Customer development is the secret sauce for startups!

When we built the first version of Scribbl.co, we talked to our 3 beta users once a week. I cannot stress enough how much we learned about our product from this process. This post details that process.

My Co-founder Oscar would facilitate the calls and record them. I would listen to them, take extremely detailed notes, and bring them to slack. Oscar and I would exchange notes and dive deep into what we learned from these calls.

This process was absolutely essential for us to ever build anything ever worth paying for.

I realized that this had to be the secret sauce of successful startups.

We only had 3 beta users, but they were a diverse enough group to make light-years of progress on our product with this process.

Once we felt we were serving that group (which took quite some time), we decided to acquire some more beta users. We grew our pool of beta users to 20.

This group got me super excited. If we could make that much progress with our customer call process with a group of 3, imagine the leaps and bounds we'd have a group of 20.

Unfortunately, things did not go as well as I had imagined. Even with only 20 users, there was no way I could continue to listen to all the customer recordings Oscar was creating. It was simply too time consuming.

This drove me crazy. We had the secret sauce, but it couldn't scale past 3 users!!

I saw this in my day job too. Doing customer development at scale was really really hard.

WARNING: I'm about to pitch my own product, but I truly believe Scribbl has unlocked an amazing process for us.

Right around this time, we added audio clips to our product. It wasn't intentional, but we started using our own product to solve this problem of scaling the secret sauce.

Like so many other startup stories, we realized we had something valuable for a reason we didn't intend.

Scribbl is the only tool I've seen that makes scaling customer development possible. If you have similar pains, I'd be so happy to help revive your startups secret sauce!

Co-founder @ Scribbl.co