Know your customers

No matter where you are on the business journey — from just starting an open source project to considering leaving your day job to getting outside venture funding to growing to $1M ARR to $10M ARR and beyond — you have to know who your customers are.

Understanding who you are selling to will determine:

• What the best monetization strategy is (open core vs SaaS vs support vs closed-source commercial software)

• What features you should develop

• What integrations you need

• What you should call your product (not the name, but the market category)

• Who you should hire (ideally, people who have experience serving the type of customer you sell to)

• What to say on your website

• Which publications you’d like your launch (and other announcements) covered in

• How to market your product

• How to sell your product

• What your sales goals are going to look like (there are many ways to get to $1m — it could be a million one dollar sales or one million dollar sale — revenue number looks the same)

• And much, much more.

No matter what stage you’re at, if you are unsure who the customer is, what pain points they experience, what constraints they operate under and what characteristics they all have in common, you should drop everything and figure that out.

Oh, by the way, a part of knowing your customers is talking to them. I’m doing a webinar about how to get relevant positioning information from customer interviews this Thursday at 10am PT. Register here.