Your blog is your first product

You just started out with working on a new product. Either you began with an idea for a solution or you are going to kick off with an idea of a few problems you are going to solve.

When you are doing customer development you want to learn about the problems of your customers as soon as possible. The ultimate goal at this stage is to get some validation from the people you talk to about these problems.

This will increase your chance of success. Most of all, it will enflame your passion if you get some good positive and negative feedback. Getting people enthusiastic or in brainstorm mode because of your idea is really fun.

Learning about customer problems

Doing interviews is a great and deep qualitative way to reach the validated state. But, there is another way to learn if your problems resonate with the group of customers that you have in mind.

You are building a product that is going to solve problems. And unless your problem is to get someone on the moon and you need to build a spaceshuttle, those problems can already be fixed by alternative or manual solutions.

This is where you can use your knowledge and experience that you already have. And combined with your vision you can get in the heads of those early customers.

Being a product without having a product

You can create a product from your knowledge and experience and solve the problems that your customers already have. You can use the theories and the solution you have in mind for your own final product and start teaching people to get working with those problems right now.

The best way to teach your customers how to solve the problems is by writing posts about you solving those problems on your blog.

How to kick it off

I suggest you write a few blog posts that helps the reader solve each individual problem on their own with alternatives or a process you explain. The great thing about this is that you can test the need for each individual problem you want to fix. This is done looking at the reader activity and incoming traffic to each post.

For example, I still get lots of traffic and the occasional comment I wrote a while ago about something in Android development. Here is the original article. So far it has 43 comments (including my own) and people discussing code samples and such. This can really tell you if you nailed it with a problem.

Conclusion

You want to release a product as soon as possible after defining the problems you are going to solve for your problems. You want to do this because you want to validate if you are on the right track.

Before or while you are building your actual technical product, you can use your knowledge as your first product.

Write blog posts where you describe how your customers dan solve their problems right now on their own by teaching them alternative or manual solutions.

This way you can get a feeling if the problems you are going to solve resonate with these readers.