[grueful]

  I already had a leg up because I had most of my product put together. I just needed to figure out how to market it.

  And the first thing I learned was that my product was dead, would remain dead, and was a waste of further time and effort. I fundamentally had begun in the wrong place and needed to first find what people wanted.

You could put a million MBAs in a room for a million years and they'd never come up with any strategy more effective than talking to actual customers first.

[saturnflyer]

I actually have customers on that product. But they're unfocused and unrelated. How do you add features when the customer needs aren't clear? You don't. You just kill it.

[grueful]

"Actual customers" is about as overloaded as "talking."

You need people you can connect with, provide value to, extract value from - and you have to make all that into a reproducible and reasonably predictable process given all of the constraints in play.

If you can do that, you're often well down the path towards a viable business. If not ...

[ahoyhere]

Actually, I beg to differ :) Talking to customers isn't nearly as effective as watching what they do, not what they say. Customers will tell you one thing all day long, then do another. Or they will have serious pains they suffer with every day, and if you ask "What hurts?" they won't think of it.

Research has backed this up over & over -- that story about Sony's focus groups about the yellow vs black Discmans is just one example -- not to mention anecdata from, well, everyone.

That's why I teach my students to observe customers and deduce, rather than ask them.

[grueful]

Yeah, you can't just take the responses at face value.

Watching five subjects in a row get to one point and then get confused is important, but they might never mention it if you just ask them directly afterwards.

I've also observed talk between users that started out "oh, I hated it" - then they'll go on to praise the functional aspects - and it turns out they just didn't like the color scheme. Which is equally valid if it generates consistent responses.