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The Lean Startup Dojo is a weekly class focused on mastering the skills that you need to successfully build a Lean Startup.

Your startup won't succeed unless you have a deep understanding of your customers and the problem that you are trying to solve for them. Customer Discovery is the process that Lean Startups use to create this understanding. In this class, you will learn how to:

- find your first customers
- convince them to be interviewed by you
- determine if they'll buy your product
- get referrals to other customers

The Lean Startup Dojo places a strong emphasis on creativity and critical thinking. You will generate multiple approaches to solve each problem that your startup will face while executing Customer Discovery. The instructors and other attendees will assist you in analyzing each solution you propose through the lens of the Lean Startup philosophy. When you leave the class, you'll have a wealth of ideas that you can put to use in your startup.

This class will be taught by Rich Collins under the guidance of Eric Ries.

The cost is $100 per class.

Seriously. This is the best bargain you can get. This class is so under-priced, it will address the skills that you need to get out and talk to customers, includes but not limited to: finding your first customers, convincing them to be interviewed by you, determining if they'll buy your product and getting referrals to other customers. The class is kept to under 10 people, so it will target your own problems.

Many entrepreneurs are familiar with Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service where real people perform small tasks for equally small pay. Being located in Canada, I’m unable to use the service directly (as it’s only open directly to US users). Thankfully there is a startup called PickFu, which enables startups worldwide to ask a simple A/B question through the Amazon Mechanical Turk API.

While I keep seeing more and more feedback from entrepreneurs utilizing Mechanical Turk to get results for their customer research process I take it with a huge grain of salt. In my case I ended up with dummy and default replies which have little to do with real feedback.

At the end of Customer Discovery you should have identified a customer problem worth solving and started building your solution (MVP). During Customer Validation, you’ll test your finished MVP by selling it to earlyvangelists and in the process start developing a repeatable and scalable sales process.

One more great post by Ash Maurya on Customer Validation. Give it a look.

...you can’t afford to ignore the cost of customer acquisition. The earlier you work on this the better, as many of the best techniques require you to build your product differently.

It is also important to ask yourself the question: can my business realistically expect to acquire customers for considerably less than the amount that I can monetize them?

Very nice insight into Customer Acquisition process.

If you don't understand this, do not start your business, until you understand every single word out of here.