Posted on

Customer – to listen or not to listen

 

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses

There is a pretty high chance you have heard the quote and an equally good probability that you yourself have used it to support or demolish an argument on “customer knows best”. It is quite interesting to note how quotes by well known people become the base to support an argument without any need to understand the true import of what has been said.

While we do not know if Henry Ford really said those lines, there is ample evidence that he thought along those lines. To the extent that his company suffered. Steve Jobs also showed similar inclinations (in terms of the customer not always knowing what s/he wants) when he said

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them

Now, there are brilliant companies that have been built on innovation and creativity that is attributed to the capacity to think independent of public opinion/noise. On the other hand, frameworks like the Lean Startup recommend listening to your customers at regular intervals to get feedback on your product. In fact, Eric Ries even recommends

Frequency is more important than talking to the “right” customers, especially early on.

 

So, as a startup, how do you build your product – basing it on your experience & intuition or by constantly going back to your (potential) customers regularly for feedback?

For us, at RobusTest, the answer is not a choice between the former or latter. It is a combination of both approaches. Having an insight into what the customer wants can be a matter of creative thinking that comes about without the need to talk to any customer. It can also come about from a deep understanding of customer’s problems. Of course, the latter is not as sexy.

We, the founders and our early employees have worked extensively in the app testing and test tooling space. We relied on this experience to arrive at the feature set of the early version of RobusTest. As we met more customers to pitch our product, we realized that customers are not looking for a product, they are looking for solutions to business problems. And these problems are unique to each customer. We, therefore, focus a lot on listening to the customer. When we say, “listening to the customer”, it is not the mere act of hearing what the customer says. It includes observing the customer’s business and business practices. Asking questions without having the answer already set. My earlier post on product design touched upon this aspect of discovering the usefulness of your offering.

How did you go about creating your product? Was it gut feel to start with and then market research? What do you think about talking/listening to the customer to create your product?

Posted on

Announcing the 5th and final batch of 10 companies @InTech50 2015

Happy to announce the final and last batch of finalists (out of a total of 50) of InTech50 2015, a flagship event of iSPIRT and Terenne Global.

Congratulations to them all!

The first, second, third and fourth batch of finalists has already been announced in our previous blogs.

Here is the final list –

  • Crayon –  MAYA is a personal concierge, powered by Crayon’s SimplerChoices™ platform. SimplerChoices™ maps affinities based on taste (from review sites, social networks), influence (from social networks), context (from public data, location-based data), and behavior (from internal enterprise data) to build a massive cross-category taste graph.
  • Datonis – Altizon helps the industrial world create smart, connected products within a very short span of time and with minimum investment in infrastructure. Altizon’s flagship product the Datonis™ platform is offered in PaaS and on-premise models and is built to handle a Billion events a day from a million devices.
  • Druva in Sync – Druva’s inSync endpoint data protection and governance suite UNIQUELY integrates secure, scalable, high-performance endpoint backup, file sync across all user endpoints, remote file access, data loss prevention, IT-managed file sharing, and governance – including eDiscovery enablement – in a single platform.
  • Nifty Window – Nifty Window is a hyper-local marketing based new customer acquisition platform that helps offline brands and businesses attract consumers online. The platform uses content marketing and distribution to help brick & mortar businesses drive in-store sales across search, social media and mobile channels.
  • Nowfloats – NowFloats enables local businesses to get online, generate relevant content, and be highly discovered for online users to consumer this information in a meaningful way.Using the NowFloats platform, any enterprise whose channel is a small business, can bring the entire local channel online and drive local consumers towards that business.
  • RateGain – RevGain is an ultra sophisticated price recommendation engine for hotels. It continuously tracks over 11 big-data, environmental factors such as market supply, competitor prices, inventory levels and more to tell hotels how much they should price their rooms at.
  • RippleHire – RippleHire is a technology product that gamifies employee referrals and enables social recruiting. By empowering the best way you hire (Employee Referrals), we reduce your hiring costs & efforts. Game mechanics make the process fun, engaging and drives great results.
  • RobusTest – RobusTest is providing SAAS based Automation Solution for Web/Native/Hybrid applications. Its does not require any pre-configuration or setup. User can automate any mobile application from their browser without any scripting/coding knowledge.RobusTest also provides detailed Automation Test reports (including CPU, Memory, network and battery usage).
  • Vymo – Our vision is to help sales teams make a Million Smarter Decisions every minute. Our marquee product is a mobile first Lead Management System. Our operational analytics help in better lead prioritisation, smarter allocation, better pitches, quicker conversions and higher frontline productivity.
  • Zing HR – ZingHR is an End-to-End INTEGRATED Hire-to-Retire Management Cloud platform. You name any process, right from the time a potential talent is called for an interview, through the employee’s entire lifecycle with the organisation, till the employee moves on. Talent Acquisition, eRecruitment, Onboarding, Leave, Time & Attendance, Claims, Payroll, Compliance, Performance Management…more.

There will be no greater joy for us than to see our finalists leverage the associations they’ve built and emerge as truly global companies over the next few years, further validating the credibility of India as a ‘product nation’. That is exactly what we had set out to achieve in the first place.

Looking forward to meeting the ‘Fanastic Fifty’ at InTech50 in Bangalore.