« Talk with your 1000 first users. »

2 min of Growth Hacking Tips 🚀

Every week, I’ll give you a few insights into one of the growth hacking tips of this list.

This is an obvious advice but… do you really talk to your customers?

The trap when you’re building a product for people is to think what these people need. Please stop thinking for people and start talking to them.

As Paul Graham said, when you start building a startup, 2 things matter : build your product and talk to your customers.

« The future of your business depends on your first users. »

We all know is an important step but we don’t do it.

It’s easier to sit at home than go out and meet people.
It’s easier to build something we think than try to understand someone.
It’s easier to think about a solution before the problem people have.
It’s easier to talk to friends than strangers.
It’s easier to get signups with a landing page than talk to people.

There are just excuses. Excuses because we are afraid to lose something we care about.

To help you get out of your confort zone, here are some advice:

• Reach your target audience on Twitter. If you are shy, Twitter could be a great place to start. People on this social network are really open-minded. Tweet them you need feedback to improve what you’re doing.
• Andrew Chen gives a way to get some opinions from your target customers:
  >> http://andrewchen.co/talk-to-your-target-customer-in-4-easy-steps/
• Talk to people is hard to to right and easy to mess up. The worst is to talk to people and get bad data (when people are your friends for instance). Here is the Mom Test to help you do your customer development right: >> http://fr.slideshare.net/robfitz/mom-test-customer-development-30m
• Before building your solution start with problem interviews. Ash Maurya gives a methodology to do it perfectly:
  >> https://leanstack.com/customer-development-getting-started/

Now you have the weapons, you have to be consistency. Don’t just talk with 1000 users but talk with users each week. And don’t forget they are qualitative data and they give you some trends. You always need quantitative data to prove those trends.

• An overview of the list of Growth Hacking Tips
• « Process first, tactics second. »
• « Don’t do growth hacking if you don’t achieve Product Market Fit. »
• « A good metric changes the way you behave. »

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! You can find me on Julien Collet Twitter :)