How many of you are actually talking to customers?
Lots of "thought leaders" on Twitter regurgitated the same generic advice. While a lot of it is fluff, I do see tremendous value in talking to customers.
I'm curious, though. How many people are actually talking to customers before/during/after they launch their products?
It's a cheat code. That's the way I think about it now. I used to dread it because it can be awkward and difficult to hear your product is crap or not right and you wasted your time. But now I think about it as being a shortcut. Something that saves me time.
Biggest problem myself and @k7y are facing now is actually finding potential customers. Anyone know where office managers or commercial building owners hang out online, or anyone else who wants a desk booking app? 😂
Eek - hang out online? They're probably not hanging in some forum together online in their spare time (I suspect!). I would say Linkedin might be your best bet there. Or some good old fashioned online stalking of buildings offering workspaces to get some contacts and cold email?
If there is a leader in the desk booking industry, can you find some forums of people complaining...?
I go through phases based on where I'm at with my product. Definitely, interviewing potential customers during the validation process is highly recommended.
However, at some point you need to stop talking & start building. What I recommend at that phase is to have a tight feedback loop right after you launch a feature, and reach out to people you've talked to about it to make sure you are on the right track with it.
Additionally, if you're considering a new major direction or positioning for your product, it's best to spin up another quick cycle of validation interviews. Personally, I've done 3 for my SaaS, and have another one I'll do in a couple months.
We extensively talked to potential customers and it didn't help until we had more to show them. Just talking about the concept doesn't do anywhere near what "thought leaders" claim it does.
I try only to talk to my customers when we have something that is relevant to them on our road map. I find they don't want to hear about every feature - but they do appreciate it when you get their feedback or let them know of a feature that is specific to their work.
Whilst many will think it is fluff - at the end of the day. The success of your business depends on listening to your customers.
You need to decompose a simple “choice” into 3 buckets:
What were the things the customer saw (observations) which led them to believe something (inferences) and then to act on it (conclusion)
My past work partially involved what my target customers do (UX researchers, product owners) and I have a fair amount of experience. I spend a lot of time on related Slack communities, forums, talking to past colleagues that fit the target, professional trade orgs, and often either passively or directly learn about their pain points or see if they know about the problem I'm solving. Slack is great since I can create alerts around keywords so I can get notified when someone mentions something related to my problem space and chip-in. For mission critical assumptions I may pay targeted people and use a tool like Respondent.io.
I'm also an introvert, and I talk to people around the problem-space at least 1/week or more. I've seen plenty of SMEs screw my past teams because they "knew the subject" but didn't talk to real people. Assume you know nothing, ask around the problem, get comfortable with awkward silence, and really listen to the human you're talking to.
How are you setting up alerts in Slack? Do you need to own the channel or can you set up alerts to larger communities you've joined, like MicroConf?
You don't need to own it. Click on your profile/avatar in Slack, then Preferences, then Notifications (top option). There's a field for "My keywords".
Let's say I'm building a project management tool, I may put in keywords for "jira", "trello", "user story", etc. and I'll get alerted anytime someone mentions them.
Lean Customer Development [1]. Sure we build telemetry in to verify things people are saying. But there is anecdotal, qualitative information that's important. Roll out features and talk to people. Give them free stuff to incentive them to do it...the feedback is critical to product development.
[1] https://www.cindyalvarez.com/lean-customer-development/
I am but i still did it bit later i guess