Whether you developed your product with a specific customer need in mind, or happened upon a product and want to sell it to someone, you have to start by knowing your customer.
Before the Internet boom, I assembled a group of friends and raised angel 
capital to start a company to develop a commodity chemical trading system, based on the notion that a hundred pounds of a specific chemical powder was the same as any other hundred pounds of the same chemical powder. It would be a trading system for chemicals – a brilliant idea – or so it seemed.
Along the way, the web “happened”, and it was gaining traction all around us.
Our company’s Chief Technologist developed a side-project to create dynamic websites for small businesses. Back then, things like Facebook and MySpace didn’t exist. It wasn’t easy to create a web presence or an identity on the Internet.
So, the idea was born – instant websites for smaller businesses.
We completely switched gears. While we started with what we thought was a brilliant idea, we came across something in development that we thought was even more valuable. Before we sold the company, we grew to several thousand customers – small change by today’s standards, but an interesting illustration of adaptation.
Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino
