"You really have to feel like you're talking to users too much."
"You really have to feel like you're talking to users too much."
I believe Daniel Gross said on the latest podcast episode that he talks to 15-20 users per day.
Is anyone else near that level? I know I'm not.
Not even remotely. Throw in a full-time gig that's not your side hustle and the struggle becomes realer than real. If I'm lucky, I can chat it up with 1 - 2 customers a night.
How do you figure out which questions to ask? I'm starting to get some signups to Workcapsule, but have not idea what to focus on when reaching out to customers
No matter what you're building, you have hypotheses about your customers (who they are, how they behave, what they need, how to reach them, etc.) that your business' success depends on. One way to talk to customers is to keep these hypotheses in mind and ask questions in an attempt to verify/disprove them.
If you're talking to potential customers, it's also quite useful to attempt to sell them your product.
If you're talking to current customers and users, find out why they bought your product, whether or not they use it, how they use it, and whether or not they're happy with it. Are they going to renew their subscription? Churn is just as important as user acquisition.
One question I've heard is great to ask your customers is how they’d feel if they could no longer use your product. Analyze the people who say they'd be very disappointed and find out what makes them different.
You have to be cautious about talking to users. You can't let them tell you how to build your product or execute your strategy. That's not their skillset — it's yours. Often their is great, but just as often it's not. Probably the biggest danger is taking advice from users who aren't your ideal customer. A product built for everyone is a product built for no one, like trying to create a restaurant that serves McDonald's burgers alongside expensive steaks.
You make it sound too easy from your podcast haha. Seriously, you frequently ask questions and I think to myself "wow, I never would've thought of that!"
When I do reach out to users (which is rare), I think I've got a great idea of how to get info from them, but it takes real work, often at the end I'm thinking "hmm, there's something in there, but I didn't quite get to it."
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As we continue to find product/market fit for our relationship management tool Markd, the two questions we ask are:
I think this helps us prove/disapprove some of our assumptions about our customers, and help prioritise what to build next.
I'd start with a quick introduction, make it clear that I'm not peddling any product and I just want to understand their business/workflows and pain points. Promise to give them free access/discount in return when I launch. Also ask for a list of friends that they know could benefit from what I will provide; that way I can name drop and those new contacts would be more willing to accept my interview request.
I know this is a year old thread, but how do you get people to talk to you? We have a google chrome extension with 300 users. People use it a lot, most users use it a few times a day, every monday we make a feedback box appear on their first use, and no one has ever filled it out. It does work, we've gotten a few blank answers. We don't have user accounts or anything either, so we can't reach out to people any other way.
Ideas:
Both 3 and 4 are very good/relevant to us, we will try both, thanks!
Yes, we are - Drift enables us to do so. Apart from solving their problems, we ask their feedback and what could be done better at BearTax and it's been very helpful so far.
That's awesome that he's so engaged with users!
There are different degrees of "talking to users." Interviews, usability testing, sales, and customer support all constitute talking to users but take varying amounts of time (and empathy investment). It would be near-impossible to do 15 in-depth interviews with users, or 15 usability sessions, a day (in my experience, they are generally 30-60 mins each). The most interviews I've ever done in a day, back when I was in the corporate world, was 3, and I was absolutely exhausted at the end! 15-20 support interactions seems reasonable, though.
According to Intercom, I've had 17 customer support interactions over the past week. I've done one interview and had 3-4 sales calls. I'd say this is about average for me. Planning to do a few usability screenshare sessions next week.
I am, I'm still on support start and end of my day to understand the sentiment and confirm our road map top priorities are aligned with our users.
It is really amazing how many small fixes/changes you can get out of this that drives great value. I also really like my users so it is a fun part as well.
Edit: You just talked to 4 users, or does that not count? :)
This definitely doesn't count :)
Do group emails to beta testers count? In that case, yes.
Anyone know of a lead generation tool/directory for finding potential users if we start from zero?
Jian, I am doing something around that just now - How can I contact you for a bit of research ? thanks in advance
Hi Anne. You can reach me at the same screen name on gmail.
sent :)
Reddit, Hacker News, IndieHackers. Finding a subreddit in your niche is particularly helpful.
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