Looys provides end-to-end Customer Development (CustDev) research: from participant recruitment and in-depth interviews to audience analysis, customer journey mapping (CJM), and recommendations for product, marketing and sales.
Commission CustDev research for B2B and B2C products before launch, when entering new regions, or when scaling your business.
Many people mistakenly assume that Customer Development means simply talking to users or sending out a standard survey: “We spoke to a few customers for 20 minutes, everything is clear, and CustDev is done.”
The benefits of this kind of contact are usually limited: you feel that something has become clearer, but do not know how to use it. There is no tangible outcome for the organization. At best, a few recordings remain for the team to review, which often never happens.
CustDev goes beyond the interview process. Its outcome is a set of practical, actionable decisions. It answers the question: “How do we build a product the market needs?” In our approach, that answer takes the form of a substantial 70-page presentation with recommendations to improve the product, marketing and sales.
We use 7+ Customer Development methods, selected around your business objectives.
They range from focus groups and in-depth interviews to competitive intelligence and product
testing. Our most popular CustDev approach includes the following components.
A 1–1.5-hour conversation with a customer, guided by a prepared set of questions that uncover their underlying motivations, concerns, expectations, and how they solve the problem today.
Customer profiles covering more than 20 parameters, identifying objections, motivations, behavioral patterns, user experience and other important factors.
A map of the customer journey that identifies goals, emotions and motivations on the path to purchasing your product.
Evaluation of how users experience a product or service and respond to its features.
After the research, you can stop
making decisions in the dark and guessing what your
customers need
For systems integrator KPBS, we explored the experience and expectations of executives who make IT project decisions. The methodology, participants and findings are available in the detailed case study.
Read the KPBS CustDev case studyYou do not need to spend time managing the research team. A dedicated project manager oversees every stage of your project.
We take responsibility for finding solutions to your challenge and keep you informed in detail throughout the research.
Payment is split into several stages, with an initial payment below $1,190 to make it easier to get started and evaluate our work.
In-depth interviews / 20 participants
In-depth interviews / Market research
Building your marketing approach: company positioning, selection of brand communication channels, a development strategy for each channel, budget planning and goal setting.
Defining the core of your company: mission, positioning and values. The elements that distinguish you from other businesses.
Understand your competitors’ strategies to strengthen your market position: advertising budgets, strategy, activities, promotions, special offers, price monitoring and more.
At the start, we divide the audience into segments based on the research objectives. We recommend at least 5 interviews per segment so that findings reflect more than an individual opinion. For example, participant groups might include:
That makes 15 participants in total.
An analyst develops a separate CustDev interview guide for each audience segment. For example, questions for people who have used the product will differ from those for participants who decided to stop using it.
Questions also vary considerably with the product and research objectives. One study may focus on the user’s experience with a product, while another explores the user’s problem and how they have tried to solve it.
There are several:
1. Define objectives and goals
2. Select research tools
3. Form hypotheses
4. Conduct fieldwork: interviews, focus groups or another research method
5. Analyze data and prepare the report
Reliable conclusions require the right questions. For example, we do not ask participants to speculate about the future. Future intentions are hypothetical, whereas past experiences reveal behavioral patterns that have actually occurred. Questions are also phrased to avoid leading people toward a “correct” answer. Poor examples include “How do you like our product?” or “Do you think problem X is important?” Almost everyone will say the product is excellent and the problem matters.
Sample size also matters. A common mistake is to conduct too few interviews, such as only 2 or 3. We recommend 4–5 interviews per audience segment and at least 20 interviews across the whole study.
This gives the findings a stronger basis for drawing business conclusions.
You can conduct CustDev yourself, but several difficulties and common mistakes can prevent sound conclusions. Collecting interview data often looks straightforward, yet many companies stop after 3–4 interviews. The resulting data is not sufficiently representative. CustDev also involves data analysis. Our analysts take an overview, group findings, identify relationships and extract insights from interviews. The results are packaged into a clear, well-designed presentation of 40+ pages, with conclusions and product improvement recommendations.
Data analysis is the central stage of CustDev. This is when the analyst takes an overview, groups findings, identifies relationships and extracts interview insights. Everything is brought together in a clear, well-designed presentation of 40+ pages, with conclusions and recommendations your team can use to improve the product.
We recommend commissioning CustDev from a marketing agency with the accumulated expertise to identify these relationships and turn raw interviews into practical product improvement recommendations.
An analyst prepares the interview questions in a document called an interview guide. Each segment receives a separate guide based on its experience with the product. For example, in B2B, questions for the end user will differ substantially from those for the person who purchased the product.
CustDev interviews focus on a person’s past experience rather than predictions about the future. Future intentions are hypothetical, while past experiences reveal behavioral patterns that have already occurred. Questions are worded to avoid leading the participant toward a “correct” answer. Poor examples include “How do you like our product?” or “Do you think problem X is important?” Almost everyone will say the product is excellent and that the problem needs solving.
For the same reason you outsource branding, website development and other specialist services. They require focused expertise that rarely makes sense to hire in-house for a one-off project. Assigning research to an existing marketer often does not work out, even if the task initially appears straightforward.
In-house CustDev often remains unfinished. After 2–3 interviews, the team becomes unsure what to do next, and the process gradually stops. The result is time and effort spent by the team and management without a useful outcome. The task is revisited every 3–6 months but still does not move forward.
We have provided CustDev services since 2023. One of the most common things clients tell us is: “We wanted to do everything ourselves and spent countless team hours, but still had no tangible results.”
