The good thing is, your customers are so too.

So here is a great thing you can do when you are working on your product:

Start getting fans for you and your product

Try to start writing a big brother blog. Write the stuff people normally wouldn't do. Blog about your exact every move. Let your visitors take a peak in your kitchen once every one in a while. Your readers will love it and you can turn visitors into fans.

Clarify and communicate your values

Showing off what you do and why you are doing it is also a great way of clarifying your vision. If you are using videos, screenshots, how-to guides or other media with your blog post you can even internalize your vision even more. Because of course, actions, experiment and images speak more than words. Especially when you are still discovering a lot about your customers and what you yourself actually want to achieve with your product.

Start being the best at selling and explaining

Last but certainly important is hour ability to show and explain what you do to other like-minded people. You will be sharing your experiences with the world. Other people wil learn from you or give you feedback and tips to do things differently.

Conclusion

So. Tell everyone in the world about what you are doing, why you do it and how you are doing it when you work on your product and with your customers.

In that post Sivers tells the virtues of sharing everything you can think of to create value for other people without direct business value. My previous post about your blog being your first product touches this point as well.

Sivers basically points out three things:

1. You already have something other people need or could use

   For example, you can blog about manual solutions for problems your future product is going to solve for your customers.

   Also. A lot of successful web companies contribute by creating various open source plugins or applications for other software developers.

   As a designer or author you could create e-books or step-by-step videos about how you work and what your process is.

2. Find a way to share it with everyone who needs it.

   It doesn't really matter what you share as long as you can share it with friends, colleagues, competitors or basically because you just like to be a nice guy.

   If you fear that no one needs what you have to offer think about the following:

   If even just one person can benefit by one little thing you product you have already doubled your personal value to the world. This is because not only you as a single person got some value but you scale yourself to 200% for helping one more person. That person can then even help someone else with your solution which means you will have tripled your worth to the world about that single problem.

3. If it takes you some effort to produce something you can charge a little for it.

   Sivers shares some great examples in his post so I won't list them here. But his most important example is the million dollar business that grew out of his way of helping other independent artists to sell music CDs online. He describes a great deal of this in his book Anything you want

1. I want to create the ultimate dashboard for inbound marketing. For the product to succeed I want to build it while I am using it on some of my own projects. My own experience is the multimate test to see if the product works

   I also want to use this blog as a channel for promoting the product, get a change to talk to you guys and post updates with videos and screenshots.

2. I want to see how hard or easy it is to do inbound marketing. I want to become an expert in building a channel for your product. See how hard it is. Experiment with all sorts of content.

   Generally speaking I just want to walk my talk.

3. I want to learn how to write. Knowing how to write is one of the most important things you can practice on as a software developer. Conveying clear messages in an interface, programming code and marketing material is crucial for a great product.

You can argue that you have no valid reason for existing if you haven't got a good idea of what problems your customers are having. There is a lot of truth in this but I also feel that if you are an entrepreneur you are always able to solve someone's problem any time.

Also, most customers are probably not buying your product for the thing you are trying to sell it to them for. Hence the customer discovery part and not the customer what do you want me to fix for you part. You can only validate your problem and your solution by testing not by just asking.

Building a channel is harder than solving a problem

Building a channel for your product is much harder and takes a lot more effort. It is easier to iterate with a value proposition or a problem hypothesis than it is to iterate with a channel.

You can flip the switch by changing your interview quests or a problem hypothesis but you can't flip over 3000 community members to another subject or marketing channel.

Following this train of thought you might like Ash Maurya's advise of starting with the riskiest part of your business model. In the sense of the arguments given before, your channel might actually be the riskiest part. You can find product/solution fit for your customers in various ways with a small group of people.

But, you can't just build a channel within 3-5 weeks and a bunch of conversations.

Also, The Startup Toolkit has a great post on how he built his channel.

Conclusion

Solving someones problem is always the reason why a product should exist. Either you have consciously solved your customer's problem or they are seeing something in you that you don't know about.

But don't forget the effort it takes to build a channel to your product.

Solving a validated problem is the ultimate goal but it does not make much sense to only do it for 20 people if you can't live off of that.

What are you experiences in balancing building your channel and learning about your customers problems? Where would you focus your efforts on when you are just starting out?

When you are doing customer development you want to learn about the problems of your customers as soon as possible. The ultimate goal at this stage is to get some validation from the people you talk to about these problems.

This will increase your chance of success. Most of all, it will enflame your passion if you get some good positive and negative feedback. Getting people enthusiastic or in brainstorm mode because of your idea is really fun.

Learning about customer problems

Doing interviews is a great and deep qualitative way to reach the validated state. But, there is another way to learn if your problems resonate with the group of customers that you have in mind.

