Running a startup puts a ton of responsibilities on your plate. From marketing to sales, hacky-HR to accounting, development to project management, you’re wearing a million hats.
The same can be true for Product Managers. You can find yourself involved in many projects, tons of meetings, and more competing priorities from your stakeholders than you’d like.
Yet, through all this busy-ness, whether you’re an early stage founder, or a product manager, you need to make time to talk to customers. It’s the lifeblood of building something people want, getting to Product-Market Fit, and launching successful new products and features.
As you commit yourself to “getting outside the building” to talk to your customers, it’s essential you make the most of those discussions.
Talking to customers…but how?
One of the hardest things for newcomers to customer development and product management to get right is the questions they ask in their interviews.
Done well, you can learn priceless insights that help you prioritize and build the right things, while descoping things that turn out not to matter. Done poorly, you fail to get sufficient signal across interviews, and waste you and your customer’s time.
Fortunately, I’m here to help you today.
I’ve taught dozens of product managers and founders this process hands on (and thousands more through posts like these), and it’s led to fantastic results for them. By using this structure, you avoid biasing your customers or putting them on the defensive. You also maximize your learning so that you can get the best insights in the fewest number of interviews.
With that in mind, let’s dive in, so you can learn how to have great customer interviews, too.
How to Structure (and get the most out of) Your Customer Development Interviews
The biggest mistake I see otherwise well-intentioned founders and PMs make is that they come to their customer interviews with no preparation.
Showing up and just saying, “Tell me about…” or “What do you think of my demo/product?” is a huge missed opportunity; you don’t know what you don’t know at that point, and lose out on a lot of great insights you could learn if you asked the right questions, in the right order.
Ask the right questions at the right time.
You can make a great impression and learn a lot more by following this simple, 3-step process I share below: 1) People, 2) Problems, and then 3) Your Solution.
A few quick notes before we break those down:
Timing: Depending on the person, this question flow generally takes 30-45 minutes to go through. If you can get a customer to agree to a 1 hour call, that’s ideal, but you can prioritize the best questions if you have only 30 minutes.
Business Model: This structure is best suited to B2B customer development, but with a little creativity, you can definitely adapt this for B2C interviews, especially if the B2C product involves the customer making a direct purchase (i.e.- subscription or e-commerce).
Order: This order (People -> Problems -> Your Solution) is extremely intentional. You must go in this order, or it will hurt your results of your interviews. More on why later in this post.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the 3 sections, in order:
1) People – Aka – Who Are You Interviewing?
Before you get into anything about problems, or your solution, you need to figure out who you’re actually talking to. This both warms up your interviewee with some softball questions and gives you an opportunity to build some rapport with them.
It also helps you get to know them and the parts of their life around the edges of the problems you’re potentially solving for them.
Important: Do not shortchange this opening section of questions!
You don’t need a novel on their daily life, but you *do need* enough to be able to understand their role within their company, who key players are, and a general baseline of their sophistication.
All of this will help you later pattern match who the user type that is most receptive to the problem you’re solving and the solution you offer, as well as who is not a fit. This is priceless for your product, your marketing, and your sales processes.
Some example questions you can ask:
What is your name and role at your company? (If you can find this out in advance, always look it up to save asking the question)
How do you fit into your company’s department structure? Overall in the company?
How do you discover new products for work? Do you need any approval to try them?
Have you tried anything new recently? How did it work for you?
What is a typical day like on your job?What are you main routines?
What is your budget like? Who has to approve your purchases?
How much time do you spend doing [task X]? (Task X being anything they mentioned in their typical day that stood out to you or related to your product/business)
Pro Tip: When you’re preparing for your interviews, give yourself a section before your People questions to fill in things you can look up on your own.
This can be things like: Their name, Job Title, Company Website, Linkedin profile, Company name/size/industry, location, internal analytics profile from your company, and anything else you can find out about them that shows context about who they are and their behavior in your product.
Then, add any questions to your script that come to mind as you gather this info to really make the most of your interviews like their usage of parts of your product, unusual things in their profile, etc.
Going into these interviews, I never know which aspects of getting to know them will be the key, which is why adding the extra notes beforehand helps; you’ll be looking back at all your interviews to figure out what common patterns and differentiators are.
2) Problems – Aka – What are your greatest pains?
This section is where you try to find out whether the person has the problem you believe you’re solving. Your goal is to not lead them to your problem. The less you lead them while still hearing your problem being mentioned, the more validation you have!
People love to talk about themselves, so let them go nuts here and really rant about their problems (i.e.- Shut up 🤐 and listen!). Generally, people are terrible at proposing solutions, but you want to hear generally what they envision as solutions or see what they’ve cobbled together themselves.
