[dfragnito]

"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.

Make sure you are not solving the wrong problem see http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/

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.