New startup founder? Here’s how to do your first customer interviews.

The most frequently cited cause for startup failure is lack of market need.

It is too easy to fool yourself. Your brain is cheering you on, steering you away from the unpleasant thought that core, critical parts of your company will crumble when they collide with reality. Checks along the way can help you avoid wasting time building products that nobody needs. Especially for software companies, the company is the product. And the product’s success is the user’s success. You need to directly address an important need with your product. And to sell it you need to know how real users feel about their problems. This will enable you to speak to prospective customers from a place of authentic understanding.

Smart, motivated people routinely fail at building companies. What you need is a strategy and a set of specific tactics to quickly reduce uncertainty so you can make decisions. Better decisions, compounded over time, can make all the difference.

Talk to the right people.

You should talk to the people you want to help. These are people who are in a position to use or buy a solution to the problem you think you want to solve. Friends and family are to be avoided. They want you to succeed, so you can’t trust what they say. You’ll need to figure out how to find users and buyers outside your network in order to grow, so start now!

Ask nicely.

When you reach out asking for a stranger’s time, it helps to ask nicely! Start by establishing common ground and context. Compliment them if you like something they said. Keep it brief and make a specific ask, for example “20 minutes to talk about X next week”.

Come prepared to guide the conversation.

The first thing you should do is write down what you’re trying to learn. For example, are you eliciting problems that you might solve, or evaluating a response to your proposed solution?

When you’re starting out you might feel more comfortable following a script, or pre-written list of questions to cover. Or you might just have a few key topics you want to explore. In any case, it’s important to notice that the questions you want to answer are not the same as the ones you will ask during the interview, which are open-ended.

Be mindful of bias. For example, if you’re trying to gather evidence to support or refute your hypothesis that invoicing is someone’s top problem, you need to approach it indirectly. “Invoicing is hard, right?” taints the response by priming the subject. It’s really easy to invalidate an interview response by accident, especially when you’re new to customer interviews. Becoming a great qualitative researcher is a lifelong investment in critical thinking and active listening. Fortunately there are a number of books and resources on the internet that can help you to avoid the worst mistakes. You can’t get better without practice, so the most important thing is to get started and just try.

You can build trust by being open, listening actively, expressing gratitude for the help you’ve received, and respecting everyone’s time. If you asked for only twenty minutes, don’t let the interview run for thirty.

Build a sense-making machine.

Customer interviews are a goldmine of insights, but they’re also full of dead-ends and booby traps. Qualitative data can act like a mirror, where each observer sees their pet idea in the data. The most recent conversations dominate our field of vision, when in reality they should be weighed equally against what we learned two weeks ago.

Three basic techniques can help to combat these human tendencies: recall, finding themes, and summarization. Lately we’ve been working on a new product called CustomerDB that can help your team to achieve all three in a few simple steps.

Recall ensures that we don’t lose data, and that older data remains as accessible as recent data. Customer interviews require a big upfront time investment, so it makes sense to make sure to retain every bit of value you can.

With CustomerDB you can select important parts of interview transcripts and notes, and search across everything you have ever collected. It’s useful right away, and the benefits grow as you have more conversations.

Finding themes, also known as groups, insights, or patterns, helps us to begin substantiating what we learned. This lets us separate unique market insights from outlier opinions.

CustomerDB supports a lightweight method to find patterns across interviews based on affinity mapping. Drag quotes together on a virtual whiteboard in order to form a theme, then give it a name and description.

The best way to communicate what you learned from your research efforts is to learn it together. This works really well when the team is small (whether you’re a founding team or a cross-functional team) and it’s worth the effort! In fact, it can be one of the best-leveraged ways to coordinate. When you collaborate on a shared set of customer data, it becomes a conversation. Alignment naturally follows from this process of sense-making.

Sign up for CustomerDB today to get started! Everything described here, from transcription to affinity mapping and summaries, is free to everyone during our public beta period. We’re looking for feedback, but most of all, to help teams accelerate product innovation through customer insights.

Happy company-building!