Here is an article I found, based on The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, which will hopefully help you develop Product-Market Fit. You can view it here.

Identify and document your assumptions

The sooner you understand and accept that you, as a entrepreneur at somewhere pre-Product Market Fit with your startup, are operating in near-chaos, where all your assumptions/hypotheses about how you gratify your users, who they are, how you will acquire and monetize them – are simply that, untested assumptions, the better off you are.

With your assumptions documented and in-hand you will:

“Get out of the Building” to validate (or invalidate) your assumptions

You must find, meet and speak with prospective customers about your product and ascertain the validity of your assumptions. This is the crux of Customer Development.  Only by speaking to these people will you have any sort of understanding about “their reality” as Dan Martell likes to put it.  What problems do they face?  How do they solve them?  What matters to them?  What is a must-have for them?

As you speak to potential customers, you should:

Identify the risk factors in the opportunity

Are you facing significant technology risks?  Or more of market risk?  How can you test and validate these (starting with the most risky)?  What market testable milestones can you build that would result in sufficient evidence to induce you to pivot or move forward? A proof of concept? A letter of intent?  A prototype?

As your understanding of the market betters, the risks will begin to crystallize, if certain risk factors prove insurmountable, you must:

Pivot but not jump

By changing an element of your customer-problem-solution hypotheses or business model, based on actual learning from a customer. As Eric Ries writes “by testing, each failed hypothesis leads to a new pivot, where we change just one element of the business plan (customer segment, feature set, positioning) – but don’t abandon everything we’ve learned.

The way to test and learn from your market is to build an:

MVP (Minimal Viable Product)

Don’t forget that an MVP is a product with the fewest set of features needed to achieve a specific objective and that you should require a trade of some scarce resource (time, money, attention) for the use of the product, such that the transaction demonstrates the product might be “viable”.

For non-paying milestones, you must define the currency (the scarce resource) and your objective (what you are trying to learn). For example, intermediate MVPs might include: landing page click-through that prove there’s some amount of interest in a product; a time commitment for an in-person meeting to view a demo that shows the customer’s problem being resolved; or a resource commitment for a pilot program to test how the product fits into a particular environment.

Once you have users using your MVP, listen for and tune into the:

Must-have signal

that demonstrates the core product functionality that your customers absolutely must have, while testing your assumptions and learning the characteristics of your market segment that will allow you to reach out and acquire them efficiently.  Sean’s survey, mentioned earlier, can be useful in finding your must have signal.

Once you successfully developed a minimal viable product and have found the must have signal, it is time to:

Double-down and strip away the unnecessary

Now you know what your customers want, you need to focus with laser-like intensity in building a gratification engine that does not disappoint.

If you can do all of the above successfully and throw in a hearty amount of luck for good measure, there is a good chance you can get to Product-Market Fit.  It may take a significant amount of time and persistence, but potential customers always hold the answer to creating a must have product.

This post was written by Patrick Vlaskovits from Start-up Marketing Blog

I 100% agree with you Jeff. In my opinion, many agents join twitter because they’ve heard it’s the holy grail, then start posting their listings, thinking they’re going to find more buyers/sellers. They’ll be quite surprised to find that very few people will browse their listings and end up complaining about how twitter doesn’t work.

Truth be told, twitter is a relationship-building tool.  NOT a sales tool.  These relationships take time and require continuous engagement, rather than popping in every time you have a listing.  Prove to the rest of the community that you’re not a robot and people will start to follow you.

Any person with sales experience should know it’s all about the relationship, and I find it surprising that many agents forget this when joining twitter.

Please feel free to comment below!

(via Rajesh Setty)

I have to apologize for my lack of posts in the past month.  I must say I’ve been busy keeping up with website maintenance and working on new upcoming websites.  Not to mention I’ve had to make time for mosaic, not only volunteering but to enjoy the delicious food and drinks!

Right now I’ve been fortunate to have enough work to keep myself really busy.  But what about the times when I’m not so lucky.  How do I stay motivated to keep going?

What I’ve found to be helpful for me is to continually find ways to improve and find better ways of doing things.  One simple way is to read. I’ve found reading one of the best ways to gain insight and different perspectives in this ever-changing business landscape.  Here are a few books that I’ve read recently that have helped me stay motivated and hungry for more!

Say hi to the authors on Twitter.

How do you stay motivated? Comment below!

“Tribes” by Seth Godin. Special thanks to a good friend, @jzinkewich for sending me this book!

“Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change” by @jeremygutsche

“Rework” by @jasonfried and @dhh

Although these tips are aimed towards Tech startups, I still think many of these tips can be applied to any business. For those who don’t know who Guy Kawasaki is, he is currently the founder of Alltop and publisher of “Reality Check.”