Some sample questions you can ask:
What are your biggest initiatives and goals right now? How are they going so far? (To understand their priorities and which they need help with most)
What are your top 3 challenges you face in your job right now? Why did you choose those? Why that order?
What are your top 3 challenges you face in your job related to [industry X]? (Industry X being the one your startup/business is in)
If you could wave a magic wand and instantly have a solution to any of those problems…what would the solution be?
Dig deeper into their typical day on anything that sounds painful or expensive. (You can add some hyperbole here to get them to rant a bit by saying things like “that sounds inefficient…” or “that sounds expensive…”)
How have you dealt with or solved [Problem X] so far? (You’re looking to find out if they’ve hacked a solution together themselves. If they have…ask for a copy of it!)
How does your work in this area interact with your coworkers? (Look for collaboration problems, needed features, and others you should interview)
What do you have to report to your manager or other teams related to this? (Look for reporting needs, buyer expectations, and how this problem may impact others)
Notice, you haven’t mentioned your solution, nor problem yet. If they don’t mention your problem specifically, then as you finish this section of questioning, you can directly ask them if what you think is a problem is a problem for them. Whether they agree it’s a problem or not, you want to then probe why it wasn’t one of their top problems.
The beauty of this approach is that you’ll learn a lot about their day to day, and what they perceive as their most pressing problems. This can often help refine what you’re working on, or reveal a pivot that can change the fate or trajectory of your business.
3) Your Solution – Aka – See if your idea survives customer interaction
In your discussions in part 2, if your interviewee brings up your problem you think you’re solving, then you’re on the right track! Bonus points if the way they describe solving it with their “magic wand” remotely resembles what you’re doing.
No matter what happens in part 2 you should discuss with them what you thought the problem was and what your solution is. Getting validation that they wouldn’t be interested in the idea is just as helpful as finding out they love it; either they’re not a customer, or you are learning what your customers want instead.
Some sample questions you could ask:
Walk them through the problems you believe your solution solves. Do they agree?
Does [your solution] solve any of your problems?Why or why not?
What looks most helpful or important to you?How will that help you?
What’s missing from what I’ve shown you to help solve your problems? Why is that important to you?
How do you see this fitting into your routines? What would be important to make it fit well for you?
Who else on your team, or at your company, would be interested in this?How do you think it would help them?
Would you be willing to pay for our solution? What budget do you have for something like this? (Don’t be afraid to probe for the pricing you know you want…”Would [X] be reasonable?” It’s imperfect but gets you started.)
If they’re willing to pay for your product and like the idea then… “Would you be willing/ready to start right away?”
If all goes well and you really are solving a pain, then your customer should want access to your product or new feature right away. More likely, you’re going to learn a ton about what they do and do not want and your idea will begin evolving. You’ll also find out others at the company you may want to talk to that have needs if your customer will start using your product.
Keep in mind: The way you present the solution can be flexible for the state of your business or the development of this feature:
Describe it in words: Tell them what you have in mind, or sketch it on a napkin or paper.
Show them mockups: Share your screen or turn your laptop/tablet towards them to show what you have in mind.
Send them a clickable prototype: Especially if you’re interviewing them on video, sending a prototype link is a great way for them to see and feel what you have in mind. (In that case ask them to share their screen and narrate their thoughts as they go through it)
Give them staging or feature-flagged access: Once you’ve launched, this is the most powerful because they can try it exactly as you intended. (And again, have them share their screen and narrate.)
In all cases, the goal is to give them something they can react to. Don’t let the simplicity of what you have stop you from learning.
In fact, you can learn a ton in these interviews when you literally have nothing to talk about in the Solution section; I’ve launched products and new features multiple times where the first round of interviews had little to no solution discussion, and we only followed up later for solution-focused feedback built on what we learned in the People & Problem sections.
Making the most of your customer interviews
This basic structure can carry you a long way towards some great validated learning about your idea and your market’s desire for it. It can help refine your idea or feature, help you determine if you should pivot, and reveal new opportunities that can help you grow faster.
There’s a few more things to keep in mind that I’ve learned over time. Applying these tips can help you become a real pro at interviewing customers.
1) Take good notes and record everything!
Once you’ve interviewed 8-10 people, you should be going back over all of your notes and look for patterns. This includes especially looking for patterns in the Part 1 section to see what all the people that agree you are solving their problem have in common.
Summarize your notes then and share with your team, so everyone benefits from what you learned, and you can iterate together on your solution based on what you learned.
