Startup Customer Interview For Dummies

Author

Moon Ma
February 21, 2023

Rule 1: Clarify the interview purposes at each stage of the startup

  1. Ideation => define user persona.

  2. Prototyping => identify the best first customer.

  3. Launched => tweaking until you have market fit

Rule 2: Guerrilla your interviews

  • Use all your network. Friends, coworkers, intros

  • Drop by in person. A YC startup couldn’t get to their customers through cold emails, so they just dropped by the fire station in person. They didn’t even e-mail or notify them. They just showed up and asked if they could talk to someone who had this problem that they had a solution to. It worked great. They got dozens of 10–15 minutes long in-person meetings just by showing up. You may feel it’s weird in the beginning because it’s like you are imposing on someone, but the mindset you should get into is “if you truly believe you are solving a problem that your target customer base is facing, you’ll actually be doing them ahead. You will be helping them out by taking their 15 minutes and learning more about the problem”

  • Industry events or any online/offline places that have a high concentration of potential people you can talk to.

Rule 3: No pitching

  • If you spend time talking about your startup ideas, you will have less time to learn about your customers. It doesn’t make sense to spend time and money to make them understand you. What you want is to understand them.

  • You don’t need to interview a thousand people but begin with one or two. The critical feature is executing an unbiased and detailed interview strategy rather than pitching.

Rule 4: No future or hypothetical questions.

  • Only ask questions about the past and the present, like “tell me about the last time XXX” or “what’s going on in the present,” not a hypothetical question in the future. Future questions only get predictions that are useless or worse than useless.

  • If you ask, “would you spend $5 in XX,” And they say yes, we may mislead ourselves into thinking we have a real product. The truth is customers don’t know the answer to that question either.

  • As soon as you ask a “would you” or “will you” question, you will likely start pitching a solution again.

Rule 5: Start with the five whys and repeat

  1. “What is the hardest part about [doing this thing]?”

  2. “When was the last time you encountered this problem?”

  3. “Why was this hard?” => Use their words for copywriting.

  4. “What have you done to solve this problem?” => What you are really asking is why they did what they did

  5. “What don’t you love about the solution you already tried?” => Why aren’t you happy about it

Once you have all those questions answered, repeat them again. Every time you will get some new information.

Rule 6: Take notes for emotions and details

If you are not good at taking notes while taking, ask a cofounder to go with you or ask if you could record it. When in doubt, capture as much information as possible.

Take note of emotions the customer expressed during the interview: anger, frustration, guilt, greed, happiness, awkwardness.

Be casual. You just need to show up and feel free to react. You will learn so much through the first 5 or 10 interviews that your process will dramatically improve. Don’t try to do 100 interviews at once. Start with five until you get the hang of it.

Bonus 1: Framework to identify your first customer

Make a spreadsheet to answer the following numerically:

Eric Migicovsky — How to Talk to Users (McDonalds is the best)

  1. How much does this problem cost them? e.g., how much revenue are they losing because of this problem?

  2. How frequent is the problem? Hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly. High frequency means (1) the customer can feel the pain and be more receptive to a potential solution. (2) you will get more chances to know whether your product is actually solving a problem.

  3. How large is their budget? Do they have the ability to solve the problem? They may experience the problem but not have the money or authority to solve it.

Bonus 2: A quantitative guide for market fit

This is after you have launched the product. You are improving it to find the market fit. You can ask:

Use the percentage who answered “very disappointed” as the guide to determine whether the feature you just added was adding to PMF. The tipping point is 40%. Once you pass 40%, you will grow exponentially and reach PMF.

Bonus 3: Tips to debug

  1. Ask for phone numbers => when you can’t understand your data. If 20% of people have this problem, it’s much easier to get on the phone and talk to one person.

  2. Design by payment, not asking => If you want to know if users will want a new feature, ask them to enter their credit card or pay more, even before you build the feature.

  3. Discard bad data => people may tell you they love it or give other compliments, but it’s useless because it’s vague. You need tactical information on what you can change and what you can improve.

References