Customer interviews
I’m looking for good ways to interview people to start doing customer validation and product for. Am working on a lifestyle/productivity web and mobile app. Any advice, suggestions or interest in being interviewed is greatly appreciated!
First I'd suggest you narrow down your target audience. For whom are you solving a problem?
Then find the places where those people are hanging around (wether online communities or real life places) and go talk to them. :)
Thanks for the advice!
I’ve gotten about 25 interviews done already, phone and in-person interviews. I was hoping to narrow down the target segment through the interviews but am not hearing strong signals from the different people I’ve talked to so far.
I’ll seek out some communities. Thanks again!
How did you get those 25 interviews?
I started with friends and family. I still have a couple referrals I am going to phone interview. I moved onto to coworkers and then other employees where I work which is a large consulting firm.
Some people have given me some signals and just about everyone is interested but a lot of those people weren’t worried about their life planning and building productive habits until I interviewed them which isn’t quite the signal I’m looking for.
Maybe I’m hoping for the perfect interviews and that’s too much to ask?
Reddit always seems like it can be a solid play. You obviously can’t be very self promotional, but to learn what issues people have and ask questions of the communities, you should be good.
I tried reddit several times but found that a cold request for interviewing or even an online poll on a forum doesn’t really work. People seem to respond a lot more to direct personal requests a lot more. I’ll give it another shot, haven’t used reddit enough to use it well yet.
One other option I forgot about is quora.com, you can basically ask questions of people with certain sills/backgrounds/interests. Since it’s a question answering specific platform it might be better than reddit.
Haven’t tried that! Will follow up with results. Thanks.
It's been a month and I've been experimenting. I took a week off for a family vacation back around the 4th of July. Threw my routine off a bit.
Here's what I've learned:
Quora does not seem to be the best place to search for customer interviews, there are plenty of posts asking about specific topics and easy to duplicate a question. Also the passive nature of posting requests, in my experience, does not lead to a lot of feedback.
LinkedIn - I reached out to individuals who use competing apps, at least people I could find. I went on the google play store and looked at reviews then linkedin searched people and direct messaged them. I did this with 10 people, which can be difficult with common names. I got one reply who expressed interest but never followed up on a phone interview.
Mechanical Turk - I've been experimenting with this technique more and more. It seems like it can get costly, I may have over priced my requests and there's a learning curve to it. I upset several people while I was interviewing and had to decline calls. I think putting your number in the description and telling them to wait before accepting the task might be the key.
Out of Mechanical Turk I've been able to interview 12 people in the course of 6 hours. It took some tests in posting the tasks and understanding the system and I still don't fully understand it but I managed to get some interesting feedback. In the title I asked for an age range of professionals and I mostly got people who fit my target audience.
The only other method that has worked and far better than the others has been talking to coworkers directly in my spare time at the office. There isn't as much variation in terms of types of professions but I still received a lot of valuable feedback. From all of this I'm going to put everything into a spreadsheet and start analyzing the data as best I can. Unfortunately my script evolved over the course of the last 10 weeks so I may have some gaps but I believe I have enough information to proceed and I have about 30 email addresses of interested participants I can reach out to for more information if necessary.
Fun journey so far! Happy to hear other experiences.
Dan