In particular, having a recording (and more recently, AI transcription) can really help here, because then you can re-listen to and review great interviews, as well as share snippets or the whole interview with your colleagues.
2) Have other team members sit in on some interviews
A good customer development focused company will have everyone involved in the process. Performable, pre-HubSpot acquisition, had their engineers spending 30% of their time on the phone with customers. Nothing helps someone do their job better like understanding who they’re building/selling/marketing for.
Using a script like this should not feel like an interview! They should feel like they’re just having a conversation with a friend about their problems at work. The more comfortable they feel with you, the more they will open up. This is part of the value and intention of the People section of questions.
By preparing your interview script in advance, you can more confidently run your interviews knowing exactly what you want to talk about. Be sure to use language that feels comfortable and natural to you, and don’t be afraid to iterate on any questions that aren’t getting the response you hoped.
4) Go off script
The best insights comes when you dig a little deeper on something that strikes a chord in the discussion. The script is there to be your roadmap, but there’s no reason you can’t return to it after a 5 minute digression about a specific pain, or discovery about how the company operates.
5) If they’ve made an MVP…ask to see it!
Nothing gives you more insight to a customer than what they’ve hacked together themselves to solve a problem. The best thing you can do is ask to see it, which will give you an idea of what they’re hoping your solution will provide. These people are also the strongest candidates to be great, helpful early adopters of your product.
If the hacked solution is actually a competitor’s product they’re frustrated with, ask them to share what they love and hate about it; that’s just as valuable as any hacked or cobbled together solution.
6) Always follow up
It’s common courtesy to thank people for their time and help. It also opens the door to follow up with them in the future if your product changes and is a fit for them, or to invite them to try it out when it’s live/launched.
Also, if you promised a free gift card (or other compensation) for their time, be sure to keep your promises and send it to them promptly. And if you hear about any bugs they report, be sure to fix them and then let them know.
All of these things score major points and make a great impression, which will make it easier to get people to interview in the future as well as build good will with current and future customers.
7) End with an ask
Always end your interviews by thanking them and asking them for something. It may be to get a copy of their MVP, or even better, ask for an intro to someone they know that might be interested in what you’re working on.
In my experience, these intros have an 80-90% success rate in becoming new customer development interviews, whereas cold emails asking customers you’ve never spoken with only have a roughly 10% success rate.
8) Be open to new problems! That’s how great products are born.
As Steve Blank has said, “No idea survives first interaction with a customer.“ Don’t be afraid to shift your focus from your first idea to what you’re actually hearing customers want. If you probe in part 2 and find a burning problem…find out how they currently solve it and what they’d pay to solve it.
Sometimes these shifts are subtle, because what you thought was most important is secondary to a bigger problem. That’s when you tell marketing and sales about a shift in positioning.
Other times, this is a huge shift and you need to change what you’re building significantly. That’s when you should have a bigger team-wide discussion.
Either way, having detailed notes, recordings of your calls, and some examples from customers of what they want instead can be the difference between what you found falling on deaf ears, or being embraced as strong evidence of a change in focus or full blown pivot being necessary.
—
In the end, you want to find a “hair on fire” problem, not a “nice to have problem.” Think about it this way: If my hair is on fire (literally), and you’re selling buckets of water, I’m definitely going to buy your product. But if I’m cold and wet, I’m not likely to buy your bucket of water right now, but might consider it in the future.
Find customer pain and a solution they desire and will pay for. Rinse. Repeat.
From launching your first product, to adding the nth feature to your company’s product suite, interviewing customers is an essential skill. By using the People -> Problem -> Solution framework and being well prepared for each interview, you can spend more time building the right things and less time adding things that no one cares about.
Further Reading:
Looking to truly master the art and science of interviewing customers? Read these other posts:
Do you find your product team doesn’t want to read your specs? Do others find them a lot less clear than you think they are?
Are you and your engineers missing estimates, or struggling to ship on time, because of changing requirements and surprise details changing context mid-build?
If you’re having trouble with things like missed deadlines, confusion and miscommunication mid-project, and not shipping your best possible work consistently, then it might be time to take a hard look at your product specs. They’re likely a big part of the problem.
The Product Thesis: A Better Way
Early in my career I was kind of winging it when it came to planning with my engineering and design teams. I had all kinds of documents all over, and I was inconsistent in the process from sprint to sprint and project to project.
Not surprisingly, it showed in the results we got, and the problems we had.
Fortunately, when I joined KISSmetrics, Hiten helped me learn a better way by introducing me to Josh Elman, who worked on product teams at Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. Josh taught me about the Thesis, which is a lightweight, efficient way to communicate all the essential details your product team needs.
