Advice for customers board (CAB) can be an invaluable resource for startups, but many founders find it difficult to put together the right group of consultants and how to incentivize them. At our ProWellTech Early Stage event, Saam Motamedi, a general partner of Greylock Partners, talked about how he plans to put the right CAB together.
"We encourage all our early stage companies to implement this," said Motamedi. The goal here is to speed up the process of getting to the product / market in shape as the CAB will provide regular feedback.
"The idea here is [that] you have this feedback loop from customers to your product where you build, go get feedback, iterate - and the narrower this feedback loop, the faster you will be able to adapt to the product market. And you want to do things structurally to tighten this feedback loop, starting with a CAB. "
Motamedi said that a CAB should consist of around three to six customers. These should be "advanced luminaries or thinkers" in the market you are serving. "You add them to the CAB - you could give them small consulting aids - and they become interested parties and give you feedback as you work in the early stages of product development."
As for the people you put on the CAB, Motamedi suggests first of all to establish the right expectations for the table.
"There are three components. Number one, the most valuable thing you can get from these consultants is their time. So the first piece is that you want them to engage on a monthly basis, which could be 60 minutes, it could be 90 minutes. , in which you will say, "Hey, I'm coming to the meeting, I" will bring two of my teammates, we will show you the latest product demo and give us feedback. We will do it once a month. " [...] And then the second piece is this notion of customer days, you could do it quarterly, you could even do it twice a year.
"The idea is that you want to bring customers together. Because if you and I are both CIOs of the Fortune 500 companies and react independently to a product, that's one thing, but if we sit in a room together, we all look at the product together, there will be interesting data between us as customers and the founder will learn a lot from this.[...] And I think the third piece is only an expectation that, as the company progresses and the maturity of the product progresses, CAB people will become supporters and evangelists of the company with their customer networks. "
Motamedi recommends outlining these expectations in a short document.