{"id":8198,"date":"2020-07-26T08:32:57","date_gmt":"2020-07-26T04:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/?p=8198"},"modified":"2020-07-27T12:12:01","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T08:12:01","slug":"building-your-startups-customer-advisory-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/building-your-startups-customer-advisory-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Building your startup\u2019s customer advisory board"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

customer advisory<\/strong>\u00a0board (CAB) can be an invaluable resource for startups, but many founders struggle with putting together the right group of advisors and how to incentivize them. At our TechCrunch Early Stage event,\u00a0Saam Motamedi<\/a>, a general partner at Greylock Partners, talked about how he thinks about putting together the right CAB<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe encourage all of our early-stage companies to put this in place,\u201d Motamedi said. The goal here is to speed up the process to get to product\/market fit since your CAB<\/a> will provide you with regular feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe idea here is [that] you have this feedback loop from customers back to your product where you build, you go get feedback, you iterate \u2014 and the tighter this feedback loop is, the faster you\u2019ll get to product-market fit. And you want to do things structurally to make this feedback loop tighter, starting with a CAB<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Motamedi said a CAB<\/a> should consist of about three to six customers. These should be \u201cluminaries or forward thinkers\u201d in the market you are serving. \u201cYou add them to the CAB<\/a> \u2014 you might give them small advisory grants \u2014 and they become stakeholders and give you feedback as you work through the early stages of product development.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image Credits:<\/strong> Greylock Partners<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the people who you put on the CAB, Motamedi suggests first setting the right expectations for the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are three components. Number one, the most valuable thing you can get from these customer advisors is their time. So the first piece is you want them to commit to a monthly cadence, that could be 60 minutes, it could be 90 minutes, where you\u2019re going to say, \u2018Hey, I\u2019m going to come to the meeting, I\u2019m going to bring two of my teammates, we\u2019re going to show you the latest product demo, and you\u2019re going to drill us with feedback. We\u2019re going to do that once a month.\u2019  [\u2026] And then piece two is this notion of customer days, you could do quarterly, you could also do twice a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe idea is you want to bring the customers together. Because if you and I are both CIOs at Fortune 500 companies and we independently react to a product, that\u2019s one thing, but if we sit in a room together, we all look at the product together, there\u2019s going to be interesting data amongst us as customers and the founder is going to learn a lot from that.[\u2026] And I think the third piece is just an expectation that as the company progresses and product maturity increases, that folks on the CAB are going to be advocates and evangelists for the company with their customer networks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

customer advisory\u00a0board (CAB) can be an invaluable resource for startups, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":8199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2512],"contributor":[],"class_list":["post-8198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other-tech-events","tag-cab"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/GettyImages-1133638956.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Techx Admin","author_link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/author\/techxadmin\/"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8198"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=8198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}