It led to engineers and designers actually reading what I wrote in my specs, better ideas coming from everyone, and ultimately shipping more wins faster. It really was that transformative.
Now that I’ve used the Thesis on dozens of projects of my own, taught it to many of my clients, and tweaked it based on what I found worked best across many situations, I’m going to teach you how to write your own thesis for the next feature or product you build.
The Better Product Spec Alternative: How to Write a Product Thesis
By using Josh’s Product Thesis, I solved a lot of the problems I had, and similar ones I see with my coaching clients:
Hard to find everything: Too many docs in too many places means key info can’t be found or is missed. The Thesis represents one place for all the most important answers for you, designers, engineering, and other stakeholders.
Too long, didn’t read: Most people do not read 10+ page documents. The Thesis and its bullet driven structure forces you to get right to the point. My average thesis (excluding further reading) is only 2-3 pages, which led to everyone reading them.
Missing key info: Compare the list of areas below to the product spec for your recent work. In my experience, most PM’s specs are missing roughly half of them, which is a missed opportunity for better, clearer planning and organization.
Being Solution, not Problem-oriented: Too many specs I review are dictating outcomes all the way down to button placements. The best solutions come from discussion and debate with your engineers and designer. A thesis becomes a primer for solution discussions to ensure the most important & impactful opportunities are tackled.
When you pull all this information together in one, brief, easy to read place, it helps your product team better understand the why behind a feature and come up with the best solutions together. It helps motivate them more as well, because it helps them really taste and feel customer pain and opportunities.
When should I use a Product Thesis?
There are two simple things to keep in mind to determine if you need to pull everything listed below together for a Product Thesis:
1) For all significant projects
If a project or task will take less than a week’s time or fits in the “Quick Win” category of a simple ticket or two in your project management tool, then you do *not* need to make a Product Thesis.
Meanwhile, if you know for a project there will be:
An Epic in your project management tool to tie a bunch of tickets together
Enough design changes you know you’ll do some major user testing
Any major changes to workflows or processes
The project is a key part of your OKR/Quarterly roadmap
Then, those are exactly the times where pulling all of the things you’ve learned about the project and opportunity into a Thesis is the right move.
2) Before you start thinking or talking about solutions
It’s sooo tempting to start thinking about what you could do for customers. Yet, you shouldn’t do that. Pull back.
Instead, you need to pull all the information about the problem together for you and your team in your Product Thesis so that you have the guardrails for a deep discussion with your designer and engineers about:
What’s possible to do?
If we could wave a magic wand, what would we create for our customers?
What can we get done within the time constraints and budget we have?
What quick wins could fit in related to this?
What should be de-scoped because it’s too hard?
Design and tech debt considerations that come into play.
You only get the magical alchemy of building incredible products when you include your design and engineering team in the solution process. It’s what both Steve Jobs and Marty Cagan do.
And they and you can only combine to come up with the best solutions when you set the table with all the information everyone needs to truly understand the problems, opportunities, and constraints. It also engages and motivates them much better than dictating solutions to them.
Knowing all of this, let’s dive into what actually goes into a Product Thesis.
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What goes into the Product Thesis?
Below are the sections with explanations for why they’re each important. If you have any questions about any of them, please leave a comment on this post. You can also listen to this podcast discussion on the Thesis I did years ago as well if you like audio.
Remember: Stick to bullets! This should ideally be 1-3 pages long as that ensures that your team really reads it and can engage quickly. You can write up a separate memo like the Amazon Press Release style for marketing and other stakeholders after you and your product team have settled on the solution & scope.
The goal here is to clarify your thinking, make sure you didn’t miss anything, and set the stage for a great discussion with your engineering and design partners on what is possible within the constraints and opportunities you outline.
To this day, 15+ years in my career and over 10 years since that fateful meeting with Josh Elman, I still start every Product Thesis I write by copying a template like the one you can sign up for on this post.
Okay, here’s the sections of the Product Thesis and why they matter:
Product Thesis Title Here
1) Why are we working on this next?
This is first for a reason: This is what gets others excited and bought into what you’re building.
Every company, and especially startups, are resource constrained. What you choose to build affects your company’s bottom line, your standing in the market, and what your team thinks of your judgment.
You need to succinctly get everyone reading this on board to why this is the biggest problem or best opportunity.
I try to have a mix of qualitative and quantitative data here including:
Mandates from the leadership team to focus on this area
How sales needed it for a big customer, or how many customers are begging for it
A stark number that paints the clear picture and creates urgency (like an alarming churn rate, big dollar value deals the feature is for, or clear weak points in a key funnel)
The more your designers and engineers can understand why this matters, the more interested they will be in working on it, even when it’s not the hottest new tech or feature.
