This week, I read the fifth and sixth chapters of The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. The fifth chapter was about how to find your customer base and reaching out to certain demographics. Guillebeau listed a few strategies for how to make sure that a specific group of people will be attracted to your product/service; the first one was to make sure that you latch on to a popular passion. The other way was to sell what people buy which included asking people what they buy. I thought that the second way was interesting because I feel most businesses need to know that people would buy the product or service before they start the business. Guillebeau said that entrepreneurs should ask their customers what they want in a survey. This confuses me because I don’t understand how someone would have customers without having a product that they knew people would buy.
Another thing that confused me in this chapter was when Guillebeau wrote that ‘the customer is often wrong’ which opposes the well known statement that ‘the customer is always right’. He explained this with an example: There was a guy selling something online and there were many positive responses and one negative response where the customer asked for a refund. He thought it wasn’t worth it to have a conversation with the disappointed customer when there were plenty of satisfied customers that he had to attend to so he gave the refund and kept working. While I agree in this situation, that that specific customer might have been wrong, it seems like it would have been worth it to see why the customer was disappointed and also I don’t think that this example would justify the statement ‘the customer is often wrong’ because it was only one wrong customer out of dozens of customers.
Your logic makes a lot more sense to me than the logic of the author. I also wonder about surveying the customer. Often customers don't know, exactly, what they want until they see it. This is a well-known fact of market research. You are certainly right about the dissatisfied customer. Especially in the age of social media, one unhappy customer who feels unlisted to can light up the world with negative tweets. That could kill your business.
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