This must seem like heresy coming from a guy who had the title VP Marketing for 10 years and writes a blog called Startup-Marketing.com. But the fact is marketing is not appropriate for startups in the initial stages of customer development.

A newer model is emerging originally sparked by Steve Blank, author of Four Steps to the Epiphany and teacher of customer development at both Berkley’s Haas business school and at Stanford University’s graduate school of engineering. I consider Steve Blank to be the world’s foremost expert on customer development. Through his experience as CEO, Founder or VP Marketing at 8 startups (5 of which resulted in $100m+ exits – the last was E.piphany) and advisor/board member to numerous other startups, he has concluded that the ideal model is very different from the traditional startup approach of abdicating customer development to a VP of Marketing. I completely agree with his claim that none of the traditional VP Marketing skills are relevant in the first two customer development steps of a startup’s life (page 215 Four Steps to the Epiphany).

Given the high VP Marketing turnover rate at startups and more importantly the extremely high failure rate of startups, his model is definitely worth considering vs. the traditional startup marketing approach. His recommendation is to form a customer development team led by a “head of customer development.” The team should include the CEO and spend a considerable amount of time in the field with prospective customers validating/refining hypotheses about their target customers and the problems they are solving. He says this team “must have the authority to radically change the company’s direction, product or mission and the creative, flexible mindset of an entrepreneur.”

After five years in the VP Marketing role at LogMeIn, I too recognized that the initial stages of customer development are very different from marketing in the later stages of a startup or especially a large established company. In fact, I concluded that much of my success as a later stage VP Marketing (both companies filed for IPOs) was the result of momentum we had built in the early stages of customer development. I decided that going forward I would specialize in early stage customer development.

I was first introduced to Four Steps to the Epiphany when I was Interim VP Marketing at Xobni during the first half of 2008. I had been looking for resources to help me understand how to drive adoption of this innovative market-creating product (a very different challenge than we had at LogMeIn which disrupted an existing market). The book provided a great framework to follow as we worked to drive early customer adoption. Since then I have helped to accelerate market adoption at two additional startups, while continuing to advise at Xobni.

Given my obsession with startup customer development, I was thrilled for the opportunity to meet with Steve Blank for coffee earlier this week and was flattered when he invited me to present to his class at Haas on March 10th. We agreed that my approach really begins at his Customer Validation step.

There are two key twists I’ve made to his framework. The first is that I drive the entire process with metrics. In fact I’m working closely with KISSmetrics (where I am an advisor) to define all the tools and reports needed to build a complete Customer Development Platform.

The second twist is that I add a customer development specialist when the Validation Step begins, which is the role I fill with startups. I belive eventually many people will specialize in this critical stage.  Without a specialist, startups waste critical time and resources deciding where to execute. It’s surprising how similiar the process of uncovering the critical information needed to drive customer adoption across different types of startups.

One place where my views diverge a bit from Steve Blank’s is that he suggests that a good candidate for the Head of Customer Development is someone with a product management or product marketing background. The key issue I see here is that experienced product marketers suffer from the “curse of knowledge.” They know enough about product marketing to want to focus efforts on areas that are usually irrelevant to startups. Having the discipline to follow the right process at this stage is much more important than experience. The good news is that I’ve found ambitious, analytical recent college graduates to be ideal candidates. They are easy to find and their salary and equity requirements are also much lower than a VP Marketing – freeing up resources to bring in a customer development specialist. This combination accomplishes more results faster than an experienced product marketer by themself, and generally costs the startup less cash and equity. Of course if you already have an experienced marketer I wouldn’t advocate replacing them.  This guidance is really directed at startups that are trying to hire an experienced marketer – and a warning that you will be paying a premium for skills that aren’t critical at this point.

Once the startup has discovered how to drive customer adoption and begins building momentum, it should be easier to attract the long-term VP Marketing (or promote the head of customer development).