How to convince potential customers to conduct a customer interview?
Hey hackers,
Me and a friend of mine are trying to validate some hypotheses for our idea related to the PropTech, but we are having hard time convincing people (especially landlords) to conduct a short 20-minutes customer interview.
Do you have any advices on how to ask people to conduct an interview and how to convince more people to do it.
Thank you in advance! 🙏
Check out The Mom Test. Lots of good ideas in this book, for example to start a blog / podcast where you interview people publicly (free exposure for them). Then you can also ask some questions off the record.
Apart from that, keep in mind: If you cannot get anyone to talk to you before you build the product, how will you get them to talk to you after you build the product? How are you going to sell it? What does it say about market demand?
Completely agree with everything there! Think The Mom Test is great but some tactics are definitely longer-term, and not the one many want to find when they first go in search of this book. Personal cold emails where you give something or add value in some way (do work for them, provide feedback on something, connect them with someone...all for free) can definitely work wonders.
Oh, you're right. @jimzarkadas started his customer research by doing free 1-1 design sessions. He had people interested really fast.
EDIT: As for The Mom Test, it's been the most influential book I've read during the last year. Definitely recommend it to every aspiring entrepreneur.
You can do it! There are 2 important factors:
The pitch - Make them want to talk to you for their own sake, not for yours. Make it worth their while. Here's a request for interviews I made for my upcoming product GummySearch. I filled up the 10 spots really quick!
The stomping grounds - You'll need to find where your target customers hang out and post there. I'm sure there are more, but I took 30 seconds to search for "tenant" using GummySearch and came up with these subreddits: LoveForLandlords, renting, RealEstate, Landlord, realestateinvesting. That's just Reddit, I bet there are tons of forums and online communities that are also worth a shot.
Thank you for sharing your request for interviews! It really helpful
Really like that request for interviews! Thanks for sharing!
Going through a similar struggle tbh! The solution that I have arrived is getting friends or acquaintances to introduce 1 random person. A single one is enough. So perhaps offer something to that first one - offer a coffee or a delivery of something. Then at the end you ask them to introduce you to 3 or at least 1 more haha. And so it goes. Been doing this since last week and I'm at my 6th member of the chain...lets see how it goes!
We did it, but it works mostly for tenants. But since the majority of the landlords are in a different generation from us, we struggle to connect with them.
Wow, didn't think it would be possible to build a chain of 6 people this way!
Definitely! The first one took over 10 days of cold emails everyday. But the first one is the hardest.
That's dedication. Nice!
Like everyone else - offer gift vouchers.
It's something we have considered, maybe it's time to give it a try. Thanks
Pay them.
Agree with @nikwen ! The Mom Test is incredible and will help you! I did a summary here: https://www.bliinx.com/blogs/find-truth-in-discovery-calls
Your starting from a difficult position. Usually you would have immersion or a founder who has immersive experience in that space already so your basically working with the "customer" before they've even seen what it is, but if this still sounds like something for you then here are some things to keep in mind: You need to find an entrepreneur-friendly landlord and make sure their needs align as well; otherwise, why bother? This means talkative landlords only please! Paying them will likely corrupt whatever isn't obvious.
Hey can you expand on the 'paying them' part?
Paying them meaning providing some incentive. Like money or a gift card.
I see. So paying them is not a good thing(cuz it corrupts what's not obvious)
Asking because I'm offering to pay them money for their time but I still don't get replies.
I'm not surprised. I have same problem with paying customers. They don't respond unless there is an issue with service.
There has be landlord communities online or seminars for landlords.
Try to see if you can find something like that and go there and try to interact in person.
If you're doing totally cold email, its incredibly hard and I've had a few folks flake on me. I'm using a modified version of this as my cold email:
https://marketingexamples.com/sales/jason-cohen-sales
Its not bad but the main key here is in finding quality leads and following up on them every other day. Like @jalvesalves said, its incredibly hard getting the first lead in, but follow ups from there should be easier.
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