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Maker
Hello Hunters! Nice to see Ecamb's Box here on ProductHunt.
The most commont question we usually have to answer is "Can't customer development be only done by the founders themselves?"
It's true, and nothing beats first-hand feedback, but there are some advantages to outsourcing it too:
1. You can get more varied opinions from (because founders usually stick to their own network at first)
2. You can get straightforward feedback w/out sugarcoating - people talking to founders very often feel bad about breaking the terrible truth on them (read: "Your product idea sucks, and we don't need it!"), and conceal it in all possible ways (e.g. "I probably wouldn't use it myself, but my best friend's stepmother certainly needs it!"). It's actually useful to try this approach yourself - instead of saying "I have this new idea..." try "A friend of mine has an idea ..." - you will surely hear different opinions.
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Maker
Hello ProductHunters! My name is Maria Adamian. Together with Peter @tatischev we co-founded http://ecamb.com and recently productized the customer development offering with two 'boxed' packages.
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Maker
It looks like some background information would be helpful. In our main line of business we deal mostly with international startups whose founding teams are outside of the US, while they are trying to approach the US market, and the Silicon Valley in particular. We call ourselves 'Co-founder As A Service'. We do a lot of business development, pitching, networking, and customer interviews for our clients. Here we are trying to productize the customer development part, and see how it goes. It is sort of an experiment, and it is already bringing interesting results. So, to answer some of your questions, we do realize that 1) service business is hardly scaleable, and 2) customer development is better done by founders themselves.
