Lean customer development in action

From spelling out assumptions to a first interview

First thing you do with your awesome idea is to try to prove it wrong before you spend time, money and energy on it.

I set out to exercise lean thinking for my side project — an idea to design a digital help to new moms.

Cindy Alvarez defines “Lean customer development” as a pragmatic hypothesis-driven approach to understanding:

• Who your customers are
• What problems and needs they have
• How they are currently behaving
• Which solutions customers will give you money for
• How to provide solutions in a way that works with how your customers decide, procure, buy and use

So , for my startup, I have outlined:

1. Major assumptions about life of postpartum moms
2. Then I have stated a problem that they, likely, to have — a hypothesis to validate
3. A target user to validate the hypothesis

Now, it was a time to validate the hypothesis with the target users.

That was a trickiest part. How do I find users and get them spend time with me?

Steve Blank coined the term “Earlyvangelists” — the people who are the most motivated to solve their problems. So, I needed to figure these people among postpartum moms and how to reach them.

What I did is I have reached social media — various forums, YouTube videos, Facebook groups to “watch” postpartum moms online.

It was a variation of “fly on the wall” observations from User Research, I have spend hundreds of hours going through postpartum moms’ angst and hurdles that they have shared with alike to alleviate their troubles and find support.

At the end, I felt I know these postpartum moms in and out, I could predict what another new mom would say in the next video, or a Facebook post. and I could predict what another moms would respond to her.

Nevertheless, this passive observation was not enough, I still had questions that weren’t answered. Some of them were: How often does a postpartum moms use a phone and what for? What is her day-to-day behavior? How does she deal with stress? What does it prevent her to ask for help? and What kind of help does she need?

And additionally, I needed to start building a customer base, so I can test early prototypes to validate problem/solution fit.

So, after a month of passively soaking in private forums and closed groups, I was ready to reach the audience using their language.

I have setup a landing page to recruit new moms

and then I have joined a private group for postpartum moms who were having difficulties in adjusting to their new roles.

Hacking to a support group to get access to postpartum moms

That was a bold move, and eventually leaders have kicked me out of the discussion, and I, completely, understand why.

But, surprisingly, words got spread from the group, and a first earlyevangelist has reached me herself!

She was a mom and a maternal advocate and she asked “How can she help me?”

So I have asked her to recruit moms for interviews and she has advertised that for me for free among her several facebook groups with over 1k users.

Now, I needed to practice user research to build a proper screener, plan for interview, schedule participants and organize qualitative data afterwards.

Read next post to know how did user research go, what expected difficulties I had during the user research and , most importantly, what I have learned from it to move forward with lean startup.

This is a post from series #productdesign where I practice product design and customer development.

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