How to get 10x value from your customer interviews
How to find customers and interview them, so you can build world-class products
👋 Hey product builders, Matt & James here! Welcome to the 3rd edition of our weekly newsletter. Each week we try to tackle questions on the zero-to-one journey of building products and startups. In doing that, we also implement our ideas into reality so that we can share our learnings with you.
We’re currently working on a project called ProductKit to help new product builders reach product-market fit. Are you currently building a product? Become an early access customer for free.
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Now on to this week’s question! 🚀
Q: I’m trying to interview customers but I’m not sure I’m doing them right, because my insights aren’t that great and it’s hard to find customers to interview. Do you have any advice?
Obsessing over your customers is the crux of every successful product, whether you’re building from zero-to-one or scaling.
Products that don’t meet their customer’s needs fail. Successful tech companies know this. Amazon, Atlassian, and SafetyCulture have a strong focus on their “customer” as a guiding principle.
So today, we’ll show you how to find customers and interview them, so that you can build world-class products.
How to find customers to interview
When you’re starting from scratch, finding target customers to interview is tough, but critical. This step is mainly a hustle, you’re going to be reaching out to a high volume of people in order to get a few interviews that produce meaningful results.
To find potential customers, we recommend checking out:
Social networks: search for attributes of your target customer (location, age, interests, job) on social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, and reach out to them
Online research tools: leverage platforms like usertesting.com or userinterviews.com to find new customers to interview. You can upload a list of questions or prototypes and access thousands of new customers immediately. Note: these usually cost
Incentives: if you’re game, cold call or email customers and offer them a $20 voucher for their time
Gig economy: post on Upwork or Fiverr that you’re looking for people to interview with specified attributes
Network: leverage your existing network or friends and colleagues to interview them, and ask them for introductions to people who are a good fit for your target customer profile
In-person: find where your target customers hang out, then go and speak to them. E.g. if you’re selling dog products, go and hang out in a dog park and speak to dog owners
Once you have 10-20 diverse customers to interview (that aren’t all your close friends), you can try to turn your initial interviews into an ongoing focus group. This means you can pick up the phone and ask them for immediate customer feedback when you need to make a quick decision.
SafetyCulture uses a number of the above ways to get customer feedback:
Usertesting.com
Email surveys
In-product feedback links
Monthly focus groups
For less engaged customers, the team offers US$50 for a 30-60min interview. This provides an incentive for these “more difficult” customers to get their insights, which is equally as important as more engaged customers. If you only focus on more engaged customers, you’ll miss out on meeting the needs of a large portion of your potential customer base.
How to reach out to customers
Keep it simple and friendly! You want it to sound like a friend asking for feedback, not a salesperson trying to sell something. They have enough shit entering their inbox!
We recommend saying something like this:
Change this as you need and experiment to see what works best in getting customers’ attention.
Since it can often be tough to get people you haven’t met into a meeting, here are a few tips on how to increase your success rate:
It’s a numbers game. Reach out to a high volume of customers and don’t be afraid of “no’s”. Expect only 10% to reply, any more is a bonus
Personalize where possible. This could mean including a compliment about an article they wrote, or an award they won recently. Do some digging online and try to connect with your customer on a personal level, this will be more likely to grab their attention
Find introductions and referrals. People are more likely to engage in conversation with you if you have a mutual friend. You can ask interviewees if they know anyone else that might be in a similar boat
Create a sense of urgency. Use language like “quick call this week” and “we’ve already done X” to show them you’re determined and are moving fast, this also generates excitement that the recipient may want to contribute to
Provide incentives. This could be a $20 gift card, or helping them in return with something they care about
6 mistakes we see in customer interviews
Getting stuck in analysis paralysis. This means over-analyzing the problem you’re solving or target customers, so the point where you don’t ever progress with material impact. Just pick a target customer, set a goal for how many interviews you think will give you enough insight, and then start building momentum
Settling on the wrong target customer. You should continue interviewing different hypothesized target customers until you’re confident you’ve got the right person that faces a burning problem and is willing to pay someone to solve it. Settling on the wrong target customer early could mean you never meet a customer’s needs at all
Diving straight into the specifics. Take the opportunity at the start of a customer interview to zoom out and ask about the customer’s day-to-day life, what motivates them, and what problems they face. You never know where this could lead you
Not having a focus to your interview questions. You shouldn’t go into an interview hoping to find “something” out, you should have a clear hypothesis that you seek to prove/disprove through the questions you ask
Ask leading questions that introduce bias into their answers. E.g. “Is the new design easier to use than the old one?” The use of “new” and “old” cues respondent expectations, and most of the time the respondent will just answer “yes”, which doesn’t help you
Don’t bring anything visual to the interview. It’s always worth bringing a prototype to a customer interview, even if it’s a drawing on paper! Putting something visual in front of a customer generates richer feedback, they can give you a solid answer on whether they’d use it or not, and what needs to improve
How to do an awesome customer interview
Interview plan
You’ll get the most out of your customer if you have a plan. This could include:
Aim: what are you trying to accomplish? E.g. I want to know whether patients are more likely to book appointments with doctors online, given it’s more convenience
Hypothesis: what needs to be true for this idea to work? E.g. Patients prefer booking online
Goal: how many interviews will you need to prove/disprove this hypothesis? E.g. 10-15 interviews
Where I’m going to find interviewees: covered above
Interview structure
We usually find it best to conduct a user interview in the following structure for a ~1-hour interview:
2mins: introduce yourself and ask the interviewee if you can record
“Hi, I’m [your name], I’m interested to understand your problems and learn how we can improve the product to meet your needs”
10mins: ask the customer general interview questions to understand them better
“Tell me about your day-to-day?”
“Who do you interact with?”
“What motivates you to?”
“What frustrates you?”
“What’s the biggest problem you face every day?”
“How are you solving this problem at the moment?”
30mins: ask the customer targeted questions to prove/disprove your hypothesis
This could be focused on understanding how customers want to collect data, interact with other people, achieve their goals, etc.
10mins: share a prototype/visual with the customer
“What do you like about it?”
“What don’t you like about it?”
“What needs to change?”
“Would you start using this today? If not, what would you need to start using it?”
5mins: ask the customer if they have any questions
Join us on our journey
We’re currently building a product to help you go through this process and validate your idea quickly, called ProductKit.
We’d love for you to continue on this journey with us as we dive deeper into building a product from scratch.
If you’re currently working on an idea and having trouble executing the steps to product-market fit - get access to the beta here.
How do you think about customer interviews?
Any feedback - hit us up. This is totally an experiment so we want to make sure we are delivering 10x value to you.
Cheers,
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