Sample frameDay 206·Entrepreneurship · Customers

Good morning. The person who'll buy your unfinished product has already built something clumsy to survive without it.

Entrepreneurship.

The Earlyvangelist

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The question

Take the five names at the top of your pipeline this morning: how many of them have already built something makeshift to hold this problem together — a shared inbox one person clears by hand every night, a second phone that only rings for this, a Saturday that vanished six months ago — and how many are simply senior, agreeable and interested in what you're building?

The idea

Steve Blank spent twenty-one years inside eight Silicon Valley startups before he began teaching entrepreneurship at Berkeley and Stanford, and in 2005 he self-published The Four Steps to the Epiphany, the book that gave the world customer development. Its most useful single idea is a word he coined: the earlyvangelist, the buyer who'll pay for something visibly unfinished. Five marks identify one. They have the problem. They know they have it, which isn't the same thing. They're actively looking, on some sort of timetable. The pain has been bad enough that they've already cobbled a workaround together out of whatever was to hand. And they can get to budget. Four of those are things a person tells you. The other one — the workaround — is a thing they did, which is why it carries the weight, and why this is not the deal-qualification exercise it resembles. MEDDIC asks whether a deal is real for a product that already exists. Blank is hunting the rarer person: the one who'll buy before it exists, because the substitute they built themselves is failing them faster than your rough version will. That substitute is the same object The Mom Test taught you to ask about, doing a different job here: there it was evidence that the problem is real, here it's a filter on people — the mark that separates the buyer who'll pay for something unfinished from everyone who can only tell you things. The trap is selling to the pleasant — the senior, agreeable people who take the meeting, call the idea interesting, and have never been in enough pain to build anything.

The framework

01
Which of them built the workaround themselves?
Of the five marks this is the one that can't be faked, because it is behaviour rather than opinion. Somebody who has built a rota, paid a contractor or quietly expensed a tool to hold the problem together has voted with time and money already — and the thing they built tells you what the job really is, which features are decorative, and roughly where your price ceiling sits. So don't ask whether it is a priority; they'll say yes to be kind. Ask to see it, and get them to walk you through the exact point where it breaks.
02
The other four marks, run against five real names.
The rest are things a person can tell you, and they still matter: they have the problem, they know they have it, they're actively looking, and they can get to budget. Run your five names down that list and the same shape usually appears — the pipeline clears the first mark and the last, because there is a problem in the category and the company has money, then fails in the middle, which is another way of saying nobody in there has decided to do anything about it yet. Five out of five is rare, and worth reorganising a month around.
03
Actively looking has a date attached.
Interest and search are different states, and only one of them buys this quarter. Somebody who's actively looking can tell you what they tried last month, who else they have spoken to, and roughly when they need this handled — because something in their world has put a clock on it: a new financial year, a regulator, a resignation, a customer complaint they can't afford to repeat. Those are still things they tell you, but each one is a claim with a name or a date inside it, which makes it checkable in a way that 'we're definitely looking at this' never is. Ask for all three directly. If none of them exist, you're not talking to an earlyvangelist. You're talking to somebody who would like the problem solved eventually, by somebody else.
04
Take their money, not their roadmap.
Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm (1991) made the case that early adopters and the mainstream market want opposite things: one wants change and will forgive rough edges to get it, the other wants a finished, referenced, safe product and forgives almost nothing. Your earlyvangelists will therefore ask for exotic, specific features, and building every one of them produces a product only they could love. Take the requests as evidence about the problem rather than instructions about the product, and keep asking which of them a mainstream buyer would also need.

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