customers
• Find and nurture the new influencers
• Build a tribe
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3. Build a map toward success
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4. A valuable target customer
• Business professional
• Places high value of relationships (>8/10)
• Has significant (>50%) of key relationships outside company
• >5 meetings/week with outside people (more/new is better)
• Uses technology to gain information advantage
• Actively builds and manages his network
• Pays monthly information service fees (mobile, CRM, wiki,
contact manager… (more is better)
People like this include;
T.A. • Roles include (execs, sales, recruiter, PR, journalists, lawyers…)
Brad • Influencer of others and/or small teams
Buzz
Kendall • Technical, early but not bleeding edge adopter
Brandt
Miles Austin
Dave Thomas (WSGR) • Often fits in GTD category as well
• Reads books like “never eat alone” or “4 hour work week”
• Attends “networking” events or activities
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5. Use a survey to capture and scale
Gist survey – with over 6500 responses - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZTH5BJR
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6. Map real people <--> personas
Kevin Spidel
"I am the Managing Director of an
international PR firm and am very active on
the social web. Gist allows me to cut through
the noise and manage my contacts directly. I
am able to monitor what matters... the
relationship."
Managing Director
Patriot Strategies
http://patriotstrategies.com
Washington, DC, USA
5300 contacts, 1279 companies

7. Leverage your network to find more
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8. Copy the leaders (for some stuff)
Users
Positioning
User/market data
Marketing
Value
Feature priority
Key thought leaders
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9. Find your market-space/competition
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10. Work backwards from the acquisition
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11. My post with a process - http://tamccann.com/finding-the-right-beta-users/
Tim Ferris/Noah Kagan - http://twurl.nl/vquqtg
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12. http://tamccann.com/every-journey-begins-with-a-few-tiny-steps/
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13. Send regular status (2 weeks)
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14. Make someone else the champion
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15. Track and manage your influencers
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16. Go make something great!
T.A. McCann
tam@gist.com
www.gist.com/tamccann