Connecting the dots
In our last post, we gave an overview of our research process, and described how we set up and collected primary data. Along with secondary research gathered from public sources like the SBA, universities in the area, and content experts, we finally had the chance to speak with real small business owners in-depth. We ended up with over 65 interviews with all different types of small businesses, and hundreds of pages of notes. How did we end up with all this info, and more importantly, how did we make sense of it all??
Getting the Most out of your Interviews
Throughout the interview process, there were a few things we learned that I think helped us be able to synthesize better later on.
- Take notes during the interview. This may seem super obvious, but there were a few times at the beginning where we attempted to take notes after the interview was done, mostly because of logistics (it can feel awkward to write or type when someone is speaking). DON’T DO IT. You forget things much more quickly than you’d think, and as you’ll see, it’ll be important later to have exact quotes.
- Don’t give solutions, but do dig into problems. Perhaps because we read so many articles on not feeding your interviewees solutions, we had a few interviews at the beginning which were too free-form. We ended up with notes that felt like a description of someone rather than an analysis of their key pain points. We had to quickly get comfortable pushing our interviewees to talk more about their day-to-day struggles. One tool that was helpful was the concept of “5-whys” — in other words, ask “why” 5 times before stopping on a given line of questioning. This helped us get at the deep, underlying reasons behind behaviors. Once we did this, we got much more meaningful results.
- Leverage multiple channels. With the background of the team, it was easy to leverage networks like Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth and McKinsey. However, these are very specialized and biased groups of people. We had to get creative, and ended up employing a bunch of other approaches, like walking into stores, attending local events, and organizing Meetups. The insights we got from these other groups of people were often different in key areas.
At the end of the interview process, we had hundreds of pages of notes.
So — how did we make sense of it all? First off, we blocked off an entire weekend to deal with it. Here’s what we did with that time…
A Beautiful Mind
First, we made one of these!
… well, not quite 😊
We did however make a whiteboard map. First, we each committed to reading through all the notes that we had collectively produced, and highlight the quotes that we found most interesting and insightful. Then, we cut out the quotes into little slips of paper. Finally, we spent several hours grouping them in various ways and trying to map out connections. We ended up with several iterations of a whiteboard map — basically groups of quotes that were similar in some way, connected to other groups of quotes. For example, we might have a group of quotes about the difficulty getting small loans, related to a group of quotes about difficulty finding publicly available information on loan applications. So, we were down from hundreds of pages of text to a few large whiteboards full of information… what next?
Distillation
To make our synthesis more rigorous and analytical, we also distilled our insights quantitatively. Our goal was to come up with statements that we could then heatmap and find the ones that came up most frequently. We collectively drew out these insights from our whiteboard maps, and wrote them in an excel, with a final list of 107. Then, we counted how many times each one occurred across our interviews, and were able to come up with a collection of things we had heard that cross-cut industries and were broadly felt across our population. These insights then became the fodder for our venture concept generation stage .
Nuts and Bolts
Tactically, this process took a long time. We ended up blocking out an entire weekend to synthesize, and we still felt crunched even after 20+ hours of working through our interview notes. This was also a stage where we iterated A LOT — we went back and forth between our notes and our insights frequently, continually pulling out new pieces. However, I think that the messiness was actually necessary to draw out deep, important and cross-cutting ideas. If I did this again, I would definitely still plan on an entire weekend to do it. The only thing I’d change is to do more prep work up front. For example, it’s probably not necessary for everyone to sit in a room together and cut out pieces of paper — these types of very tactical things can be done over the couple days prior.
Final Thoughts
This part of the process was pretty cool. Before, we had a ton of one-off anecdotes and stories, and it was sometimes hard to see how it would lead to meaningful discoveries. The synthesis stage was, for me, when it became real. Next, we decided to deep dive with a few small businesses, and integrate ourselves into one of their key problems in order to understand them even more deeply. Check back to see how that went!
