Nail it Then Scale it / Lean Start Up Lessons Learned

We're trying hard to be smart about this whole start-up business. Limit risk. Sell before we build. Allow the market to create what it needs instead of forcing our ideas on it.

But it's been an extremely rough road. We've interviewed somewhere around 35 companies now, and are finally beginning to understand who our real customer is - and who we should be interviewing.

Here's something I've noticed so far - the people we've talked to can be separated into two criteria for being our customer. The first is their position within the company. Front-lines salespeople are not our customer. They're barely even our user. The majority of the early interviews I did were with front-lines people, who validated the concept to some degree, but didn't give it a really strong reaction either way. That made it extraordinarily difficult to understand the feedback we were getting. It wasn't negative... but it wasn't positive. So I felt like we were on to something, but hadn't really nailed it, and had no idea what to change to get to the right answer.

Then we interviewed a couple sales managers, and they were all for it. Some of them. Which led to our second conclusion - size matters.

Smaller organizations are too intimate to need a tool for management. The managers interface with their people every day and know exactly what's going on.

Larger organizations, however, do need a tool for performance management. We've hypothesized the threshold to be at about 10 salespeople. We've interviewed a few that have teams of 7, and they give validation, but not very strong. There seems to be a very strong correlation between size and need, with the largest organizations (300 and 100 salespeople) being the most adamant about the value of this concept.