What is customer creation?

Customer creation is the process of applying what you have learned in the customer discovery and customer validation to get ready, position, launch and create demand. You are here if you have validated your early customers and made initial sales.

The goal here is to create market demand into the sales channels. Once you found the right customer for your business, in this step you can start to spend money on marketing. Starting to spend money in this step will prevent you from attracting the wrong customer and positioning in the wrong market.

There are 4 steps in the customer creation phase:

1. Product and company launch preparation - given that you already know what type of market you are entering, you should agree upon the first year objectives. At the end of this phase you should be in agreement about the market you are entering, sales and marketing figures and have a customer creation budget.
2. Product and company positioning - once you have a marketing strategy, you should pick a PR firm that understands what you’re trying to do. It’s important to note that in this step, articulating how you see your company (internally) and how others see your company (externally) will help you in creating a match between position and the market. Ideally, you should finish this phase with an agreement upon a PR agency, a summary of the audit (internal and external) and an official positioning statement.
3. Product and company launch - you will prepare to launch in a niche where you already have early adopters. In this step you will need to find an audience, connectors and evangelists that you want to deliver your key messages. The messages should derive from your value proposition and be clear. The output of this phase should consist of the strategy, description of your audience, messengers you will use, messages and what metrics you will use to measure success.
4. Create company demand - using first year objectives, you will deliver the first year strategy, all while agreeing on the metrics you will measure success with. If the strategy does not fit, iterate.

Understanding customers was key to success in the first 2 steps of customer development. Now, understanding the market is vital because there will be differences between early adopters and wide market. With this in mind, you will be able to move forward with the next step in the customer development model: company building.