2) When and how do people use this feature?
Most products end up having a variety of different users and ways that people use the product. To help your team better design a specific feature for the right part of your customer base, you need to detail who this new feature is for.
Be specific! A use case section that is just something like, “As a marketer, I want a mobile app so I can access my data away from a computer” is total weaksauce. Instead, provide the kind of context and detail that paints a picture of the situation:
“On their way to work on the subway, content marketers like to check how their blog traffic is doing for items they published that morning or the day before. It helps them get into work and know how they’re doing before they sit down. If a number is low, they may try promoting it extra to try to raise the number. If the number is high, they may share the win with others on the team.”
Could you picture that situation in your mind? Can you see Jenn the marketer opening an app on her iPhone while sitting on a subway car? I bet you could. Your team can, too. They can also then start thinking about what the perfect (not just good) solution would be for them.
Write out as many use cases as you feel are needed. I often have as many as 4 or 5 detailed cases for a big feature, especially when our product has multiple personas.
3) What Problems do we need to solve? (in order of priority)
Features are really solutions to your customer’s problems. It doesn’t do any good to build a feature that doesn’t actually solve the problem, so it’s important to detail what problems you need to ensure the solution your team creates addresses them.
Problems should either be existing problems your product has (especially if you’re iterating on an existing feature) or the problems related to the use cases you just described above. Some example problems may be:
Performance Problem: Customers are experiencing frequent crashes (57 incidents last week). This feature is critical for customers and they are constantly having to refresh and start over, losing their work in the process.
Design Problem: 20% of support tickets are due to customers are having issues with the current UI. They can’t find key features that exist that they say are important to them (Include a markup of the interface to show these.)
New Problem:Customers spend hours every week manually copying numbers to a spreadsheet and making their own visuals for their VP. If we automatically make those reports, we’ll save them time and can then have the VP see our branded reports frequently.
I usually write out 5-7 problems that a feature addresses in bullet form. If it only applies to some of the use cases I described, I’ll specify that as well.
Remember to also rank the problems, so that the most important issues get the most attention. When ranking, remember Olsen’s Hierarchy of Needs as a helpful framework on what matters most: (Note – the bottom is most important like Maslow’s Hierarchy)
This ranking matters most when it’s time for tradeoffs. A detailed ranking of problems will help you make sure the right things get done and avoid being de-scoped, while less important, and difficult items quickly hit the chopping block.
4) How much time is budgeted for this project? When do we need to be completed with this by?
One of the additions that I’ve found has been important for most product teams, but wasn’t in Josh’s original lesson for me was to call out the time / budget for a given project.
This is important to think about for 3 reasons:
Your engineering and design teams need to know how big a project this can be, so you can talk tradeoffs and scope effectively with them as you collaborate on coming up with the best solution for this phase of the project.
You are consciously choosing how long you work on this project versus the other potential projects and goals you have. You have finite time and resources, so you need to decide what is worth the largest investment. RICE and similar frameworks can help with this, as well as thinking about these kinds of tradeoffs:
Your stakeholders need to know when you’ll deliver this project, so they can plan accordingly for how they’ll act based on this launch.
In particular, sales and marketing teams can become very frustrated by majorly missed deadlines. It not only impacts their planning, but it critically affects their ability to hit their numbers.
The simplest way to avoid these kinds of issues is to start making the time allotted for a project something that is defined at the earliest stages of planning. That’s why in this section the goal is to very succinctly, in 1 sentence in 1 bullet define:
How many weeks you have for this project and a target ship date (or time when it’s in QA and ready for your deploy process.)
Yes, you may want some flexibility depending on what you decide is important, and that’s exactly the point; time spent on this project should be an active part of the discussion. Otherwise, I’ve seen too many cases of projects that run much longer than planned, or scopes that get completely out of control, preventing essential other projects from happening.
5) What are Future Considerations that must be accounted for?
This section is all about avoiding hearing from engineering, “I wish you had told me that before we built [X]!”
Very often, when engineers build something, there’s a few ways they could do it. When you give them a hint of what may come in the future, or that was de-scoped early in this process, they can make more intelligent decisions about how they build things now. A small change now can make a revisit to the feature *much* easier 6 months later.
Depending on the feature, this could be very short or long section. If there are things you know are not going to make the first version of this feature, but expect will be needed to be added later, be sure you tell your team!
You can also use this section to note things that originally were planned for, but after discussing with your team, you de-scoped. This is how you turn your Product Thesis into a living document that is useful to reference at many points in your product development process.