You are building a product that is going to solve problems. And unless your problem is to get someone on the moon and you need to build a spaceshuttle, those problems can already be fixed by alternative or manual solutions.

This is where you can use your knowledge and experience that you already have. And combined with your vision you can get in the heads of those early customers.

Being a product without having a product

You can create a product from your knowledge and experience and solve the problems that your customers already have. You can use the theories and the solution you have in mind for your own final product and start teaching people to get working with those problems right now.

The best way to teach your customers how to solve the problems is by writing posts about you solving those problems on your blog.

How to kick it off

I suggest you write a few blog posts that helps the reader solve each individual problem on their own with alternatives or a process you explain. The great thing about this is that you can test the need for each individual problem you want to fix. This is done looking at the reader activity and incoming traffic to each post.

For example, I still get lots of traffic and the occasional comment I wrote a while ago about something in Android development. Here is the original article. So far it has 43 comments (including my own) and people discussing code samples and such. This can really tell you if you nailed it with a problem.

Conclusion

You want to release a product as soon as possible after defining the problems you are going to solve for your problems. You want to do this because you want to validate if you are on the right track.

Before or while you are building your actual technical product, you can use your knowledge as your first product.

Write blog posts where you describe how your customers dan solve their problems right now on their own by teaching them alternative or manual solutions.

This way you can get a feeling if the problems you are going to solve resonate with these readers.

When you are starting to work on your new project one of the hardest part is finding people to talk to in your target demographic. You want to find early adopters to see if the problems you want to solve resonate with them.

The best way to do this is through interviews.

Here are three things why doing some inbound marketing on the side can help you with finding your first customer group.

1. Automatically meet new passionate people to interview for customer discovery

Writing on a blog about trends, solutions and problems around your product helps you find those early interview candidates. This is especially useful when you run out of people to interview.

Finding people online that you don't know also eliminates the "friends" problem when doing interviews: strangers you meet online are probably much more objective.

Be sure to start a twitter account or blog earlier than later. It can take some time for people to notice and follow you.

Action: Write articles about the problems you want to solve on your personal blog or start a new niche industry blog.

2. Find new potential early adopter groups

For the product I am working on right now I have two early adopter groups in mind: product/startup founders and online marketeers.

Because I know some people in both groups I chose to start doing customer development with product/startup founders. Also, because I am one myself.

However when you gather some people that are interested what you have to say and write about, you might find new interesting target groups to focus your product on.

By starting up inbound marketing earlier it is a chance to find out new interested groups that you might have missed in the past and are very interesting for your product.

Action: Keep writing about the problems you intend to solve with your product and make sure you find out who your followers are.

3. A path to customers

So you have interviewed a few people and you have a good idea on the direction you are going to build your product. You know you the problems resonate for at least some people and you know your product is going to solve those problems for them.

Most products and startups don't even come this far so you can pat yourself on the back and sit back for the money to flow in, right?

Wrong. You have probably only tested your product with a bunch of people. Unless you can already live of that you need to do a bit more validation with a larger group of customers.

This is hard when people don't even know your product yet and you need to set up payed channels to let them know, which brings it's own problems with them.

But, because you started a blog and started engaging with a community you created even before you launched the first version of your product you can now start promoting your product to them.

This way you can test the message that explains your product to more people than just the early adopter and you can test your product on a more quantitative level.

Action: Start creating a path to customers even when you don't have a product yet. A blog with remarkable content is ideal for this. When the time comes, promote your product on your blog.

Conclusion

Starting up inbound marketing like a blog and tweeting about problems, solutions and alternatives around the subject your early adopters like will help you with customer development.

When you have the first handful of followers you can already try to ask them if you can interview them to learn more about the problems you are going to solve.

Besides that you can validate new customer groups that you meet on your blog or on twitter.

Finally, your following hopefully accumulates exponential growth over time so you already built your own channel to promote your product.

As a first post I would like to point out two books that are great resources when you are interested in inbound marketing and you want to get passionate early adopters and customers for your business or product.

Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah

This book is a great introduction when you are just starting out with getting started with inbound marketing. It is basically a starters guide with lots of great advise and insights.

Read this book if you want to get started. It is also available as an ebook and on Kindle.

Buy "Inbound Marketing" on Amazon.com

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

You will like this book if you like big picture stuff. It is also a great story on how the business world and customers are changing.

Defining channels, measuring visitors, customers and tracking followers on social media is a way of tracking your progress. But it is not the most important.

The most important thing is to be there for your customer. To start seeing them as buddies, people and not as some number in you analytics tool. That is what Gary's book - amongst other things - is about.

Visit thankyoueconomy.com