Inspired by Marty Cagan — Reference Customer
In the book of Inspired, it talks a lot about the reference customer. Here’ll just extract some parts I find interesting to share with you.
Business Product
The power of reference is quite important in pushing the potential user to use our product. Aside from that, reference customer can also help us to tune our product. In order to achieve that, it’s advised that at least 6 reference customers should be invited to participate in the program of optimizing the product. And if you find it’s even difficult to find 4 to 6 reference customers to join the program, then probably this product doesn’t really solve the problem of customers. As a result, we may probably need to rethink about if a better plan needs to be laid out.
In the process of optimizing the product by reference customers, we need to make sure our customers are truly from our target market and not more than one market. Because this way can benefit us to focus. Lastly, it’s better to release the product to our reference customers before going to the general release as if this can make them happy with it then they surely will stand with us to boost our product sales after the formal general release.
Consumer Product
If our product is consumer product, then still following the similar concept, but it’s suggested to focus on a larger number of consumer on the order of 10 to 50 that we can engage with to get them to the point they love our product. The product optimization should also be emphasized here that this program should be done with broader testing of our product ideas, especially with people that have never been exposed to the product. Reference customers here may not be that influential as the one in business driven products. In contrast, consumer products’ user are more affected by social media, the press and other influencers(e.g. Youtuber, Blogger…).
Lastly, also want to connect the reference customer concept with the Product Adoption Lifecycle. Reference customers to some extent are like the early adopters. Usually they play a vital role to make our product more acceptable to majority of users and in the same time can also motivate the majority to adopt our product. As long as we can keep a good relationship with our reference customers and gaining feedback from them, then the success rate of launching a product can definitely become relatively much higher.