The bottom line: Balancing the present and the future is a constant struggle for your product. The best thing you can do for your team is give them the key information you know so they can do their best to balance their work against the present and future as well.
6) (Optional) How does this tie back to this quarter’s OKR(s)?
This should be a single sentence explaining which of your OKRs this project relates to, why it does, and a link back to your OKRs document or tool.
The point of this is to make it obvious to anyone seeing your Product Thesis how you see this contributing to your OKR(s).
If you don’t have OKRs, obviously ignore this section. You can also include this in your Why section in the intro if you prefer, but I’ve found that explicitly calling it out like this is helpful for others (like say an executive or your boss). As with everything in the Thesis, use your best judgment for what fits your team and company.
7) What is our KPI or Metric for this Thesis?
This is one of biggest gaps in most product specs I’ve reviewed, and it’s critical that every Thesis have some form of this.
You should ask yourself, “What would make this new feature a success?” A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is the most common way to determine that success since ideally you will tie the success of the feature to one or more of your company’s key metrics.
It’s okay to have more than one KPI, but keep it simple, or there will be too many things to measure. When I’ve had multiple KPIs for a feature they’ve been things like:
Support requests will drop by 90% for this feature after relaunch.
Usage of our app’s [X] feature will grow by at least 50% after relaunch.
Because this feature affects the sign up flow, we expect a 5% lift in conversion after this launches.
You will fail sometimes, but by forcing yourself to quantify what you expect to happen, you will keep you and your team honest. By setting a number that you must hit, you can also know when you should go back and iterate further. You’ll also hone your instincts on what creates wins and what does not.
Further, by identifying the metric up front, you make sure any tracking that needs added to the product is done while your engineers build it, saving them time going back later, or lacking a baseline after launch.
Most important for this section is simply the act of committing to measurement. Shipping is not success as a product manager, but without calling out measurement in your spec, I find most PMs never get around to measuring a lot of what they should for their features.
8) Who are the stakeholders and how/when do they need to be informed?
When work gets busy, it’s easy to forget about stakeholders and other people you don’t work with every day. That’s how you end up forgetting to loop someone in when they need to be.
This can end up hurting you and your company in a variety of ways:
Your launch may flop, because marketing had no time to prepare a press push or launch announcement.
Sales misses out on some deals, because they don’t know what is available soon enough to close a key, tightly fought deal.
Other teams may step on your toes, because they didn’t know what you were working on.
Avoid shooting yourself in the foot by thinking through who you need to involve in this project and how. Keep it simple, much like the OKR section, by simply:
Listing out the Name, Department, and when and how you expect them to be involved in the project. One name per bullet.
Then, make sure you stick to that plan, and confirm with the stakeholder you agree on how they’ll be involved and what they need to know.
This is a checklist to remind you who to speak with and helps you make sure you give them all the time and information they need to coordinate with you effectively.
9) Further Reading:
Your main document shouldn’t be longer than 2-3 pages, so Further Reading can act as an Appendix for you. This section allows readers to easily jump into an area that is most interesting to them and see the data or evidence that backs up your Thesis bullets.
Add links to customer research, call recordings, feedback, quotes, usability testing, surveys, survey analysis, specific analytics reports or queries, etc. While your main document should be no more than 3 pages, Further Reading can be as long as you want.
Remember: You want all the detail you can without the fluff and verbosity that makes engineers and designers skip reading it. Further reading is a great place for specific information that didn’t fit in the above sections and may be relevant to only certain team members.
Who should I share this with and when? How do I use this with Stakeholders?
The number one goal of this document is to help you bring clarity of thought and a clear definition of the project to set up a healthy discussion with your design and engineering team. Together, you’ll work out what the best solution is based on the constraints, problems, and opportunities here.
The secondary goals of this document and process is to:
Help you identify weaknesses in the work you’ve done to define this (i.e.- Don’t know something? Go find out.)
Start thinking ahead for how to involve marketing and other stakeholders at the right times.
Give you an organized place where you have all your research and thoughts in one place, so you can share all or part of it when it’s helpful in stakeholder discussions.
This then makes it easier to share with other colleagues when it makes sense. Once things are solidified with your core product team, it often can be helpful to share your Thesis with some of the stakeholders you noted in section 8; the same use cases and problems that inspire your designer can also inspire marketing copy or sales pitches.
Conclusion: A great Product Thesis is a high leverage asset for PMs
Creating a great product spec clarifies your thinking, organizes it clearly for others, and helps you avoid many of the most common pitfalls of the product development process.
