The Overview #68
Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting thoughts, articles, and more from around the internet.
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Understand your customers better with these three questions – and Vouch
Capturing your customers’ feedback helps you build a product they can’t live without. In this Vouch video, James shares the three questions every business should be asking its customers. Watch it here.
Vouch is a video collection platform, perfect for capturing authentic feedback. Simply add your questions, share the link, and start learning from your customers.
In this post:
Should you build features to win deals?
This article is a must-read for everyone in early-stage startups, especially those pre-PMF. It’s tempting to build features to sign a customer, but often ends up being the wrong call for these six reasons:
- You’re Dodging The Controversial Calls – and this dilutes the focus on your core ICP
- You’re Not Intentional About Your Design Partnerships – and find it harder to get feedback that helps you win
- You’re Committing Too Easily To Prospective Customers – and that makes it hard to build velocity on your actual plans
- You’re Unrealistic About What You Can Execute – and you end up disappointing everyone
- You’re Falling For The Myth That Competition Doesn’t Matter – and lose your competitive differentiation
- You’re Skipping Cross-Functional Feedback – and operate in an unhelpful echo chamber
Discover, THEN validate (separately)
It’s so tempting to focus just on discovery work! It’s exciting to understand what customers and the market want and need.
But effective validation can be a superpower. Knowing when and how to sanity check, beta test, or wizard-of-oz a product initiative can help you save time and effort, while getting better results.
Who is the customer?
A great meme. Founders and CEOs generally start companies based on the pains they’ve experienced in the past, so can be great proxies for market insight in the early days. As the business scales and the market evolves, those insights aren’t so broadly applicable anymore – but good luck if the founder recognizes it. In these cases, you’re likely overestimating your customer’s maturity, that puts you at-odds with the market.
The only thing you can do is push to gather evidence over assumptions, measure confidence levels, and understand where you need to validate.
Swipe File: Investing in your differentiators
This Tom Tunguz article is succinct, but says a lot.
In her experience, customers rarely push vendors to further their differentiation. By definition, the unique selling proposition doesn’t exist elsewhere in the market. So advances or improvements to the differentiator may not be obvious to customers… Features that reinforce differentiation won’t surface in customer feedback…
The product management team must take responsibility for reinforcing the startup’s differentiator. Once the market recognizes the startup’s advantage, every competitor will race to replicate it. The startup must invest in that differentiation to sustain their market lead.
Take a look at what’s in progress in your product team today. How much effort is focused on building unique value, not just catch-up, business-as-usual features?
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