Whose opinion should you listen to?

Getting feedback from customers and prospects is important at every stage of a company’s life. It’s important even before getting funding and it never becomes irrelevant — even the largest Fortune 50 companies care what their customers think.

However, you should not value every customer’s opinion equally. When someone offers an opinion (regardless of whether that opinion is “your product is awesome” or “your product sucks”) you should ask yourself:

• Is this person a best-fit customer?

• Is this opinion I’ve heard from a lot of people or just this one?

• Is this opinion actionable or not?

At the beginning, you won’t have any best-fit customers so it’s hard to say if someone would be good customer or not, but you can still consider whether or not the person is in your target market. Regardless, I wouldn’t take an opinion — positive or negative — seriously until I’ve heard it repeated by at least three people. Lastly, not all opinions are actionable. Don’t get to upset about opinions that you just can’t do anything about.

When one person doesn’t like a product’s positioning or doesn’t see the value in the product, some founders can get tempted to make a big shift to accomodate that one person. Resist this urge! First of all, if you change too frequently it will confuse people; second of all, feedback from one single person is not necessarily a sign that in general people in your target market don’t get it.

Do you have an enterprise version of an open source project that you’re trying to position? I’m doing a webinar this Friday at 9am about positioning enterprise editions for open core companies. Register here.