How to talk to users?

As an avid follower of YC and the whole silicon valley culture, I am very much aware of how important it is to be in constant contact of users. However, in my own experience of working on some start up ideas or even doing my job as a product manager, I found it hard to do it well.

My main challenges are:

1. Finding the right questions to ask at the right time is difficult
2. Processing and understanding the information from the users are difficult
3. I don’t talk to the users enough to get a real in-depth understanding.

Given these challenges, I started my Youtube Rabbit hole and Google searches with things like “User interview 101”. I started doing this since last year but nothing I have seen so far were anything particularly insightful until this week. I finally found it. This video is by Eric Migicovsky on this exact topic: “How to talk to users”

Here are couple of the key take aways that I found most useful:

“User interview is about extracting good and useful information”

Common mistakes made by people who talk to the customers/users (I am guilty on all three charges):

1. Talk about their life, not your idea. Exact data to improve product, positioning
2. Talk specifics, not hypotheticals. Don’t talk about features we want to build. Don’t ask would you use it/pay for it if we have this feature. Talk about things that have already happened.
3. Listen, don’t talk

Extract information by asking:

1. What’s the path that led you to this situation/problem?
2. Learn about the motivations and why they got themselves into that problem in the first place?

5 great questions to ask during the early stage of developing the product:

1. What’s the hardest part [about doing this thing]? (Set the context, e.g. if I want to build the memory app, then what’s the hardest part of trying to remember these ideas).
2. Tell me about the last time you had this problem? (This is to understand circumstances of encountering this problem. e.g. for the brainjam app, I encountered this morning on my way to the office while driving, I listened to this Podcast. I had some ideas and I want to remember the ideas as I was having them but due to the fact that I was driving. I couldn’t. )
3. Why was this hard? (You may hear a lot of reasons. This isn’t to identify. This will be important to understand how to market and explain to the new users. Customers in general don’t buy what. They buy the why)
4. What, if anything, have you done to solve this problem? (E.g. When I could, I tried to stop and take notes in order to remember but the friction of finding a piece of paper, pen or phone to type is just way too much time. I tried to use Voice memo to record the ideas but I just find it hard to use for this purpose. I haven’t figured out exactly what’s causing that problem but it is pretty clunky to use.) This is important because if the users have already began using some home grown solution, then this is a real problem. What are the other things you are competing.
5. What don’t you love about the solutions you have already tried? (This is the beginning of the initial feature set. Things I don’t like about the existing set of solutions to the problem) Users in general don’t know how to identify the next features.

Talking to users are useful at all stages of the start up, for example:

1. Idea stage-> this is to find users with problem. Find first users with problems. Friends, coworkers, intros, drop by in person, industry events. One or two users interviews are good for this. (Take a lot of notes. Keep it casual.)
2. Build prototype -> best first customer. Identify who will be the best first customers. Find numerical answers to: how much does this problem cost them? If they solve it, how much revenue would they make? If they don’t solve it, how much money does it cost them? How frequent is this problem? How large is their budget? (The best customer is obviously the one with the most severity of the pain, highest frequency of use and has the ability to fix)
3. Launched -> finding product market fit. Iterate towards product market fit.

Well this whole bit is so useful and I will make sure to come back to this at a later time and hopefully this is useful to some of you out there as well.

Here’s a whole book on User Interviews.

Here’s the blog post on how Super Human quantified and achieved the product market fit: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/

Interesting facts and trivia about PMF:

Achieving Product Market Fit

Weekly ask all customers:

How would you feel if you could no longer user [product]? Achieved PMF when 40% answers “Very disappointed”

1. Ask for phone number during sign up
2. Don’t design by committee (Don’t ask what features they want. Ask here’s a new feature, would you pay for it with putting
3. Disregard comments or bad data. Don’t get onto the hypotheticals.