Don’t Use Your Best Clients as Crash Test Dummies

The time has come to go to market. And it’s only natural to want your best clients, your besties, or both to take the journey with you. Clients you’ve been in the trenches with for years and whom you trust implicitly and/or your closest confidants who know all the nitty gritty about your startup journey might feel like the right people to put your product through its paces and give you unfiltered feedback.

Trust us. They’re not.

Before we dive into why you can’t break this Must Do, here’s a recap of the other Rule Four Must Dos you have already done, or will do soon:

Sure, it’s easier to test your new product or service with people you know. They might be willing to do you a favor, give you honest feedback and make sure their team really tests out the product or service. It sounds like a win-win. Which is why this is one of the most tempting Must Dos to break.

Again, don’t. Or, at least, mostly don’t.

Leverage our top four reasons to resist going to who you know.

We have lots of reasons to steer clear of existing relationships when it comes time to test the market. Here are four:

1. You risk more than a single sale. If your product isn’t perfect (and it probably isn’t out of the gate), you might jeopardize future opportunities with an invaluable contact. Having seen you at a weak moment, your top clients and even your friends could be less inclined to work with you in the future. It’s a significant gamble considering how important these relationships are and how long they took to build. Much better to find other potential customers where the stakes aren’t quite so high.

2. Their feedback might be biased. Your best customers, or strongest relationships, likely have preconceived notions about your brand that could influence their feedback. Their loyalty and familiarity with your products or services might make them less likely to deliver harsh criticism or identify issues that someone new to your product or company would notice.

3. They probably aren’t your ideal target audience. Just because you know someone well or have worked with them forever doesn’t mean that their specific needs and use cases are aligned with those of your average user or potential new customers. It’s much more likely that they differ significantly. When we tried to make the mistake of leveraging our best client relationships for testing, they nicely told us they weren’t interested. This rejection highlighted a crucial insight: All public companies were not our target market. Unless they had a compelling reason to prioritize sustainability (usually because they were in a “dirty” industry or had prior environmental or DEI issues) their Boards or executive teams were generally disinterested in making an investment in our offering. That said, if our client had agreed to try us out just to be nice, this misalignment would have resulted in feedback that wouldn’t be much help—a waste of both their time and ours.

4. You won’t treat them the same as an unknown entity. Perhaps most problematic, existing best customers (or friends) might receive preferential treatment during product rollouts or testing phases, just as they may have experienced in other interactions with you in the past. This special attention could skew their feedback and not accurately represent the experience of typical users.

Use the opportunity to build a new set of potentially invaluable relationships.

Faced with a setback when our client turned us down for testing, we found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to reach out to unfamiliar companies with our beta product. To overcome this challenge, we overdelivered on the service, gave them more than what they initially purchased and invested heavily in return for the possibility of useful feedback. As founders and dedicated Female Mavericks, we both (Victoria and Beth) played an active part in every one of our rollouts and promised 24/7 access if any problems arose.

Yes, these early deals were the least profitable in our company's history. But they provided exactly what we needed at the time: honest, actionable feedback, opportunities to iterate and improve, and insights that led to renaming and redelivering various aspects of our offering.

The best part came when we exited beta with a thoroughly tested and well-received product. We had cultivated a great audience, resulting in short sales cycles for our new offering. The discomfort and superwoman effort we both put in were indeed worth it.

Keep your besties dialed in.

If you find it too challenging to fully restrain yourself from engaging your most valuable professional and personal contacts, consider involving a few select relationships during the concept validation phase of your journey. Imagine having a dinner discussion about your product's intended functionality and its potential market value (including its relevance to them). Gather their feedback and use it to refine the product. Just remember to keep this group highly selective and completely separate from those doing the actual beta testing.

 What’s Next?

Pricing…oh pricing. This is the one area where we would go back and forth and round and round for hours. Higher. Lower. Retainer. Project. Some hybrid combination of all the above. Here is what we know: there are hundreds of ways to derive a pricing strategy. There is no one size fits all. But—you don’t really have to sweat any of it yet. Come back next week to find out why the perfect pricing can wait.