The best way to ensure your product specs are consistently high quality is to use a template to guide you. That way, you don’t forget anything, and others get used to a consistent format from you.
If you’d like to upgrade your product specs, and want to start using the Product Thesis, I have created a template you can use now. Simply enter your email below to receive the template straight to your inbox:
I was just helping a client with this issue recently, so wanted to share what I’ve learned helping dozens of product managers over the years. Here’s my best advice for improving your success rate at both getting customers to interview and getting them to show up:
How to get more of your customers to show up for their scheduled customer interviews
You can’t interview customers who don’t set up a time to speak with you.
Or, put more simply: you have a 100% flake rate for the customers who never scheduled a call.
So if you haven’t set up any calls yet, you’ll need to do that first. Here’s where you can start if you’re new to customer interviews:
Ask your existing user base: If you have only 10 customers, go interview all 10. When you have much more than that, you can narrow your focus, but it’s always best to start with people already familiar with your product.
Focus on power users: Every product tends to have some people that are fired up about using it. They log in more, complete more actions, and may even evangelize it to others. These people are gold. One of the best ways to thank them is to interview them and take their feedback and ideas seriously. They often reveal insights that can help guide you to your next stage of growth.
Mix up your methods: Every customer type I’ve ever worked with has been a little different what works best. Try various communication mediums to see what works best (text, email, messages in your platform, Linkedin, etc).
Act on what you learn: This should go without saying, but I’ve seen too many PMs miss the forest for the trees on customer interviews. You should be learning new things in interviews that influence your roadmap, improve designs, and fix bugs. Taking action on what you hear is what signifies to those you interview that it was worth their time to talk to you.
Give credit and thanks to those that helped: This may seem like a small thing, but it is a big deal. Customers *love* hearing that you built the thing they complained about or suggested. Taking a few minutes to message them to let them know can go a long way, and is often how you then build relationships where customers will volunteer for interviews again and again.
And if you need more ideas for getting customers to speak with or just need to find your first set of customers, I have a post that will give you tons of ideas: 95 ways to find your first customers.
Rules of thumb to remember when interviewing customers:
Before we dive into the tactics to use to get your customers to show up for their interviews, keep in mind a few important rules of thumb for these interviews:
It’s hard to start from scratch: If you’ve never interviewed customers before, it will take time to get your customers used to talking with you. The first ask will have the lowest response rate, and then it will get better from there.
Your industry matters a lot: B2B customers are typically much easier to get calls with than B2C (consumers), but that varies, too. Think about your customer and how often they’re by a computer or phone and what their schedule is like. The more they are available and near a phone/computer, the easier to get calls, while the less they are, the harder interviews will be. So yes, it’s harder to interview college students than an IT department. But it’s also harder to interview a construction worker than a retiree.
How you ask matters, too: Being friendly, explaining what’s in it for them, and making it as easy as possible makes a big difference, too. You should experiment on the best methods and wording to ask for interviews just like you’d test other messaging in your product and emails.
Ask the right people: Make sure you know who you want to talk to and why. Power users are more likely to speak to you, as are those who are most motivated to use your product (like a sales rep mandated to log their calls) and have been using it. Asking people who never log into your product will both be harder to get on the phone, and have fewer useful insights (unless you’re specifically trying to learn how to activate users of their type).
All of this is to say that practice and persistence makes perfect; it takes time to master the entire process of interviewing customers, but the rewards are huge. You’ll make better product decisions, improve your product, and gain insights that can improve every team and department.
Fixing the flake rate: How to get more customers to show up to your interviews
No matter what you do, some customers won’t show up to your interviews. It’s an unfortunate fact of life. Emergencies come up, conflicts hit their schedules, and some people flat out forget.
Yet, there’s a tolerable amount of flaking, an expected amount of flaking, and then amounts that make it too hard to do your job, and leave you and colleagues feeling frustrated.
The rule of thumb I like to use is that in an easy to reach, engaged audience in B2B, 10% is a good flake rate (meaning 1 in 10 calls scheduled is a no-show), while in B2C and other difficult industries, a 40% flake rate is not unusual.
Regardless of your industry, we want to make that number as low as we possibly can. These tactics will help you accomplish that.
Oncehub and Calendly are your friends.
Before we get into the nitty gritty details, it’s important to call out the most important tool in the process of scheduling customer interviews: your scheduler.
If you work in tech, you probably use Calendly, and if you’re really old school, you may remember the old days of Tungle, who invented the tech back in ~2009. I personally use a tool called Oncehub, which I find more robust and customizable than Calendly, but both will work.
