Acting on Customer Discovery

When I first started at Convergent Technologies, the founder, Alan Michaels, had left Intel and he believed he was going to be making a single board computer. Computer that fit on one circuit board back in the early 1980’s was a radical notion. And what Alan did was he went around to computer companies and said, "Look at what I got. How many would you like?" And they all kind of knew Alan from his work in Intel and said, "Wow! That's great! We'll take three for our R&D lab." And Alan went, "No, no, no. I'd like you to take 3,000." The first company he went to said, "Alan, we're looking at a new type of computer but it doesn't even have a case. It doesn't have an operating system. It doesn't have any applications. It's a nice building block but maybe we'll take three and maybe we'll license the design from you." So Alan went to another company, this time NCR. And he gave them the same pitch and they said, "Alan, we'll take five!" He said, "5,000?" "No, we'll take five." Gave him the same story. "It doesn't have a box" and whatever. And finally, Alan went to the third company, a company called Burrows at the time. And they said, "Alan, we'd take 10." He said, "Oh, oh, oh. You mean you'd take 10 boards? Absolutely, but would you like to see my box?" And they said, "Well, you didn't mention a box when you..." "Oh! Let me draw the specs of the box. It has an enclosure." And they said, "Oh, great! Does it have an operating system?" "Absolutely! It has an operating system." "What else does it have?" "Well, what else do you need?" "Oh, does it have a word processor?" "It has a word processor!" "What else, what were you thinking about? Oh, it has one of those!" Right there in discovery Alan finally realized that what he was hearing was that what he had was good enough to get three but was missing a couple of zeros. Now of course he had to go back to the rest of his company, which had all of seven people and said, "Good news! I just got an order for 10,000 computers fro...