These are my notes for talking to users (customers) as an indie hacker.
A summary of the Startup School video "How to Talk to Users" which takes from The Mom Test strategy.
These notes provided by Masa, abirdwhale Kakinoki Masato in the form of a YouTube comment here.
- Talk about their life, not your idea
- Talk specifics, not hypotheticals
- Listen, don't talk
- What's the hardest part about [doing this thing]?
The best startups are looking for problems that people face on a regular basis or that they're painful enough to warrant solving. This question can help confirm for you whether the problem that you're working on is actually one that real users feel is a pain point, feel is something that they actively want to solve in their life.
- Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem...
The goal of this question is actually to extract context around the circumstances in which the user encountered that problem.
Try to extract as much information as you can about the context in which they began solving this problem so that as you develop your product, you'll be able to actually reference real-life examples of past problems that potential users have had, and you can overlay your solution on top of that to see if it would have helped in that particular circumstance.
- Why was that hard?
The reason why you want to ask this question is because you'll hear many different things from different people.
The benefit from asking this question is not just to identify the exact problem that you may begin to solve with your solution to this problem, but you'll also begin to understand how you market your product, how you explain to new potential users the value or the benefits of your solution. In general, customers don't buy what. They buy the why.
Answers that you get from customers to this question of why. Why was this past problem that you encountered so hard may actually inform your marketing or your sales copy as you build out the rest of your product.
- What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problems?
If potential customers are not already exploring potential solutions to their problem, it's possible that the problem that you're trying to solve is not a burning enough problem for customers, for them to be even interested in your better solution to this product. So this question tries to get at the root of that issue. Is the person who encounters this problem already trying to solve this?
You want to ask this question for two reasons. One is to figure out whether the problem that you're solving or you're working to solve is even really something that people are already looking for solutions to. The second one is, what are the other competition out there? What will your product be compared against as you end up rolling out your solution and offering it to end customers?
- What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?
This is the beginning of your potential feature set. This is how you ask the... This is how you begin understanding what the features are that you'll build out for your better solution to the problem. Now, note that this is not the question of, what features would you want
This question specifically targets, what are the problems with the existing solutions that they've already tried? These are specifics and you can begin to kind of figure out what the differential between your new solution and the existing solutions already in the market will be.
- Find first users with problem
- Yourself (founders)
- Test your user interview strategy on yourself. Try to walk through a situation where you've encountered that problem.
- Friends, coworkers, intros
- You don't have to talk to thousands of people. Every good user research strategy begins with just one or two people. The critical feature here is executing an unbiased and detailed customer or user interview strategy rather than just trying to pitch your idea to them.
- Drop by in person
- If you truly think that you're solving a problem that your target customer base is facing, you'll actually be doing them a hand. You'll be helping them out by taking their 15 minutes and learning more about the problem.
- Industry events
- Take notes
- Take detailed notes because like I said before, you'll never know until later which key facts of these user interviews may be useful. If you're not great at taking notes while you're talking to someone, bring a friend, bring a cofounder, ask the person if you could record it. When in doubt, capture as much information as possible.
- Keep it casual
- You could just show up. You don't have to preplan this. You don't have to have 20-minute blocks on your calendar scheduled for days on end of user interviews. Feel free to react. Honestly, you'll learn so much through the first five or ten user interviews that your process will dramatically improve from those first interviews to the next batch. So don't feel like you have to do a hundred user interviews all at the same time. Just start with one, start with three, start with five until you get the hang of it.
- Careful with their time
- Make sure that you're cognisant of the other person's time.
- You'll be able to get probably the best information out of a 10 to 15-minute long first interview, and that might be all the time you need just for that initial chat.
- "...ask them questions about their background and then their goals - what are they trying to accomplish?" Peter from Draftbit
- As you move past the idea stage into testing your prototype with users, the next major kind of benefit that you can get from talking to users is figuring out who will be your best first customer.
- If you choose the wrong first customer, that you may be led down a path that constrains you or artificially traps you without actually getting paid by that first customer.
- How?
- The best first customers being at the centre of the Venn diagram where they have the highest numerical answers to the three questions
- Find numerical answers to:
- How much does this problem cost them? (severity of pain)
- How much does this problem cost them today?
- How much revenue do they stand to earn if they solve this problem
- How much expense do they currently spend trying to solve this problem?
- How much money is wasted today as they try to solve this problem
- How frequent is the problem? (frequency)
- The best problems that startups can target are ones that are encountered more frequently
- This is usually beneficial for two reasons
- One is, they encounter a problem on a more regular basis. It means that the customer's feeling the pain of that problem on a more regular basis, and they'll be much more receptive to a potential solution
- The second reason why you want to tackle a problem that people encounter on a more frequent basis is, you'll get more chances to know whether your product is actually solving a problem
- How large is their budget? (ability to fix?)
- Make sure that you're asking questions about whether they actually have the ability to solve the problem, given the choice (budget, authority)
Some folks say build this and others say talk to users. Good tweet thread