Congratulations. You've used customer development to attain the product/market fit - now what?

Even assuming your awesome product really is as awesome as you think, you are competing for a finite amount of customer dollars, time, and attention. How are you going to break through the clutter to reach your customer, get their attention, and get them to open their wallet?

Unless you’re Facebook, you are going to need channel partners to get your product to market, at lease initially. How do you find a channel partner for your product, and how do you get that channel partner to distribute your product? Once your BD guy has gotten that distribution partnership, how do you get your partner to invest energy into selling your product over everyone else’s (what the retail industry calls “preferred shelf placement”)?

I came up with the term Channel Development as an adaption of an amazing presentation I heard yesterday called Magic & Money: your users want magic, but your partners want money. More traditional names include go-to-market strategy or business development.

Channel Development, or the Magic & Money problem, is what’s called a two-part game: you have to solve for your users’ needs and your partners’ needs simultaneously. Solve for only one, and nothing will happen. Reaching channel/product fit – another term I just made up – requires iterating along what the presentation called “parallel insight arrays” – going from commercial insight to consumer insight and back.

This session will use a fishbowl or roundtable format, depending on the level of interest. The presentation, by the founder of innovation consultancy Fahrenheit212, focused on innovation in large companies who have the advantage of existing channel partners, brand recognition, etc. I will present the basic concept and then we will collectively adapt it to the startup reality and build a framework for startups to do Channel Development successfully.