🕵️♂️ I'm a clueless software engineer who recently started doing customer discovery here's what I've learned
Quick Review: so what's the point of customer discovery in the early stages of your business?
The point of customer discovery in the early stages is to figure out about your customers life, behaviors, and pains. Your just trying to understand the life of your market/audience better. Seems easy enough right? That's what I thought, even after listening to the advice in the Mom test it was hard to put all of that advice into practice. Like most things you actually learn by doing it not by reading and regurgitating. Naively I thought I would be able to absorb the information, and use it when I needed it, but it hasn't been that easy.
Doing the interviews
I've been trying to conduct the interviews quickly and informally (5-15 minutes). It's been difficult to strike a balance between informal and interview. There's two main issues I've faced.
The first is with the informal nature, because of this it's very easy to end up talking about random things or about yourself, and once this starts it's easy to lose your objective. Even worse when you do this you lose focus on the other persons life. The only solution I've found to this is to stay hyper aware of the convo, and try and steer it back in the direction of their life. It's been easier to do this the more interviews I've done.
The second is identifying when you need to ask for specifics, and making sure your asking good questions. Even though you know what bad questions are it's still very easy to ask them so again you have to be aware (if you don't know what bad questions are checkout the IH podcast about the Mom Test). Also, asking for specifics is something you have to be super aware about. I would get generic answer, and they would seem like answers, but many times I failed to dig into the specifics of those generic answers.
Also I've found it helpful to come prepared with questions about things that I think are problems for my customer. Conversations won't naturally lead to these problems unless you ask about them (unless that particular problem is on their mind) Here's what that looks like E.g. if I have a hunch that indie hackers have a hard time finding customers to talk to I would say things like
- Have you done customer discovery for your product? (figure out if they are even doing customer discovery)
- Hey I've been having a hard time finding people to do customer discovery on. Do you have this issue?
- What do you try and do to find people to talk to?
- What was your approach for reaching out to people?
- Can you show me some of the emails you sent?
- What problems did you encounter while trying to find people to interview?
Takeaways and what matters
It really takes practice to not ask misleading questions, identify when you've been given a generic answer, and ask for specifics. The takeaway here is it takes practice to be effective at customer discovery. That being said you still get something out of talking to customers. It's definitely not a waste of time, but to get the maximum from an interview you need to be good at it.
What you should do
Start talking to people more. Start doing it now. Start building those customer interview muscles. Dig into their lives, and be prepared to ask questions about the things that you have hunches about. Also, be prepared to be not great at it immediately. Practice, Practice, Practice. It's what will make you better at customer discovery
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