Conducted our first 2 customer interviews!

Excited to share that my co-founder Matt (@mc2147) and I recently wrapped up our first 2 customer interviews over phone and Skype!

While we believe in taking a customer-centric approach (personalized emails, in-app surveys and feedback, etc.), interviews weren’t something we thought about until recently. We weren’t sure our customers would be responsive to interviews, mainly because they’re busy Saas founders who often wear multiple hats!

When learning more about marketing this year, we realized that customer interviews could help us deep dive into our users’ experiences and answer questions like:

• How were users hearing about us? (Hotjar and Google Analytics don’t always tell the full story)

• What pains were they facing that led them to sign up with us?

• How were they handling those pains before? Were they able to find a manual solution, or did another app solve any of their issues?

• What motivated them to pay for our product?

• What are their most common workflows nowadays?

What We Learned

The interviews were surprisingly insightful and fun! Here are a few of the highlights:

• We discovered why someone first paid for our product. In their words, "What you see with ProfitKit isn’t what you’re going to get – in a good way 😆". To them, it was clear that we were putting in a lot of effort to improve the product. They saw us as a long-term investment.

• We got our first known word-of-mouth referral! This was exciting to hear because I was convinced that it would be at least a while before we’d see this happen.

• We realized that we could target another audience besides Saas founders – accountants working for subscription-based businesses.

• We learned that some of our features weren’t noticeable enough. One user had no idea that we even had payment recovery features 😅! We took this feedback and recently re-organized the platform to make things more intuitive.

What Worked Well

Full disclosure, I think it’s way too early for us to be telling you exactly how to run your interviews (check out Forget the Funnel by @ggia and Stacking the Bricks by @alexhillman and @amyhoy for better tips), but I do want to reflect on what I think worked well.

1. Our recent emphasis on being more approachable and less of a "faceless entity"

We’ve been trying to be more in front of our users lately:

• In almost all our emails, we mention how users can get on a call with us if they need help. We also provide a link to book a call in our email signature.

• Visitors can now schedule a call with us directly on our site (via Calendly) or message us easily through Intercom

• We just pushed out an About page that outlines our goals and who we are

2. Approaching the interview as a story & reflecting on past behavior

The one thing I hear over and over again when it comes to customer interviews is focusing on the customer’s story rather than the customer’s input. While I do believe it can be useful to hear what features customers might want to use in the future, this feedback can sometimes be fleeting and vastly different than what they actually do in the future. It’s often more helpful to understand their past behavior and their customer journey so far.

For example, just understanding our customers’ journeys and pains were enough for us to identify gaps in our workflows and brainstorm new feature ideas.

3. Limiting the interview to 6-8 questions max and just digging deeper

I believe in treating the interview more like a casual conversation than a full-fledged interview where you’re asking one question after another. I like to think of the interview questions as a way to frame the conversation, and everything else that follows should be organic (follow-up questions, anecdotes, etc.).

This approach definitely helped us build a more personable and friendly relationship with our customers.

What’s Next?

We’re hoping to conduct a few more interviews in the coming months. We’re at a stage where I believe our customers’ actions and words will help us improve onboarding, messaging, and positioning.

Please feel free to share your experiences and offer insights -- always happy to learn what’s worked well for other Indie Hackers! 😀