The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten podcast.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to switch your customer base.They highlight how to identify the right product for the right customer, and what to do if the customer you planned to target didn’t work out for our business.

Customers are the heart of any business, but not all customers are created equal. Because your customer base has such a huge impact on your business growth. It is important to ensure that they are of high quality, and that by providing them with the perfect solution to their problem. That they in turn help you to achieve the goals that you have for your business.

Tune into this week’s episode of The Startup Chat to learn what you can do if you have built your product, but find that the customer that you planned to market to are not responding to your solution. Steli and Hiten, also talk about the gift of flexibility, being open minded and honest with yourself about how things are going. They show how knowing that it isn’t working is a big step towards turning everything around and creating something that will work.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

02:39 The first step to identify the problem.

03:17 The importance of customer development.

04:03 What to do if you have your product and no customer to market to.

04:50 How to market a pre built product to a new market.

05:10 Why being flexible in your approach is important.

05:36 Mistakes not to make with your pre build product.

06:19 Tip on going after a new market.

06:45 Don’t operate from fear.

07:00 What can you do when it didn’t work.

07:32 The gift of realising it isn’t working.

3 Key Points:

Is your solution a good fit for that problem or is there another solution you can come up with.

Don’t think that you are forced to make that product work in a different market.

Keep your options open.

[0:00:00]

Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.

[0:00:03]

Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.

[0:00:05]

Steli Efti: Today on The Startup Chat, we want to talk about how do you switch your customer base? Or, how do you find a better customer if the customer you went after didn't pan out? Right? The reason why I want to talk about this is that a listener sent us an email, I think, a day or so ago, asking us to talk about this and to give some advice. Whenever you listeners are sending us emails, A) we appreciate it, B) we try to get back to you and see whenever you bring up something we haven't really discussed in too much detail, we'll record an episode and dedicate it to you. The question that that founder had was, "Hey, we had a thought or an idea who our customer could be. We built a little solution for them. We went out there to try to acquire them, and what we learned was that it took or it takes way too much time and energy and money to acquire these types of customers for the return that we can make with them in terms of their willingness to pay for what we've built. So, now we're thinking, 'Shit, this is not the right type of customer. We won't be able to build a successful business here. We have to go and find a different customer to sell our solution to.' How do we do this?" What are your thoughts on this, Hiten?

[0:01:23]

Hiten Shah: Every time I talk to a founder about this problem, which is actually probably a pretty common problem, especially earlier stages of a business within like the first year of a startup, they usually have some intuition. Ideally, though, they have some data and information as to what experiments they can run to find the right customer. The reason I say that is oftentimes, they're sitting there. They didn't always deliberately target a certain customer set. In fact, they just sort of put their stuff out there and sort of targeted, but then there's some pockets of customers that are super useful...