Customer advice board of directors (CAB) can be an invaluable resource for startups, but many founders struggle to put together the right group of advisors and nudge them. At our TipsClear Early Stage event, Saam Motamedi, general partner at Greylock Partners, explained how he plans to create the right CAB.
"We encourage all of our early stage businesses to put this in place," Motamedi said. The goal here is to speed up the process to arrive at the product / market fit since your CAB will provide you with regular feedback.
"The idea here is [that] you have this feedback loop from customers to your product where you build, you get feedback, you iterate - and the tighter that feedback loop, the faster you'll adapt to the product market. And you want to do things structurally to make that feedback loop tighter, starting with a CAB. "
Motamedi said a CAB should be made up of around three to six clients. These should be "luminaries or trendsetters" of the market you serve. "You add them to the CAB - you could give them small consulting grants - and they become stakeholders and give you feedback as you work in the early stages of product development."
As for the people you put on the CAB, Motamedi first suggests setting the right expectations for the board.
"There are three elements. First, the most valuable thing you can get from these customer advisers is their time. So the first piece is you want them to commit to a monthly cadence, it could be 60 minutes, it could be 90 minutes, where you're going to say, 'Hey, I'm going to come to the meeting, I' 'I'm going to bring two of my teammates, we're going to show you the latest product demo, and you are going to give us your feedback. We will do this once a month. [...] And then the second piece is this notion of customer days, which you could do quarterly, you could also do twice a year.
"The idea is that you want to bring customers together. Because if you and I are both CIOs in Fortune 500 companies and we independently react to a product, that's one thing, but if we sit in a room together, we all look at the product together, it there will be some interesting data among us as the clients and the founder will learn a lot.[...] And I think the third element is just an expectation that as the business progresses and the maturity of the product increases, the members of the CAB are going to become advocates and evangelists for the company with their networks of clients.
Motamedi recommends describing these expectations in a short document.