The Art of Customer Discovery Interviews
Talking to customers is a key to success. Here’s how you get started.
Trust me when I say customer discovery is the key to success. However, it’s not as simple as blindly sending emails asking for feedback, or attaching a survey in an email campaign. Being good at customer discovery entails asking the right people the right questions, and actively listening to what they have to say.
Identifying Potential Customers
In order to talk to customers you need to find them. This can be one of the most difficult task, but a major key in the beginning of a venture. You need to learn where your target customers live. That could be a corner of the Internet, a specific coffee shop, different conferences, etc. Make a list of places you can reach your customers.
The larger the list the easier it will be to scale when the product is perfected. Once the list is complete (lets face it, it’s never actually complete) its time to get out there and make contact. This is where things get serious.
Making Contact
Talking to customers is difficult. It’s similar to a guy trying to talk to a girl or vice versa. The initiating party usually doesn’t have their shit together and there’s a chance of rejection. But that’s ok! You need to muster of the courage to just say hi or just press send.
If they’re online, find their email and craft up a well thought out email. The email should engage with their ideas/posts and be relevant to the problem you are trying to solve. We’ve found that an introductory email that speaks more about what the other party is doing than what you’re selling will get a much higher response rate. It’s a known fact that, psychologically, people will like you more when they spend more of the conversation talking about themselves. The same logic can be said when engaging on a target customer’s social media post or direct messaging them. Once you get them responding, tell them about what your experiences have led you to pursue (see how different that wording is than “what you are working on”) your product. Ultimately ask them if they’d be interested in seeing your Minimum Viable Product and providing feedback.
If you’re looking to get in front of people in person, I have a tip for you. Go to a conference where the attendees are all target customers. You can knock out 200 customer interviews in a weekend! There’s a reason startups like AirBnB, Foursquare, and Twitter all launched at conferences. You get your name out there fast and the feedback comes in even faster. Head to these events or spaces where your customers live, get a table and just talk to people. When we launched VentureStorm in college we got a booth in the Computer Science building and talked to kids on their way in and out of class. It was completely free and we talked to close to 50 kids in a 4-hour window. We did that twice a semester for two years.
Once you have people engaging with you, it’s time to step up and get them engaging with your MVP.
The Interview
Interviewing customers is a difficult task in and of itself. Ultimately you love the product and vision, and you want them to do the same. But when you’re interviewing you need to keep your emotions to yourself. This can be extremely difficult, but you have to go in there with your poker face. You do not want to give them any indication of what you’re looking for them to say. That will skew the criticisms you receive about your product. So remember to come in emotionless.
Next, you can’t steer the conversation through questions or responses. Come into the interview with ideas about what you need to get feedback on, but ask only open-ended questions about the product, problem, or solution. For example, “Tell me about a time you struggled to find a software developer?” “How did you end up getting your product built?” “What steps did you take along the way” “What issues did you see arise during the process?”
Notice how none of the initial questions mention the current product. They are all geared toward understanding how that one particular customer see’s the problem. It helps us validate whether we are solving the same problem and that they eventually portray their ideal solution to us.
After the initial questions it’s time to break out the MVP. At this moment you should be either: excited to show your product or nervous to show it. This is because the initial questions should probe enough about their problems that you begin to understand whether or not your vision aligns with their vision of a solution. This is where you can put the MVP on the table and have them interact with it anyway they can. The questions you should be asking here are the more obvious interview questions (still with no emotion or motive).
Once again, I’ll share this quote with you in case you missed it in our last post.
If you need help performing a customer interview feel free to sign into VentureStorm and shoot our team a message via the contact form. We’re always happy to exchange interviews (we still collect feedback every day)!
