Start watching your first customers early and obsessively. One observation is just a data point, but three similar ones signal a real trend. Use that pattern to disrupt the customer experience deliberately, not copy what competitors do.
I mean, this is about, you know, as early as you can get this customer-centric thinking, you know, the better. And literally there's nothing better than like retracing the steps of your first, you know, target customer, your pilot customer, and seeing how they actually went through the process and what worked, what didn't. Now, you know, I always say like one is a data point, three is a trend. So, you know, if you do this for like your first few, and by the time you begin to see the same set of patterns that's coming, then you exactly know what's happening. The other thing I would say is that a lot of times, you know, you need to be thinking outside in and you should be thinking, okay, you know what? I wanna be the Apple of my world, right? Like Apple retail store didn't come out from actually going and tracing how their customers were buying. They basically said, Here is how we are going to disrupt. We talk about that as disruptors, you know, customer experience disruptors don't think about just retracing. They say fundamentally, how do I improve this? And that's another way of thinking. And there you use design thinking to be able to say, you know what, I am going to redefine this for my solution. It's not gonna be the same process. While I understand this process, I'm gonna use design thinking to come up with a disruptive way in which I can actually build it. And that's how the freemium model came in. That's how the virality in a lot of software came in. And that's how self-serve came in because people just decided, well, we're not gonna send a rep where it doesn't make sense. And I definitely ask you to think of both of those.
