Customer Obsession: Success Secrets of Startups & Products

Customer Obsession: Success Secrets of Startups & Products

Jason Stewart
Jason Stewart
3-minute read
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Explore customer obsession and unarticulated needs for startups. Learn how user needs can transform into innovative digital products and a successful business.

Table of Contents:

  1. Discovering Product Success through Customer Obsession
  2. Unveiling Unarticulated Needs: The Secret to Product Success
  3. Putting Innovation in Practice: iPod's User-Friendly Design
  4. Transforming Customer Obsession into User-Focused Success

Discovering Product Success through Customer Obsession

Are you obsessed with your customers? Understanding your user's unarticulated needs are critical to your company and product success. It's also the most important component to having a solid UI/UX research and design process.

Why do 9 out of 10 startups fail? Why do 50% - 96% of new products developed by large companies fail? The answer to these sad statistics has everything to do with customer obsession. Before developing a product, the one question you must ask yourself is: Am I completely obsessed with my customers?

The key differentiator between successful and failed products is how customer-obsessed you are. You can determine positioning, pricing, marketing, strategic partnerships, and even suppliers by being completely infatuated with your customer’s behaviors, activities, and interests. Everything will fall into place if you are in love with your problem and in love with your customers.

Unveiling Unarticulated Needs: The Secret to Product Success

An even deeper insight into customer obsession, and the key to nailing a product, is understanding a person’s "unarticulated needs."

Unarticulated needs are a simple concept to grasp, but incredibly hard to get right. It means you need something you didn’t know you needed.

“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

This quote is often attributed to Henry Ford, although zero evidence exists to support this claim. Either way, it supports the point to be made in this section.

The Tide to Go "stick-pen" was developed on observed unarticulated needs. Tide detergent executives went into homes and watched people doing their laundry. They witnessed a pattern of pre-treating stains across geographies, homes, and environments. People would keep a toothbrush near the detergent bottle, pick up some liquid on the toothbrush, and brush it into the stain on the clothing before dropping the clothes into the washer. This workaround (official product development term) became a multi-billion dollar product that stopped these stains before they became a problem - at the inception point. We spoke with George Glackin, a former senior executive of innovation at Procter & Gamble, the makers of Tide and this product. "Ah-ha moments come when you can see a way to solve an important problem in a whole new way. The end user may not even be aware that there is a better way. Once they see it, however, and they say 'Now that is an obvious new solution', then you know you have a winner!"

Putting Innovation in Practice: iPod's User-Friendly Design

I want to be careful about using the iPod as an example because the iPod was nowhere near being the first MP3 player. Putting Apple marketing aside, the reason MP3 players didn’t catch on had everything to do with usability and product design. Other MP3 players were confusing to use and didn’t come with a convenient way to load music. They were just external hard drives with headphone jacks. All our music at the time was digital, but Apple showed us how to listen to it.

This is innovation in practice. The unarticulated need was a way to listen to digital music files in a delightful way. Apple gave us a screen, a simple way to scroll and select songs, and iTunes: to load and unload songs and create playlists. How do you think they came to this conclusion? Simply by becoming obsessed with their customers that were using these products at the time, and trying to solve a problem for them.

Dog Slobber? No Customer Wants That!

One of my favorite companies, eponymously named Chuckit, noticed something every dog owner hated but tolerated: picking up filthy, dirty, slobbery tennis balls. But we all did it anyway when playing fetch with our dogs. Chuckit figured out a way to give you slobber-free pick-up (a term they invented) and let you throw tennis balls further than you could by hand. Unarticulated need: slobber-free pick-up. Bonus benefit added: increased distance. This is a company that knew exactly what to create because they care so much about the customers using their products.

Transforming Customer Obsession into User-Focused Success

So what’s with the high failure rate? Because unarticulated needs can be counter-intuitive and take serious work to uncover. How can you determine unarticulated needs? You need to ask questions, observe, and empathize. You have to foresee pains and patterns even if a user may not recognize they have a problem. You have to take some (data-backed) risk. Then you need to build it the right way, iterate quickly, get tons of feedback, not run out of cash, and get market adoption. Sounds easy, right?

Anthroware’s greatest strength is eliminating the workarounds, and the rework or the waste by creating digital aids. We turn unarticulated needs into digital products. We spend significant time observing users, asking questions, creating low-fidelity mock-ups, getting feedback, and iterating quickly toward beautiful software that delights users.

We’re obsessed with our users; we’re obsessed with your users. We love interacting with technology to make our personal and professional lives better. Are you thinking of creating a new product? Ready to launch your startup? Let’s talk about finding your customer's unarticulated needs and building a delightful experience with our passion for customer obsession.

Jason Stewart
Jason Stewart
Co-Founder/ CIO
Santa Rosa, CA

Jason Stewart is Co-Founder/CIO of Anthroware, an on-demand innovation force. Jason leads his team to identify the waste and rework in companies and creates beautiful digital tools that people love to use, while lowering overhead and increasing throughput.