How I got customer interviews to validate my product with just an idea

Hello everyone, a different post from the updates. I wanted to share my strategy and experience for getting customer interviews through the month of October to December.

To give some preface, Evoke is an AI API that allows developers to run AI like Stable Diffusion and text generators like Bloom (GPT-3 alternative) for their projects and apps.

I actually started the process later than most; I was building the product first as an idea already before doing interviews, my mistake, I know.

But nonetheless, I was going to get some validation anyways since we weren't too far in and we didn't even have a website nor demo.

I had a basic strategy, create a form and message customers to schedule a no-strings attached non-promotional chat just for research.

I found Jotform.com to be especially helpful, since their free pricing option (100 submissions and 5 form templates) was more than enough for my interview needs.

I started out on LinkedIn. I'm building an app that mostly appeals to developers, so I mass searched for developers on LinkedIn, and when my monthly searches ran out, I used https://recruitin.net/ to search on Google for profiles.

Here's what I used for messaging users:

*Hi [name],

I’m doing research on difficulties programmers are facing to better understand them.

Would you be up for a 30 min chat?

You don’t need to prep anything, there’s no pitch, hidden agenda or trick questions

Got a few slots here: https://form.jotform.com/223026301072035.

Thanks!*

Do keep in mind that LinkedIn messages have a restrictive character limit, so you have to be succinct.

As for the form design, you can see the design by clicking on the link and copying it in Jotform.

I set availability to the current week or one week ahead. Not more not less. This allowed me to generate a level of urgency.

Results and what I learned
From this strategy. I got a total of 5 interviews in a week, with two not showing up. However, the ones that did show up were very poor in terms of learning the wants and needs of my customer base.

They were general programmers that had nothing to do with anything remotely similar to my product. They didn't even work in AI.

What I did next
I decided to try Reddit next and narrow down my focus. I joined some Stable Diffusion, GPT-3, and OpenAI subreddits and searched up "app", "software", or "program" into the search bar.

Lo and behold, there were dozens of people building apps and software with these AI!

And they were complaining about issues with them as well; a perfect ground for market research.

I usually commented on a few of their posts providing genuine advice for their apps. Give value = get value back.

Then I DM'd these people with a similar message, but I mentioned more of what my startup was about and also interest in current projects they were building due to having a higher character limit.

I got a much higher response rate, and even some potential customers excited to join my Discord, which I was building to prepare for the launch of the product.

However, when it actually came to showing up to the interviews, these people were far worse. I got 3 interviews total in a week.

However, the information I got from these was FAR more useful. They outlined specific issues they had with competitors and what solutions they were looking for.

So what did I learn?

• Quality is much more important than quantity for customer interviews
• High quality interviews are found from selective targeting - subreddits are a great way to narrow this down
• Give value first by building rapport with the potential customer through other avenues before asking for anything from them, even if it's just their time
• Reddit will throttle your DMing privileges if you do it too much as a new account to prevent spam. Post a few comments first and DM no more than 5 people a day. You'll know you've been throttled if your DM takes forever to load when you click on a new chat.

Overall, this was an interesting learning experience, and I hope it was helpful both in terms of advice and resources provided to any who read this.

The resource that by far helped me the most for getting customer interviews was this blog post: https://wynter.com/post/customers-for-interviews

If you're interested and want to see updates for Evoke, you can join my Discord: https://discord.gg/DsJXxcMmkC

I also post about Evoke a lot on Twitter, so follow me there as well: https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch

You can also just follow my product page here.

Thanks for reading and feel free to discuss in the comments!