Whether you interview customers regularly, watch support requests on HelpScout or use a GetSatisfaction or UserVoice - like tool, your startup is inundated with feature requests from your customers.  It's great to have them engaging, but can lead to the dreaded "feature creep" that leads to a bloated, unusable product. What's a startup to do? The answer may surprise you in its simplicity: use the 5 Why's.

Running a startup puts a ton of responsibilities on your plate. From marketing to sales, ghetto-HR to accounting, development to project management, you're wearing a million hats.  We all know that Lean Startups methodology and customer development are important, but *actually practicing* it can be hard (if you're not familiar run to CustDev.com *right now* and get Brant and Patrick's book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development ASAP!).  

As you commit yourself to "getting outside the building" to talk to your customers and truly quest for Product-Market Fit, it's essential you make the most of those discussions. One of the hardest things for newcomers to customer development is structuring their questions for customer development, so I'd like share how I structure interviews to maximize their effectiveness.

It happens to us all. Your startup is cruising along, or at least you're really busy running in a million directions. Maybe you've also got pulled away with some personal issues like selling your home, caring for children or relationship challenges. No matter what the cause, you get away from the most important thing: Getting outside the building and talking to customers.

So knowing that you have dropped the ball and need to pick it up again, what do you do? How do you get back on the customer development horse?

What does American Idol have to do with startups. Nothing, right? Well, that's what I thought. Then I got hooked on the 2011 season. After a few weeks of watching Jennifer Lopez's startling transformation into Paula Abdul (I mean, come on - look at her!), it hit me: American Idol is the ultimate exercise in customer development. It's a dead simple, efficient, and downright genius system that utilizes customer feedback to find product-market-fit.

In honor of both the Lean Startup Circle Meetup on Thursday and the Lean Startup Machine coming this weekend, I'd like to share a few lessons I've learned in the past year as I've served as Customer Development Manager at oneforty and been actively learning the Lean Startups methodology.  

You hear it all the time: "Fail Fast", "Celebrate Failure" and "Learn from Failure."  But is that really what matters?  Does knowing what doesn't work actually help you get significantly closer to what will work?  Are we predisposed to rationalize failure, because we don't want to feel like the insane work hours of a startup were a waste? I don't think we should ignore failure, but we need to do more to study, and immitate success.  There is 100X more to learn and gain value from success. 

Let's examine this topic...

Last night was the excellent event organized by Sim Simeonov called Customer Development: The Second Decade .  At the event, some of the best in customer development spoke about what it means today and what startups need to be doing.  There were many great takeaways in the event, so I encourage you to check out the video.

At the end of the event, I specifically asked (skip to 2:09:11 if you'd like to see it) about how the consumer web should approach building a viable lean business, where free, freemium and often uncertain business models reign supreme.  Eric Ries gave me a great, detailed answer when I caught up with him after the panel ended which I'd like to share now.

“Customers live outside the building.” Every startup is well served to remember this and make sure they’re reaching out to their customers/users to understand them.  As customer development manager at oneforty, I’m on the front lines of that effort and our overall goal of implementing Lean Startups methodologies.  I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned along the way.