| I'd say that if someone falls into that trap then they haven't really done the market research in the spirit of this strategy. The purpose of speaking to customers first before building is to find out how much demand there is for the product and how much they're willing to pay for. It's to find out that there is really only one company or a few that want this... before possibly wasting your time building it. If someone knowingly goes into building a product for a single customer, then that had better been a conscious decision, knowing the ramifications of that. Be aware of it and don't let it be something that just happens. In any case, for engineers, speaking to customers before building is not the default. So there's a strategy that they are going out of their way to adopt, for a specific purpose. So they need to do it right, not half-assed, and design the app for a large number of users with input from a good amount of people, otherwise their single main customer who will have them by the balls. The market researcher should go into it knowing that the user cannot always list out exactly what they want. Everything the market researcher should do is purposeful, to try to discover what that thing that needs to exist really is, how big the addressable market is, and for how much money the market will bear. It's a whole strategy... And it's a better strategy than building without working with real actionable data from a sample of the actual future users. |