Customer development
What is customer development?
Customer development is a framework, developed by Steve Blank, for building a startup by testing hypotheses with real customers. It runs in stages: customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation and company building.
It underpins much of lean startup thinking.
Why customer development matters
It treats a business plan as guesses to test rather than facts to execute, which lowers the risk of scaling the wrong thing.
Related marketing terms
Customer discovery is talking to potential customers to learn their problems and test whether your idea solves something they care about.
A minimum viable product, MVP, is the simplest version of a product that lets you test your core idea with real users and learn quickly.
Product-market fit is when a product clearly satisfies a real market need: customers want it, use it, keep using it and tell others.