What you can and can’t learn from interviewing your customers.
For the past couple months, I’ve spent most of my time on customer discovery and exploring some new directions and ideas within Fetchnotes. For the uninitiated, customer discovery is the process of interviewing your target market to understand their behavior, needs, and willingness to pay. The idea is that rather than guessing about these things, you can get a lot of that information simply by asking. Your first product idea is hardly ever the “right” one, so this process helps you find that “right” idea before you sink time into building it.
When I talk to founders, they tend to either follow this advice way too literally, or not follow it at all. I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned about what you can and can’t learn about customer discovery, and why it’s so important.
What you can learn by talking to customers
- Behavior/process. It’s easy for people to describe what they currently do, and it’s critical to understand the context in which your product will live. I ask people to walk me through their day and describe the experience/responsibilities that I’m interested in from start to finish. If you really want to go nuts, follow them around throughout their day.
- Problems. People love to complain, so this usually comes naturally. The key here is to listen to people talk about their behavior/process above, listen for things that sound complex/painful, and then ask them to elaborate on what interests you. If the problem is big enough to build a business on, they’ll naturally start complaining about it. You shouldn’t have to ask, “What are the problems you’re currently facing?”
- Competition. You can research competitors online and use their products on your own, but by talking to their customers you can learn a lot about what works, what doesn’t, and what would get them to switch. In my experience, the most interesting insights around competition are why other products trying to solve their problems haven’t stuck.
- Decision-making process. How do your customers normally evaluate products in your industry? Who evaluates them? Is the end-user the same person who cuts the check? This is most important if you’re selling to organizations or groups, but there’s some sort of decision-making process for most types of products.
- Marketing channels. It’s not always the best product or technology that wins the market — it’s whoever can successfully reach and convert the most customers. Asking people how they find out about new products in your category is the best way to inform your marketing strategy, but it’s also one of the most overlooked.
Amazing products are built by people with extraordinary empathy for the way their customers think about these five topics. Much of your initial hypotheses will come from personal experience, but “getting outside the building” is the fastest and cheapest way to determine how generalizable that experience is.
Customer discovery traps: what you can’t learn by talking to customers
- “Would you use this product?” The average person is really bad at visualizing things that don’t exist. So when you describe your product concept and ask, “Would you use this product?” they are making all sorts of assumptions and cognitive leaps that you can’t possibly account for. Unless it sounds so good that people are willing to pre-order with real money it (which is rare), this question yields very superficial feedback. Worse, people are shockingly bad at predicting hypothetical future behavior.
- “What are the problems you’re currently facing?” People often ask this when they don’t know where to begin. But if you ask people to just pick some problems on their mind, all you’re going to get is what’s bothering them right now. Pick a starting point where you’ve felt personal pain (for example, planning an event or remembering to take your medication at a certain time), and then start asking questions about people’s experiences. You need to start somewhere or the responses are going to be so diverse you won’t be able to identify any patterns.
- “How much would you pay to solve this problem?” Ignoring the obvious problems mentioned above, everyone hates spending money, and people will tell you what they want to pay (not what they would actually pay). A much better question is, “How much are you spending currently on products like mine or to solve this need you have?” Or, “What would get you to spend more money on something that solves this need?”
The goal of customer discovery is to gain a deep, holistic understanding of the problems your customers have and the context in which they operate. But to paraphrase Henry Ford, if you simply ask people what they want, they’ll just say a faster horse. It’s your job to leverage that knowledge to invent the product or service they need.
Other (possibly heretical) tips and hacks
- You don’t always need to talk to strangers. A lot of people tend to assume your friends and family are biased, but if you’re asking the right questions, then it really shouldn’t matter as long as they’re in your target market. You should definitely talk to strangers too, but I find I get nearly identical value hitting up my friends on Facebook chat or over drinks. That access encourages me to ask questions more often, which does more good than the incremental value of talking to a stranger in a coffee shop.
- You don’t need a large sample size. Generally I’ve found that after I’ve talked to three people within a given persona, I just start hearing the same things over and over again. (Keep in mind, you probably have many different personas and you don’t know what they’ll be at the outset, so you’re talking to way more than three people.)
- Ask vague, open-ended questions. I treat customer interviews the same way I treat employee interviews — conversations about their lives. I want to understand everything about the way they think. By leaving questions open, you’ll stumble across insights you never even considered.
- Find representative customers that you can hit up over and over again. I have a handful of people that I’ve determined represent different personas that I hit up when I want quick advice/feedback on ideas. Not everything warrants a focus group, but it’s always helpful to get an outside perspective. After all, talking to customers should be something you build into the DNA of your company — not a one-time task on your pre-launch to do list.
Now, what are you waiting for? Go talk to your customers!