Lean Startup Conference: Work with Users from Day One

At Phuse, we’re often asked how good ideas are. Thing is, we’re not always the best people to ask. While we do a lot of research and put lots of effort into understanding each project we take on, we’re not the market experts — you are.

So how much research has to be done to build a successful product? This was a major theme in the main day-two programming of the Lean Startup Conference, which I was fortunate to attend via livestream at CSI Annex (where Toronto Phusers sometimes hang out). Here’s some advice I thought was especially useful and I wanted to share with aspiring entrepreneurs who missed the conference:

Go beyond Google — way beyond

Researching is tough enough when you’re the intended target, but what happens when we’re building products for people with totally different experiences? We have to go a few extra miles.

When Alex Ringwald of LearnUp came to the U.S., unemployment was over 20%. Being gainfully employed, she wondered if it was something she could solve. Her approach? Spending six months interviewing unemployed people about how they were feeling and why they thought they weren’t getting jobs. “The things you read in the news aren’t going to show you,” she said. “Listening to them [your target audience] will.”

She also consulted with experts, but never lost touch with her potential user base. When you’re not your own user, you have to be extra mindful of maintaining open dialogue with those who are to stay in the loop.

Connect with customers before writing all the code

The Field of Dreams “Build it and they will come” mentality sounds great, but isn’t always accurate. You might be solving a problem, but it might not be the one that’s most important to your base. Learning as much as possible about your potential customers/users can save you a ton of development time and money, and help you build a more successful product or service.

Daina Linton spoke about this in her experience building Fashion Metric, an ecommerce platform that takes the work out of finding well-fitting clothes. The original idea came from a much smaller problem: men having trouble finding shirts that fit them well. Linton kept asking: “If we could find a solution to this, would customers even care?”

To find out, Fashion Metric took a slow, staged approach to their offering. Instead of building a full-service platform right away, they started with a simple landing page that collected email addresses from people experiencing fit problems. They then surveyed those people on their fit issues, and expanded the landing page to get even more information. The fit intelligence engine came next, at which point they partnered with a brand to sell shirts.

Linton’s team learned that it was actually price point and style that guided customer choices, then fit was critical. Sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper to find the real pain points, so don’t stop at cursory surveys.

“Learn from your failures and validate your hypotheses,” she said. “You will probably uncover new problems. You can then use customer behaviour to guide your development.”

Really care about the user experience

In the race to release a minimum viable product, it’s tempting to ship as soon as something is functional, regardless of how it looks. First impressions, however, mean an awful lot — especially when it comes to attracting users to a new product.

If your early users aren’t wowed by what you’re offering, good luck finding more of them. As Kathryn Minshew from The Muse said: “If you don’t get this one right, it will be hard to make anything else matter.”

Our advice? Apply the information learned from interviewing, profiling and assessing user/customer needs to the flow of your product/service as soon as possible. And don’t skimp. People know what looks good and works well, and will not make room for products they consider less than A-grade.

So about that idea…

Don’t ask us if it’s good — ask the people you want to solve problems for or offer services to! In the words of Daina Linton: “Create opportunities to learn from your customers from day one.” Everything else will follow.

Special thanks to Sunit from Watrhub for organizing the livestream, and to CSI for sponsoring the room use!