Ok. To be honest this is actually not true. I love talking to customers to get feedback on a particular app I built or on a new business idea.
However, being the technical founder and basically a software developer, I am really comfortable behind my laptop: reading e-mails, chatting with people or posting feedback questions on sites like Forrst.
But, to get the valuable feedback that is needed for figuring out what kind of problems and/or solution your customer wants, you need to be able to interview or contact them on a deeper level than the occasional e-mail.
I have been struggling with this problem for a while now. Especially since I am aware of the Lean Startup and Customer Development methodologies.
Especially since I am not the kind of guy that wants to start cold-calling or emailing people that have never heard of me. This gives me an uncomfortable feeling that I am intruding in their lives too much.
For some projects, this is no problem since I usually like working on problems that I, my close friends or colleagues have. But for ideas that involve people I don't really know or when I want to get some more objective feedback, this is hard.
In retrospect, I have unconsciously analyzed a lot of "lean" companies that are success stories. The biggest topic that you don't really find about them is an explanation on how they actually met their first few customers.
So this is what I have observed. What most of them all have in common is that they started out with keeping a blog or sending out their word in other places where their customers usually lived.
For example. 37signals already had a great following and fanbase on Signal vs Noise when they started working on their products and also Dropbox started by posting the video on HackerNews.
In retrospect. Most of the cases I have came across where very successful in blogging and writing great stuff for the world. They all started their journey with some kind of Inbound Marketing: unobtrusively getting in the heads of their (potential) customers without having to disturb them too much.
Then, when they got a few followers they would ask some of them personally to do an interview or some other kind of customer development activity.
To conclude. The insight of reaching out to your customers from day one (or even before that) when you want to get to know them and talk to them trough blogging and inbound marketing is becoming the missing piece of my personal customer development and lean startup puzzle. I think it is something that we should spend a bit more attention to.
I hope this insight can help you gather more people to talk to about your early stage idea or application. Especially when you are like me and you sometimes just don't know where to find any more people to talk to.