The Myth of the Customer You Think Exists

If you build it, they will come. – Field of Dreams

Or they might just look at you funny for cutting down all that corn.

One of the biggest problems with technical leaders and researchers is often that they think that if they just build something better, people will buy it. It’s smaller, cheaper, faster, more efficient, etc. But the truth is that if you don’t understand your customer and their needs, you might be building something that no one wants.

The Myth of the Customer You Think Exists

My first foray into the startup world was with a company called Tergeo Technologies. One of the things you often hear in the startup world is to build a solution to a problem that you have personally. I live in Philadelphia. If you know two things about Philadelphia, it’s probably that Eagles fans are crazy and cheesesteaks. If you know a third thing, it’s probably that the city is filthy.

Now, that’s certainly hyperbolic, but it’s not entirely wrong. The city does have a well know litter problem. Particularly when it used to be known as the cleanest city in America.

This was a problem that I personally experienced every time I walked down the street. There would always be a bag, wrapper, plastic bottle, or some other piece of trash on the ground. This led me to a pretty comprehensive deep dive on to the sources of litter and how to solve it.

To make a long story short, the reason why we have so much litter everywhere is a combination of several factors:

1. Disposables - plastic bags, bottles, and wrappers simply create more stuff that can eventually become litter.
2. Short term collection - basically, how your trash can works and the availability of trash cans. If you have a closed trash can and plenty of them its easy enough to throw something away in a way that doesn’t create litter. If you have an open trash can, or no trash can at all, it’s easy to just throw something on the ground.
3. Bulk collection - how the trash is collected from short term collection. How frequently is it collected? Is the trash can overflowing? Is the trash collected in a way that minimizes litter?
4. Sweeping and cleaning - no method is perfect and even with ideal practices in the first three points, litter will still occur. So how do you clean it up? How often? What methods are used?

Philadelphia actually has some efforts on the first two points. A few years ago, the city banned the use of plastic bags in stores. There is some evidence to suggest this has had a positive impact at reducing litter.

The city also has a good trash can program but they are still notably lacking in coverage throughout the city among other issues.

Now the real problems start. Philadelphia still has a horribly antiquated trash collection system. Residents are expected to store trash in their homes/property until trash day. Most people store it outside in some sort of trash can. Considering much of Philadelphia, and the parts that have the worst litter problems, look like this and city regulations discourage people from storing their trash cans in front of their house, this means people frequently keep their cans out back, and then - since they don’t want to drag the cans through their house - they take the bags out the night before trash day and leave them on the curb. Queue the raccoons, rats, and other animals that love to tear open trash bags and spread trash everywhere.

Even in cases with semi-detached houses or folks have an alley, this now puts the onus on the sanitation workers to pull it out of the trash can. They’re human, frequently overworked, and this takes a physical toll on them. Accidents and rips happen. Trash spills out. And now you have a mess. And that’s assuming that people even bagged their trash properly, let alone the fact that recycling isn’t permitted to be bagged and is often left out in open containers. Windy trash days are a nightmare.

On top of all that, the city up until very recently had no official street sweeping program, one of the few major US cities to not have one. The city has since begun rolling out more frequent street sweeping, but it’s still not enough to keep up with the litter problem.

The problem I thought I could address was the sweeping problem. I fundamentally thought it was a labor problem. That it was dirty, unforgiving work, and that if we could just make it easier for the workers to do their job, we could solve the problem. I thought that if we could just build a better street sweeper, we could solve the problem. Queue the robots!

Turns out that was an expensive complicated boondoggle when a simpler solution was simply to facilitate a crowd-sourcing of labor and money. Much cheaper than a $20k+ robot.

But I Know this is a Problem!

The alternative to this - and what I’ve learned recently from this experience in I-Corps - is the notion that if you know people, and people with money that are paying for solutions, are having a problem that you can solve, that customers and funding will just show up.

My research is in the field of autonomous navigation, particularly in GNSS-denied inertial navigation. This is a field that has been seeing increased interest from the US government in the past decade or so, particularly within the Department of Defense. The DoD is frankly a great investor in research and development: lots of money, potentially high investment risk tolerance, and a willingness to take long bets on new technology.

That said, you still need to understand your customer. The DoD is a massive organization with a lot of different branches and divisions. Each of these has their own needs, and they are not all the same. The Army has different needs than the Air Force, which has different needs than the Navy. And even within those branches, there are different divisions that have different needs. The needs of a submarine are not the same as the needs of a fighter jet, which are not the same as the needs of a tank, which are not the same as the needs of a drone.

You can’t just show up and say, I know this is a problem and here’s my idea for a solution! I’ll take my SBIR money now!

Specificity is Key

So one thing that I’ve learned from I-Corps that completely went against my expectations and intuition is that customer specificity is key. You need to know who your customer is, what their needs are, and how your solution fits into that. You need to be able to articulate that in a way that makes sense to them.

Often times, maybe as a legacy from old ways of doing business, there is this thought of not wanting to potentially give away customer segments. Of course this comes with balancing not trying to be everything to everyone. “GPS-denied inertial navigation solution using passive geophysical anomaly feedback” seemed pretty specific to me.

But who wants this? Why do they want this? Who uses it and who pays for it? SPecifically what problem does it solve?

The answer is that it depends. It depends on the customer, their needs, and how your solution fits into that. You need to be able to articulate that in a way that makes sense to them. You need to be able to show them how your solution fits into their workflow, and how it will make their lives easier. It depends on the competition and how your solution is different from theirs. It depends on if it is a competing solution or a complementary solution. All of these things I hadn’t considered.

It might be early, but…

A thing we heard a lot when trying to raise money to launch Tergeo was that the idea was cool, but that the company was too early. I’ve learned that this is just a polite way of saying that they don’t understand the problem you’re trying to solve, that they don’t think it’s a problem worth solving, or that they don’t think you’ll be able to make money doing it.

Tergeo was absolutely too early. We built something nobody wanted. It just wasn’t going to work.

That said, this idea is also too early… to form a company around. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing. What I’ve gotten out of this is three key things:

1. Software-defined solutions are preferred as it is easier to integrate into existing trusted platforms. And I quote: “we’re not there to yank the avionics.”
2. The key metric with navigation systems is drift-reduction. GPS is there, it works, it’s accurate. We simply don’t want to have to rely on it to know where we are. If drift reduction during GPS-denial or unavailability can be reduced you’ve got a winner.
3. There is lots of space to play in this market and lots of interest in trying out new solutions. The key is to find a specific differentiator (platform, performance quality, use case, etc.) and then find a customer that is willing to pay for it.

Conclusion

So we’ll see where this goes. My next immediate step is to actually go back into the building and start building something. If only to get to the basic proof of concept phase. Once I’m there, maybe we keep going with continued research and development to build out the C.V. or return to customer discovery and see what we can find!

This post is part of my ongoing series documenting the transition from research to real-world product through the NSF I-Corps program. Follow along as I attempt to build a business — or find out if I crash along the way.