Do you lead your customers, or follow them? Most companies really start by following the customers. That is how you get capital, you prove there is a need, and that you can fill that need. It may be a need that nobody has seen before, or tried to do anything about before, but you are still following the customers, going to where they already are and helping them to do something they already intended to do. It is very hard to start a company with the “build it and they will come” mentality; building something that you can’t demonstrate solves an existing wide-felt problem.
As your company grows, you still tend to follow the customers. They ask for enhancements and new features, and you provide them. You may help guide any one ask with your “domain expertise”, weighing this customer’s ask with the behaviors and asks of other customers. You see the patterns of what customers are asking for, and start to add features that they are not directly asking for, but you can see the need is still there, just like you started the company by noticing a need that was not yet being filled satisfactorily.
At some point, you may start to look at the industry in general, and start trying to predict where it is going, and what features you can add to help the industry and your customers along that route. These are things that perhaps none of your customers are asking for, and you don’t yet see the concrete need yet, but you do perceive that this could be useful at some point in the future (hopefully near future). This is trying to lead the customer. You can be backed by the evidence supporting your new feature, pointing to trends in the industry, or even trends among competitors, and try to convince them why this thing that they didn’t ask for is valuable for them to use.
If you have a well-established customer base that have grown to trust you, you can get away with some of these leading features. Your customers will give you some leeway and may try out the features without much persuasion. But this is a dangerous area to be in. If the feature has required a lot of development time just to be something minimally viable that nobody has asked for, you may be gambling a lot on a hunch. You are literally trying to predict the future, and none of us tend to be very good at that. That leeway your customers give you may suddenly evaporate if this new feature doesn’t end up helping them in any way. They will not be as likely to try out your next new thing, and you have to build up some trust that you may have lost.
One important caveat here is around legal and regulatory requirements. There may be times when new laws become effective that you will need to react to, but your customers may not directly ask for. In these cases though, it is probably much easier to tell the customer they have to do things in a new way because Big Brother says so, rather than you are guessing that in 3-5 years everybody will be doing it this way.