Maybe it's just me spending too much time here on "Startup News", but I think the author has a fair point. There are a million startups with no real chance of profitability in the near future (few years) or without really reworking their idea once they gain traction that seem to be gaining huge amounts of investment capital.
If VCs pour tons of money into startups that fail (one form of "exit"), the bubble will burst. VCs don't like losing money, and if they see their money going down the drain, they will pull out. We might not see a complete withdrawl that causes an Internet collapse like in 2000, but at the very least VCs will demand short term profitability realization, and that will put the kibosh on a great number of MVPs and "like X but with Y" ideas.
Speculative, yes, but speculation is what the market is all about.
Even worse - if VCs fund these startups, VC return will deteriorate, which will stop LPs from funding VCs. That collapse of the ecosystem is the real burst of the bubble.
Let me start by saying there is an obvious bubble in the market - or in more professional terms, an oversupply of early stage capital, mostly in seed stage. It is no news that in the last couple of years many new private individuals / angels / micro-funds have entered the venture market, and are funding companies at the earliest of stages.
Well since it's so obvious, it should be trivial to give data to back your arbitrary-sounding claim. Unless of course, this really is an arbitrary and unfounded claim.
I'm not sure that word means what you think it does. The whole point of customer development as I interpret it is to GTFO of the building, find customers, build relationships with them, and start making money ASAP.
Maybe the OP has had experience with individuals just getting to customer engagement and then sitting on their thumbs? In that case I can understand the frustration but it seems less customer development focused and more "why don't people want to make money" focused.
"Customer Development" is not the same as a having an effective "business model". I believe they should be treated differently. They will impact the product/service in differnt ways.
Getting in front of (selling to) 1, 10 or even 100 customers, collect feedback, implement feedback is easy. Getting in front of (selling to) 1000, 10,000, 100,000 is hard if your business model does not scale.
"Customer Development" is more "will they buy it"
"bus dev" is more "how to best penetrate the market efficiently"
"Bus Dev" will force you to change your product in ways you may never imagined, and these changes will not be realized from customer feedback. Customers do not care if you have an efficient b model.
While going through the customer feedback process I realized are b model sucked (it always bothered me). The article above inspired to me solve the right problem which has caused us to make a significant change to our offering.
If that's what people mean by Customer Development - then I'm all for it. Absolutely people should get in front of their customers, build relationships, and drive to revenues.
My experience, which led to this post, is that when asking people about their go-to market strategy, how they will scale, answer is customer development. Which is still fine BTW - except in the one (too common recently) case where this focus stops them from figuring out how to build a business out of that customer base. How to scale financially. That's my issue. That's when trouble sets in.
If VCs pour tons of money into startups that fail (one form of "exit"), the bubble will burst. VCs don't like losing money, and if they see their money going down the drain, they will pull out. We might not see a complete withdrawl that causes an Internet collapse like in 2000, but at the very least VCs will demand short term profitability realization, and that will put the kibosh on a great number of MVPs and "like X but with Y" ideas.
Speculative, yes, but speculation is what the market is all about.