How To Talk To Users?

Good founders maintain a direct connections to their users.

In business, there is no middleman. If you are the founder, it is your job. It is in your job description to talk to customers.

Only two things that must be done to search your company: (1) Build the product, and (2) Talk to users

Three common errors you probably make when talking to user:

The Mom Test

1. Talk about their life, not your idea

2. Talk specifics, not hypotheticals

3. Listen, don’t talk

3. Listen, don’t talk

Five great questions you can ask in every user interview

1. What’s the hardest part that you do when trying to solve the problem? (Set the context, e.g. if I want to build the memory app, then what’s the hardest part of trying to remember these ideas).

2. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem? (This is to understand circumstances of encountering this problem. e.g. for the brainjam app, I encountered this morning on my way to the office while driving, I listened to this Podcast. I had some ideas and I want to remember the ideas as I was having them but due to the fact that I was driving. I couldn’t. )

3. Why was that hard?(You may hear a lot of reasons. This isn’t to identify. This will be important to understand how to market and explain to the new users. Customers in general don’t buy what. They buy the why)

4. What have you done already to try to solve the problem?(E.g. When I could, I tried to stop and take notes in order to remember but the friction of finding a piece of paper, pen or phone to type is just way too much time. I tried to use Voice memo to record the ideas but I just find it hard to use for this purpose. I haven’t figured out exactly what’s causing that problem but it is pretty clunky to use.) This is important because if the users have already began using some home grown solution, then this is a real problem.

5. What don’t you love about the solutions you’ve tried? (This is the beginning of the initial feature set. Things I don’t like about the existing set of solutions to the problem)

Talking to users are useful at all stages of the start up, for example:

Idea stage-> this is to find users with problem. Find first users with problems. Friends, coworkers, intros, drop by in person, industry events. One or two users interviews are good for this. (Take a lot of notes. Keep it casual.)

Prototype stage-> best first customer. Identify who will be the best first customers. Find numerical answers to: how much does this problem cost them? If they solve it, how much revenue would they make? If they don’t solve it, how much money does it cost them? How frequent is this problem? How large is their budget? (The best customer is obviously the one with the most severity of the pain, highest frequency of use and has the ability to fix)

Launched stage -> finding product market fit. Iterate towards product market fit.