Jacinta Lim
Sep 5, 2018 · 1 min read

Thanks for the incredibly well thought out response. I completely agree that user interviews should not be the sole basis of understanding our customers, but should be triangulated with other means — such as a ‘sales safari’ as you put it and a prototype to put in front of people.

For us, we speak to our customers on a daily/weekly basis, and that speaking to customers takes various forms: (i) monitoring Facebook and other community forums where our customers are on — which is our version of the ‘sales safari’ perhaps because through reading their comments and feedback on travel, we can better understand their pain points; (ii) focus group where we test out certain hypotheses with a small select group of our target customer base; (iii) one-on-one user interviews where we go more in-depth (as mentioned my Medium essay); and (iv) one-on-one user interviews where we set users a task (e.g. book a trip) and watch them do it on our platform without making any comments or asking any questions — which I think is a variation of what you mentioned in (2) of your comments on putting a prototype in front of customers.

Does that sound broadly in line with your experience on what you have found to be the most useful approaches?

    Jacinta Lim

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    Co-founder of Seek Sophie (Techstars ’19), a travellers’ marketplace for sustainable adventures. Curious traveller, coder, INSEAD MBA and former M&A lawyer.