by Justin Wilcox -

You need to grow a pair

Ever gotten advice so spot on your ego couldn’t take it at the time, and it was only later you realized its value?

That happened to me when Glenn Kelman told me, point blank:

You need to grow a pair.

4 years ago I had the privilege of meeting with Glenn to chat about my startup at the time.  During that meeting, I got some of the most poignant, and harsh, advice of my life:

Me: My company is a, blah, blah.

Glenn: You guys making money?

Me: Yeah, we’ve got a customer that’s keeping the lights on.

Glenn: That’s fantastic! [gives me a high five]

Me: [The CEO of Redfin just high fived me – stoked!]  But it’s only one customer.   We’re in talks with other companies and they say they like it, but no commitments.  We need a marketing/sales guy.

Glenn: Have you asked these potential customers if they’d pay for it?

Me: Well, it’s um, complicated.  You see…

Glenn: You don’t need a sales guy. You need to grow a pair.

Me: [unstoked]

Wtf?!  I may look young, but dude, seriously, I’m pretty sure I hit puberty…

Well before the notions of Customer Development and Lean Startup were popular, Glenn knew what was up.  Steve Blank might have coined the phrase, “get out of the building”, but the advice is the same and I end up passing it along to a majority of the founders I meet:

You don’t need a sales person, you don’t need a marketer, you need to ask your customers if they’ll pay for your product before you build it.  You need to grow a pair.

Thanks, Glenn.

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by Justin Wilcox -

What does customer development look like?

We've launched, but haven't seen much traction...

You’ve got an idea, and now you’ve been told to “get out of the building,” but that kind of advice just leaves you with more questions:

  • How do I find my target audience?
  • How do I ask enterprises if they’ll pay for my product?
  • Do landing pages and ad clicks really tell me how much people will pay for a product?

That’s what this blog is all about.

We’re going to follow companies as they “get out of the building.” We’ll see how they discover their target audience, ask if that audience will pay for their product, and watch them react to the response.

By observing the step-by-step customer development process of multiple companies, you’ll be able to study concrete examples from real-time case studies. At the end, this will look like a roadmap that traces the journey from our nascent ideas to our final destination (which is wildly lucrative success, duh), but right now it will be like a road trip through destinations you’ve heard about but never seen.

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