For a startup to succeed it is ideal to follow a non-linear approach from idea to market. In other words, if you know who will consume your product or service you don't have to wait until your offering is ready to sell. Getting customers early (during your planning or development days) will do great and even bring you funds. In this post, I will provide you with case study of LifeMojo, recent startup based out of Bangalore. LifeMojo is a Preventive Healthcare platform that helps you stay fit by helping you eat right. It is a team of 3 enthusiastic developers/entrepreneurs. They started the company by pooling in their personal savings but knew they have to get it right before they drain away their savings. Time was crucial. LifeMojo CEO, Namit Nangia recalls

" We found our first prospective paying customer, 1 week into the product conceptualization cycle. We approached them with a storyboarding of the concept as a working HTML and discussed the concept. They were excited about the product and gave us their input. We got back to them with the prototype within a couple of weeks and that is when we signed the first paying customer."

He emphasised the importance of customer inputs to get their offering to be build around what people want.

"The first few customers helped us a lot by spending time with us, helping us understand their industry and identifying the gaps in the existing preventive healthcare processes that we would fill by leveraging technology.

Surprisingly not many entrepreneurs take this approach. Many startups learn it the hard way. So lets go back to the basics. Begin with selling your idea If you fail to sell the idea you are quite likely to fail selling the end product. Find customers early. Don't start it too late as it can help you save a lot of costs. Find people who would benefit from your solution. Get them along during your requirements, design and testing process. Customers are good testers You would get real users to test your application. This would save a lot of our testing time and totally eliminate the need to outsource testing. They will also give you a valid use-cases for new features that they would expect in the application. Customers can bring in funds Product companies don't like making tailor made software - but often companies require customers to define feature roadmap. Giving features at the speed that the customer needs can attract some cash even before you roll out the product to the world. Customers can predict better Your customers are likely to be in a better position to tell if your application is usable, useful and value for money. A perfect reality check. So, if you are heading the wrong direction in development - no better expert than a customer to guide. You can be sure that your product will not fail big time when it reaches the market, if your first few customers loved it. Lifemojo exhibits great risk-aversion strategy by acquiring domain expertise by involving customers early. This helps them keep cost low and increase chances of their business to succeed faster.