Learning about your customers and their quirks
By now we all know that you have to talk to your customers. They're the best resource you have to learn about who will actually buy your product. I've found myself building in a vacuum and ignoring other people recently, so I thought I'd preach to force myself to practice. Who knows, maybe it will work!
Scientific Method
First you need to figure out if your general assumptions are correct. Who your customers are, their behaviors, pains and most importantly if they will pay for a solution.
Goal of customer discovery
The goal is to create an iterative series of intentional, guided conversations. You're acting more as an investigative journalist than anything else.
You should learn:
- Who your customers are
- Their behaviors
- Their pains
- Their motivations
- Their priorities
- Their perceptions
- The severity of their issues
- Their willingness to change
- How they make decisions
- How they are influenced
- Where they seek information
- If they will pay for a solution
Hypothesis & Questions
Hopefully you've already formed a hypothesis, but now you can formalize it by writing it down. This should be a series of statements about your customers that you believe to be true and may or may not have verified. The next step is to come up with questions that will inform your hypothesis and whether it is true or false.
Your questions must be open ended and experiential (learning about the interviewees experience). You're trying to understand the interviewee's history with the problem. **They cannot be leading (directing interviewee in a certain direction.) Yes or no questions aren't allowed. **
The goal is to understand the emotional state, severity, frequency, immediacy and the story your interviewer is experiencing when they come across your problem and see if that fits into your understanding.
Why would they talk to me?
People like talking about their problems. Just ask, it won't hurt.
How many people do I have to talk to?
Talk with people until the responses begin to converge or data segments itself.
I learned all this listening to a talk from Rachel Ford through Atlanta Tech Village. She was awesome.
