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Customer Development as a Startup

Our customers gave us the idea for LimeLeads Pro

First time hearing of us? LimeLeads provides quality business leads to entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large sales team.

Our customers are awesome. We’re lucky enough to have a solid base of returning customers that are willing to give us feedback and direction.

A few months ago we started receiving emails asking for monthly subscription plans to our database. Users often noted that they wanted large amounts of leads, but not necessarily all at once.

Eventually we honed in on subscription terms and even a pricing model – then we just asked some of our existing customer base if they would subscribe.

What do these customer conversation look like? Here’s an example:

LimeLeads Customer Conversation

Overwhelmingly, we received positive responses. So we got straight to work building out LimeLeads Pro.

So how do you go about asking your customers?

The answer to this questions depends on how many customers you have.

For companies that already have hundreds of thousand of users the best answer might be A/B testing new offerings, or using machine learning models to predict what your users will like – like this company.

But for relatively new companies like LimeLeads, A/B testing and other data-driven techniques are often not an option.

For customer development, my technique is to get customers on the phone and let them do the talking.

The goal is to avoid bias; to avoid feeding your customers the answers you want them to say. That’s the only way to make an unexpected discovery.

So next time you go over and above to help a customer, and it’s clear that they’re really happy with you – just ask them to jump on a quick call. It’ll be worth it.

Thanks to everyone who gave us their feedback!

Do you have any questions?

Either write a comment at the bottom of this post – I’ll answer every single one – or email us at [email protected]. Sending an email there makes our entire team’s phones beep, so we’ll get back to you right away!

Want to give us a shot? It takes only 30 seconds to sign up.

Mike – CEO @ LimeLeads

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