Original post published on the HeadReach blog.

This post is part of the HeadReach journey and one of the emails I sent on outreach marketing/customer development when you subscribe for HeadReach.

A smart person once said:

“Life is too short to build something nobody wants.”

In my previous post, I showed you how I validated an idea with 15 paying customers using outreach.

In this post, I’m going to share with you how to use customer development to create a product that people want to use. And the best part is this doesn’t apply to products only. You can use it to understand what content people want to consume, so you can focus on creating the right content.

When we talk about outreach marketing, most of us think along the lines of PR, link building, and promotion. But what about reaching out to people to figure out what they want?

Customer development is the process of finding potential clients and asking the right questions to understand what solution you need to create.

The term was coined by Steve Blank in his book “The Four Steps to Epiphany”.

The theory says that every hour spent in customer development, saves a lot of hours in building:

So instead of praying to a fake god that someone would buy your product or read your content — you reach out to people first and speak with them. Simple stuff, right?

Here’s an illustration from Patrick Vlaskovits (author of “The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development”) that shows the 4 stages of cus. dev.:

Let’s take a brief overview of how to do customer development:

How to Do Customer Development to Understand What People Want?

In this early stage you ask the question:

Is there a problem that needs to be solved?

Right now we don’t think about the solution, but the problem. This happens by conducting interviews with customers (or readers if you’re creating content) and identifying their problems. From there you can identify the minimum features required to solve the top 3 problems of this audience and to build an MVP.

Now in my last email, I showed how I validated the idea for HeadReach using concierge MVP. I got 15 people paying for an outreach list. The thing is — the validation doesn’t stop there.



I wanted to use my first paying customers to understand why they actually paid me. I did that by asking questions.

I sent this questionnaire to all of the people that purchased from me:

What’s your biggest pain with doing outreach now?

What you find most valuable in the list?

Was anything missing in the list that you wanted to see?

Could you please check out this concept screenshot -http://cl.ly/0k0w432q453c — of the tool we’re building, and let me know what you think — is there anything unclear with the interface?

Would you pay $29 per list for a tool that generates the same quality of results as the manual list?

Because all of the people I asked were already my customers, it was very easy to get answers from them.

While this is not the last time I’m going to speak with customers, it’s an excellent starting point to measure what features we have to build first for HeadReach.

How to Use Customer Development for Content?

I appreciate that some of you might not be building a product, so I wanted to show you few ways you can connect with people and ask them/monitor what they want to consume when it comes to content creation.

Let’s say you’re creating your next breakthrough article.

But first let’s face it — writing a good, meaty, long post is like working on a project. It takes time researching, writing, editing, formatting, promoting, and the list goes on.

So how we can make that process a little less risky and make sure we write something that people would actually care to read and share?

Check out these 3 micro case studies:

Use Existing Audiences to Validate Your Content

This approach works in 3 steps:

Write a smaller outline of the post.

Publish the outline in communities with established audiences.

Evaluate the interest.

“The Ultimate Guide to eCommerce Link Building” is my first and most popular post on the WooGuru blog with over 500 shares. It is 8,000 words long.

I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to write 8,000 words unless you’re sure it’s worth the time.

This huge guide was actually born out of a much smaller post (1429 words) that I published on Reddit few weeks before the big post was created. The small post was called “7 Actionable Link-Building SEO Tips for eCommerce. From my personal experience with my first online store (not a blog post!)”.

What I did is outline some actionable link building steps and publish the content on communities with a big audience — Reddit, GrowthHackers, GrowthTalk.co. Then I evaluated the post engagement:

Collectively the post got over 60 upvotes on Reddit

5,400 Views on the GrowthTalk community. This is the most popular post on GrowthTalk to this day.

See, it didn’t take me long to write that post. It took around 2 hours. And that was just right to figure out if people want to read about “eCommerce link building” before I write the big guide.

Answer Your Audience Most Pressing Questions

Laura Roeder, founder of http://lkrsocialmedia.com/laura-roeder/ and Edgar says it’s very easy to identify what the audience wants to know:

“You blog about the questions that your customers ask you. That’s it, and most people don’t do that because they think that’s too simple.”

Sure, it’s simple, but Laura is not a simple marketer. She used her tribe of social followers to pivot Edgar to $2.5M in just 18 months. And I wouldn’t call that simple.

My most popular blog post is how to re-tweet. Literally, the video is called How to Re-tweet. I’m guessing if you’re watching this video you already know how to re-tweet, but a lot of people on the Internet don’t know how to re-tweet, and those people are great customers for me because I have a whole course about how to use Twitter. I’m not winning any social media industry awards by teaching people how to re-tweet. Nobody is going to give me a marketer of the year award for this post, and that’s why most people overlook stuff like this because they think it’s too simple, it’s too basic. But the fact is this is what your customers want to know about, and a lot of people aren’t talking about it because it’s not winning them industry awards.

Watch the whole interview with Laura here. While old, most of the points are evergreen.

So how to understand what are your readers’ most important questions?

Ask them. Set up an email auto-responder that goes out to every new subscriber asking them what’s their #1 problem.

Ask them. Over the phone.

People love surveys. They’re neat, easy and scalable. You can send them to thousands of people and get answers that you can export and sort. The problem is surveys are a quantitative research, not qualitative. And for customer development, you need the former.



The issue with surveys is that you must know what type of questions to ask and what type of answers to expect.



When you talk over the phone with your audience, it allows you to bend the conversion in the direction you want it to go and dig deeper to understand the problems. It also allows you to keep a pulse on the voice of the person and their emotions.

People love surveys. They’re neat, easy and scalable. You can send them to thousands of people and get answers that you can export and sort. The problem is surveys are a quantitative research, not qualitative. And for customer development, you need the former. The issue with surveys is that you must know what type of questions to ask and what type of answers to expect. When you talk over the phone with your audience, it allows you to bend the conversion in the direction you want it to go and dig deeper to understand the problems. It also allows you to keep a pulse on the voice of the person and their emotions. Monitor social media. Use a tool like Mention to track certain hashtags and keywords.

Ask Your Most Engaged Customers What They Think of the Post

Nick Eubanks, a kick-ass SEO and good friend of mine, runs a closed private Facebook group with avid members. The SEO Auv group while just 163 members big, it’s a hub of the most engaged readers of his blog.

This type of community is a fantastic opportunity to get some early feedback for your content and directly ask your audience what they think of your content by providing a post preview.

This is how Nick does it:

Final Thoughts

I hope you can see now that outreach marketing has many other applications apart from promotion.

Outreach is all about relationships, and it’s an inevitable part of the customer development process, whether you do it to validate a product or your next content masterpiece.



I’d love to hear from you if you use customer development and share with me any successes or failures?

Next week I’ll show you how I managed to collect over 1,000 emails in less than 2.5 weeks as part of the HeadReach pre-launch campaign.

Stay tuned and have a productive week!