Is this post a little self serving? Yes. (I’m a co-founder of Flowtown).  That being said - we use Flowtown every day in our customer development processes and after showing several startups how to accomplish this, I figured it only made sense to share it with the rest of the lean startup community.

1. Finding Early Adopters

One of the biggest challenges for most startups is finding early adopters for their application.

Early Adopters: Passionate, early users of new technology or products who understand its value before mainstream markets. Acquiring early adopters is important to jumpstart product adoption. (p.17 - The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development)

They become extremely important in providing feedback on product features, competitive landscape, the market and potential business models.

3 steps to helping you find them within your teams network:

1. Using Flowtown you can easily import all your existing contacts manually or by using one of our import methods: CSV, GMail, MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.  From there we analyze them and create a rich social profile.
2. Now, using the occupational search feature - you can look for individuals who may have have experience in the market you’re targeting.  For example - here’s the search we conducted within all the founding teams contacts: CMO/CEO/COO, Social Media Experts / Consultant, Founders / Co-Founders, Marketer / Marketing and Community Manager.
3. From there you can create a contact group from this search result and send them an email or tweet to connect with them. (tip: in person - get out of the building

Bonus Tip - Here’s a list of people that you can ideally learn a lot from:

• Industry consultants
• Developers with domain knowledge
• Founders in similar market addressing a different customer
• Investors with an interest in your market

2. Learning and Engaging Your Users

Once you start having users - you can then do a variety of things within Flowtown to understand and engage with them better:

• Create Twitter List from a User Group: Using the ability to create groups based on location, occupation or social network you can use this to engage with them on twitter.
• Timed Survey Automation: Flowtown has the ability to schedule a customer discovery survey (ex: using Survey.io) to all new users 2 weeks after they’ve activated or sign up for your application.
• Customer Advisory Board (CAB): Creating a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) contact group, you can then add customers and others individuals from your target market that have agreed to provide feedback and validate ideas before building them by sending simple emails with either surveys, product screen shots, screen casts or mock-ups.

These are just a few ways you can use Flowtown to interact with your users and potential customers.

3. Real Time Notifications of Target Users

Using the our web hook integration, you can setup your sign-up flow, newsletter subscriptions or contact form (ideally using Wufoo) to add that person to a Flowtown group.  From there, you can setup a social notification to be emailed anytime someone meets one of the following filters; twitter influence, occupation or location.  For example - anyone that signs-up for Flowtown that has either a Klout twitter influence score  >=15, occupation is either a Founder, Co-Founder, CEO, CMO, Marketer or lives in San Francisco - I receive an email like this.

From there I typically do one of the following:

• Ask them what problem they feel that Flowtown would solve for them
• Ask them to join our Customer Advisory Board (CAB)
• Ask them how they heard about us
• Ask them for a 15 minutes phone call and conduct a customer discovery interview
• Say hi to an old friend!

… Final thoughts

Most startups fail because they’re building something that nobody wants and they run out time and/or money before they can learn their way to success.

Hopefully you’ve adopted Customer Development (CD) within your startup and find some of the tips I’ve provided useful in regards to learning exactly what it is that’s going to make your product a must have.

Did I forget anything? I would love to hear from you in the comments.

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Speaking has always been a way for me to deepen my understand around a specific topic, as well as a way to gain a larger perspective around issues that face a the startup community.  I always get more out of it then I put in (it’s a bit selfish that way #honesty)!  With that being said, I’m super excited to be participating in 6 of the most amazing startup conferences in North America.

Startup Lessons Learned (videos are online) - San Francisco, April 25, 2010

Flowtown Case Study as a Lean Startup.

Lean Startup Intensive (Web 2.0 Expo) - San Francisco, May 2nd, 2010

Flowtown Case Study as a Lean Startup: This will be a similar case study to the one we presented at the Lesson Learned Conference with one additional slide on the techniques that we’ve since implemented that have had the biggest impact to our results.

Startup Camp - Montreal, May 5, 2010

Unconference Moderator:  Montreal + Startups = Super Excited!

Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference - Halifax, May 14-15, 2010

Startup Marketing Tactics: User acquisition, Conversion Optimization, Metrics and Channel Testing.

MeshU - Toronto, May 16, 2010

Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer App

In todays world of open source, cheap computing power and APIs, it’s not if you can build it, but should you build it. The #1 startup killer is running out of time to “figure it out” before you get traction. Lean product development is the methodology that allowed companies like PayPal, Yelp, Ardvark and up and coming Flowtown.com (profitable in two months) to pivot into their market to become a dominate player.

There is a science behind the approach and in this talk I’ll go over customer development, feature prioritization, split testing, product metrics and agile development as approaches to increase your probabilities of succeeding as a startup.

http://meshu.eventbrite.com/

LessConf - Atlanta, May 21-22, 2010

Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer App

If you plan on attending any of these conference, be sure to leave a comment with your Twitter name and a note on why you’re going (what do you hope to get out of it) and I’ll be sure to reach out to you and help enhance your experience.

See you on the road!

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If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Next week Ethan and I will be speaking at Berkeley to the MBA class that Steve Blank and Eric Ries created around Customer Development (CD) and Lean Startup.

Am I nervous? Heck yeah! Steve’s the God Father of CD and known for being brutally honest. All we can do is tell our story with as much passion and honesty as possible.

If you’re new to Customer Development or Lean Startup, be sure to read Steve Blanks blog, or his book: Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Last month in Boston I got to speak with a groups of statrups about Customer Development and the best feedback I got was “get straight to the stories, don’t focus on the mechanics … tell us what YOU did it - not how to do it.”. So with that feedback fresh in my mind, our talk next week will be 100% story based.

The 7 personal stories on Customer Development / Lean Startup I’ll be talking about:

1. Customer Developement (CD) is freakin’ hard.
2. Focus on the problem, not the solution.
3. Don’t solve problems you’re not passionate about.
4. Being good at sales is a bad thing.
5. You need thick skin to do it right.
6. Stop geeking out on the numbers.
7. Pivoting to perfection (again, problem not solution)

Interested in stopping by? Learn how here.

Are you implementing Customer Development / Lean Startup processes in your startup? If so, what have you learned?

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