Customer Development
Customer development is divided into two phases: problem discovery and product validation. Problem discovery is about understanding the customer’s perspective and problems, after you’ve understood the problem, then you create a prototipe (or MVP) and then proceed with the product validation.
You must begin with a set of hypothesis, the process of customer development will validate or invalidate these. But the most important part of validating or invalidating the hypothesis is that it has to come from the potential customers, not you.
During this process, you also want to identify your riskiest assumption. What is that one assumption that if it were to fail, nothing else matters?
Now the challenge is that during the initial phase, problem discovery, is that you must NOT talk about you, your problem, or your solution! This is for a number of reasons.
- People are polite, and they will lie to protect you.
- The problem you imagine they have might not be an actual problem for them.
Here are some videos to help drive this point:
There are a few tools out there. Rob Fitzpatrick wrote a book called the mom test, which it defines like this:
- Talk about their life instead of your idea.
- As about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future.
- Talk less and listen more.
Successful teams have reported 100-200 interviews. The goal is to interview until you start hearing the same themes over and over.
Finding people
Start by creating a spreasheet like this:
Then go and find potential customers. Ideally you have an idea of who you want to talk to, so start drafting the different types of personas. Nothing fancy, just a blurb of the different types of individuals you’ll find, then try to find them by using some of these resourrces:
- Pitchbook
- https://www.dnb.com/
- https://www.userinterviews.com/
- https://www.meetup.com/
Now, go and look at their LinkedIn profiles and see if you have anything in common that might be useful to start the conversation.
This is not the “used car sales person”, you are helping your customers solve problems! Do some customer research.
Build a list of Tier 1 prospects and Tier 2 prospects - Tier 1 are perfect fit and tier 2 are basic fits, spend more time with Tier 1.
Getting the meeting
This content is comming from /r/Startups, it was a talk imparted by Joe Benjamin (https://twitter.com/JoeBenjamin_)
Cold emailing
- Subject line 3 words or less
- Don’t talk about yourself of your startup
- Personalize the first sentence for tier 1 prospects - do your research.
- Balance quality with quantity.
- Make the email about them, touch on one pain per email.
- Create curiosity, lead with an insight, create an insecurity
- Follow up emails are key!
- Multiple emails over two to three weeks works well.
- Soft call to actions perform better: “Interested in learning more?” versus “How is Thursday at 3pm?”
The goal should always be to book a meeting.
Cold calling
Cold calling works, but it can be time consuming. For certain customer segments it’s critical to make cold calls. Call people who open your emails multiple times if you’re not focusing on cold calls.
Become an experte or known for something you help with. Post a lot about that - 1x a day, 7 days a week. Build your network. Make your profile a landing page more than a resume - header image, tagline, featured section, CTA Spend 15 minutes per day and you’ll see results - engage with popular people in your space Hardes part is consitency.
Network
Don’t be shy. Ask for introductions. There are people who will help. Join relevant communities (Discord, Slack, Twitter) and add value. You’ll eventually get business from it.
Problem Discovery
Product validation
Find out what type of persona this is, based on the different personas that we have constructed. Normally, we conduct product validation interviews after we’ve done customer discovery. So you should already have an idea of the problem they have. If not, you have to do your homework and make sure you know they have a certain problem that our demo will solve.
The interview questions
Taken from https://mfishbein.com/the-ultimate-list-of-customer-development-questions/
Customer Segmentation
Depending on how you obtained the interview/how much background you have on the person, you may need to make sure they are within your customer segment, and/or understand more about their demographic. I usually try to keep it to a max of three.
- What do you do professionally?
- Who handles [process you’re improving] at your home/office?
- Tell me about your role at [company]?
- How much time do you spend on [process you’re improving]?
- [Specific questions related to your product/customer] – for example, do you have kids?
Problem Discovery
- Questions to validate your hypothesis about a problem, or to learn about problems.
- What’s the hardest part of your day?
- What are some unmet needs you have?
- What product do you wish you had that doesn’t exist yet?
- What tasks take up the most time in your day?
- What could be done to improve your experience with [process/role]?
- What’s the hardest part about being a [demographic]?
- What are your biggest/most important professional responsibilities/goals?
- What are your biggest/most important personal responsibilities/goals?
Problem Validation
If your customer did not talk about the problem you wanted to address, use the below questions to begin validating/invalidating that your customer has the problem you think they have. In addition, it’s often not enough to just solve a problem, sometimes it also needs to be one that people are highly motivated to solve. Some of the below questions can help with that too.
- Do you find it hard to [process/problem]?
- How important is [value you’re delivering] to you?
- Tell me about the last time you [process you’re improving] – listen for complaints
- How motivated are you to solve/improve [problem/process]?
- If you had a solution to this problem, what would it mean to you/how would it affect you?
Product Discovery
Questions to help generate ideas or to validate your idea. The below questions are intentionally very open-ended. By asking yes or no questions specifically related to your product, customers may feel inclined to agree with you or not be critical. By asking more open ended questions, you can be more confident that they’re giving you honest input. If in response to the questions below, your customers tell you they’re looking for similar to what you have in mind, you might be on to something.
- What do you think could be done to help you with [problem]?
- What would your ideal solution to this problem look like?
- If you could wave a magic wand and instantly have any imaginable solution to this problem, what would it look like? – I’ve found that about 80% the time the answers I get to this question are not very informative – solutions that aren’t feasible or most certainly wouldn’t be profitable. But the other 20% of the time there are some really informative responses that make the other 80% acceptable.
- What’s the hardest part about [process you’re improving]?
- What are you currently doing to solve this problem/get this value?
- What do you like and dislike about [competing product or solution]?
Product Validation
Questions to validate/invalidate your idea.
- What do you think of this product? – this question is intentionally vague. Listen to whether they talk about wanting to use the product or how it could be improved. Given how vague the question is, the former is positive, while the latter may be a sign that improvement is needed.
- Would this product solve your problem?
- How likely are you/would you be to tell your friends about this product?
- Would you ever use this product?
- Would you be willing to start using this right away?
- What might prevent you from using this product? – might reveal ways that you could improve the product. Potential hurdles might be budget, time, perception’s of the product’s value, a competing product, etc.
- Will you pay $x for this product? – see if they will put their proverbial money where their math is. Often times when you ask this question, no matter how small the price, you will start hearing key insights that you wouldn’t have heard otherwise.
Product Optimization
Questions to help you improve your idea or product.
- What could be done to improve this product?
- What would make you want to tell your friends about this product?
- What’s most appealing to you about this product?
- What might improve your experience using the product?
- What motivates you to continue using this product?
- What’s the hardest part about using this product?
- What features do you wish the product had?
Ending Interviews
Questions to ask at the end of an interview. You may also need to ask for their contact information if you don’t already have it.
- [Summarize some of your key takeaways] – is that accurate? – I usually do this throughout the interview.
- So based on the conversation, it sounds like x is really hard for you, but y is not. How accurate is that?
- It sounds like x is very important to you, while y is not. How accurate is that?
- Is there anything else you think I should know about that I didn’t ask?
- Do you know anyone else who might also have this problem that I could ask similar questions to? – small form of validation if they’re willing to give you referrals
- Can I keep you in the loop on how the product develops?
- Can I follow up with you if I have more questions?