I was recently invited to get an opening talk at Startup Weekend Houston specifically on customer validation. I enjoy developing interview questions and actually talking with potential customers, so it seemed like a great opportunity. As I got closer to the actual presentation, I realized that by jumping into the interview stage, I would be glossing over some key concepts that are fundamental to the entire weekend, so I went back to basics.

When you're building a business, there are a ton of terms to be familiar with. There are simple concepts like cashflow, more complex ones like Cost of Custom Acquisition, and even squishier ones to measure like Net Promoter Score. But in my opinion, there are three terms specific to web-based businesses that - if you use them wrong - almost nothing else matters.

First, there are Visitors.

Over the past decade, I've started, been employed by, and advised a flock of startups. More recently, I've been an advisor at events like Startup Weekend, Lean Startup Machine, and the new Longhorn Startup Program at UT.

One of the big pushes in recent years - I suspect primarily due to Lean Startup - is customer interviews. At some point during these interviews, the "would" question comes up. Generally it's structured something like this:

"Would you like a product that makes X better?"

And every group celebrates that "95% of our customers said yes!"

That's great, right?  Well.. let's break this down a bit.

First of all, until they give you money, they're not a customer. That's it plain and simple.. so therefore, these are potential customers or potential users but not customers.