8 Best Articles on Customer Development
The most useful articles on customer development from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Customer Development Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved on customer development by Refind users in 2023.
How to ...?
How To Sell The Problem Before Selling The Solution
They say that every great business addresses a real customer need.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles on customer development—all under 10 minutes.
Essays on network effects, growth hacking, and tech
@andrewchen Get my newsletter. It features long-form essays on startups, growth, metrics, and network effects. I’ve written 650+ essays which have been featured and quoted in The New York Times,…
The right way to respond to feature requests
What do you when a customer asks for a feature your product doesn't support? Here's our best practice guide on responding to feature requests in a human way
Why Isn’t Agile Working?
Agile project management techniques have the potential to help companies develop software focused on their customers’ needs in less time and with less waste than the old approaches. But as author John Cutler points out in this short, illustrated read from Hackernoon, agile isn’t a magic pill that will fix an organization’s productivity woes on its own. getAbstract recommends this short post as a starting point for those who may be considering an agile implementation but aren’t sure what to expect.
How Customers Adopt Products
This is a tool called the Forces Diagram that helps you understand why customers may switch or may not switch to a new value proposition or solution. We found the concept and tool to be very valuable…
Don’t Sell a Product, Sell a Whole New Way of Thinking
Customers need the right mental model to understand why they need your product.
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles on customer development.
A UX Research Crash Course for Founders — Customer Discovery Tips from Zoom, Zapier & Dropbox
Zoom’s Jane Davis answers all of your tricky customer development questions, creating a highly tactical guide for founders flying solo on UX research as they explore startup ideas, validate concepts,…
95 Ways to find your first customers for customer development or your first sale
You can have the best idea in the world, but until you find someone besides yourself that wants it, it’s not really a business. To find those people, as Paul Graham wrote in a recent essay, …
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