SHOW IH: Problem Discovery & Customer Development Interviews as a Service
Hey IH đź‘‹,
Would love your feedback on a concept that I'm testing out. Here's how it works:
- You give us a profile of customers you'd like to know more about
- We'll go out and find customers that meet that profile and do user interviews to understand their biggest problems, and get validation and insights into whatever pain point you're considering solving.
- You get back text, audio and video transcripts of the interviews, along with summary analysis for what trends are common across the interviews.
Why I think this is interesting:
Making sure you're solving the right problem by applying the lean methodology is super important. But, it's also very time consuming to find customers that fit your target profile, and making sure you ask open-ended questions that don't just try to guide people to what you're hoping to hear. I've done 100s of user interviews in my time at big cos and startups, and have been tweaking what are good questions to ask during the interview process to maximize learning.
One of the things that I'm curious to figure out by conducting these interviews in a way that imparts the learnings effectively to the person getting the user. I definitely think it would save time & I'd like to read these interviews too (seems like something the IH community would be into in general - discovering more problems).
Free interviews to start:
We're looking to learn more about the process of doing these interviews on behalf of other people, so I'm open to doing some free interviews for the IH community for people that sign up (as long as we can also interview you on how the experience was :) ) .
Questions
What do you think about the price point? Does this sound right? Too high? To Low?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts 🙌
I really love this idea. Considering the “Mom test” it has some value to have someone independent to seek out customer pain. Are you following the interview style of questioning like the “Mom test”? If so, I might actually be interested in this. You should explain this in the copy.
How would I know you are capable of doing is though? It would be useful if you shared an actual interview so we can hear how you approach it, and how you extract information from the prospect.
As to pricing, I can’t really say. I once looked at using something like “Price Intelligently” and was flabbergasted by how much they charge for their service. I’m sure it’s worth it for established businesses, but as a startup it was a non start for me. At $50/interview, spending $500 to evaluate something with 10 people isn’t completely out of the ball park if you source GOOD customers... aka the ideal audience. What is your evidence / proof you could do that? That needs to come across on the copy.
Example. If I wanted you to interview 10 cloud administrators of Microsoft Azure infrastructure running in production (IAAS and/or PAAS, not Office 365), how would you source them? If I added that the companies you interview should have at least 50 to 100 employees, could you seek and verify this? That seems like some real effort, which would then be worth it to pay if you included all that research as well.
So in the end, the idea is interesting, at least to me. But how would you provide evidence that you are actually capable of providing a non biased interviews of my ideal customers? Show me that, and you can have my money.
Thanks for checking it out @SilverStr ! I think you're spot on with the potential benefit of it being an "independent" opinion on the customer pain. I'll be adding sample interviews to the site that should clarify a lot of it.
Audience Sourcing:
"But how would you provide evidence that you are actually capable of providing a non biased interviews of my ideal customers? Show me that, and you can have my money."
It would be great to see volume pricing at scale, as it sounds like we get some extra benefits on data analysis for 10+ interviews. Love the concept of scaling User Interviews this way to get some initial guidance on an idea or product or industry as it seems like more useful data than what I'd get from a vanilla research service.
Thanks for the feedback @drodic. Will think a bit about what volume pricing could look like. I'm also playing with some idea around first-interview being free, or at least sharing a bunch of sample interviews with the community & more resources around that