3: Conducting Customer Problem Interviews
If you find the idea of talking to dozens of strangers about their problems just a little bit intimidating, you are not alone. This is probably the toughest thing for entrepreneurs to get past. But, trust me! It is so worth the relatively small amount of initial discomfort. And believe it or not, after just a few conversations, it gets easy and even kind of fun!
If you need additional support, Giff Constable has a great book called Talking to Humans that is just about this process. If you have the time, you should read it.
Your goal for this exercise is to interview as many customers as you can. The idea is to validate customers' problems, and absolutely NOT to pitch them your solution yet.
Let me say that again. You are trying to validate that they have the problems you think they do. You are not selling or pitching anything today at all.
Put on your anthropologist hat. This type of experiment is more like social studies than business. We'll get to the business parts later in the course. For now, you are trying to learn and build empathy with your customer.
Logistically, here is what you need to do. The Channels column on the Trello board should include places where you think your customers are reachable. Use those channels to reach out to at least 5 to 10 customers. If the channel is digital, you can try and post a request for folks to be interviewed. If it's a physical location, like in my example on the Trello board template (shop owners), you'll just have to walk in and ask them.
Now, how do we do this exactly?
Say you have your first customer interviewed lined up (either scheduled or in person). The interview has two parts: In part one, you want to lead by asking them some general demographic and behavioral questions to warm up. For example...
"How long have you owned this shop?"
"How many days a week are you here?"
"How many employees do you have?"
And so on...
In part two of the interview, you will be reading them your hypothetical problem statements with these steps:
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For each problem, you will read it to them and ask if they have that problem:
"Do you find it difficult to fill unused capacity in your shop's schedule?"
They will tell you yes or no, most of the time. Make a note of that.
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If they do have the problem, ask them how painful a problem it really is, ideally on a numerical scale (say, 1 to 5). This number will help us sort the highest pain problems from all the customer interviews after we're done.
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For each problem, ask them how they are currently solving it. If they use some kind of tool or service to solve it, ask them what they pay for such a tool or service.
After you have gone through all of your problem statements, be sure to ask if they have other problems that you didn't think to ask. Use the same numerical scale as above to capture this new problems.
When you have completed 10 interviews like this with 10 different customers, you should be able to invalidate at least some of the problems you thought these customers have. Maybe there were some surprises. Maybe what you thought was a big problem, really isn't much of a big deal. It's OK to be surprised--that's why we're doing this.
Hopefully, your business idea targets a customer segment that you can reach, that has a real set of painful problems that your product or service can solve.
Now, we're going to look at differentiating your solution idea among the competition.
Next: Competitive analysis.
I am here to help.
Don't feel ready to go it alone? Give me a call so I can help you.
Prefer email? That's fine. I am reachable at mcafee . sam at gmail . com