The key with either is that they automate parts of the process you don’t want to have to do yourself like:
Proposing times you can make based on your current schedule in any moment.
Creating a calendar invite and sending it to your interviewee and any colleagues joining.
Avoiding any double bookings no matter when your customers are ready to find a time.
Handling reminders, and easy rescheduling for the customer.
And if you’ve ever used them, I’m sure you can think of other benefits as well.
All of their functionality turns many frustrating back and forth emails into a few quick clicks and you’re done. And unless your customers are egotistical VCs on Twitter, they’ll be grateful to have something so simple and fast to use. (…and a dirty secret about VCs is that the same people who *hate* calendar scheduling links have assistants who *love* to use them.)
Tweaks to Your Customer Interview Scheduling Process to Reduce Flaking
Ok. Now that you have a calendar scheduling tool set up, let’s go check those settings so that you maximize the chances that the majority of your customers who schedule a time will actually speak with you.
1) Set a lot of reminders:
Your first instinct may be to minimize reminders. You sent a calendar invite, right? You make all the meetings and events on your calendar, so your assumption is everyone else is the same.
That’s a rookie mistake.
Instead, set multiple reminders: 24 hours before, 1 hour before, and 10 minutes before is a your best bet. This makes sure the day before they see, “oh right, I’m supposed to talk to [your company] tomorrow.” Then, the 1 hour and 10 minute reminders ensure you’re at the top of their inbox and they are less likely to get sidetracked and forget.
Even if you think they’d be annoying, realize these reminders really help you out, so take advantage of the fact scheduling tools will automatically send these for you….if you turn them on.
2) Ask for a phone number at sign up, then call them:
You may use Zoom or MS Teams or Google Hangouts for all your calls at work, but that doesn’t mean your customers always do. For any number of reasons they may be unable to or unfamiliar with the technology.
And even if they are familiar, there may be times they have issues with the system working due to spotty internet, not being near a computer, or IT restrictions. You never know until you lose some calls because of it.
However, unfortunately many customers who miss calls never tell you why they didn’t make it.
That’s why the best thing you can do is ask for their phone number when they sign up for a call, so you can call them instead of wait for them to dial in.
3) Offer a gift card or credits for their time:
One of the easiest ways to recruit more people to speak to you is to offer them a reward for their time. This is particularly helpful when you’re working on a consumer product.
This can also often help with flake rates, too, because people are more likely to show up when they have a reward they’ll get after.
Just realize there’s quickly diminishing returns on this; while $20 might work better than $5, you typically won’t find much difference between $20 and $50, or $50 and $100. The exception is if you’re trying to talk to high net worth individuals, or executives; in that case you may need to pay a lot more, or donate the money to a charity instead.
Regardless, offering compensation (or credit with your product) is a great way to not just get people to schedule a call, but if you remind them of the offer, it can help with getting fewer of your interviewees to no-show.
4) Remind them what the purpose of the meeting is in the title, description, and initial ask:
As you’ve likely learned in building products, the little details matter, and they add up. Getting the details right in your customer interview reminders and calendar invites is no different.
Assume that your customers are busy, distracted, and thinking about a lot of other things, which means repeating all the most important details will help.
Go through your calendar scheduling tools settings and:
Make your title for the calendar event something clear and descriptive (i.e.- “[Your company] product interview about [Feature]”)
Put in the description all the key information about the event to further jog their memory and remind them of the reward they’ll get (i.e.- “You scheduled this call so we can talk to you about your experience with [Feature]. As a thank you, you’ll receive a $X gift card for your time.”)
Put all this info in the reminders, too. Remember those 24 hour, 1 hour, and 10 minute reminders? Usually you can add a note or customize them, so add the same info there, too.
You never know what your customer will or will not look at, so by always having the most useful information, you avoid them saying, “Who the heck is Joe and why did I agree to call with them?”
5) Configure messages to come from your email as much as possible:
Your interviews are a chance to build a relationship with your customers. One of the best ways to do that is for them to feel like they can reach you.
Sending messages from “noreply@” and default systems feel impersonal and prevent your customers from reaching you directly. This can rob you of all kinds of valuable opportunities:
Questions or concerns they have before speaking with you (which if unanswered they just won’t show up)
Feedback about your product. Most feedback never makes it to the PMs who can do something about it, so the best thing you can do is give your customers a direct line to you to cut out all the middlemen.
Where possible, swap any default email addresses and noreply@ systems for your own email, or an alias you can forward to you.
6) Resurrect some missed calls by sending followups:
There are a million reasons why someone might forget about your call with them. Don’t take it personal.
Instead, assume they meant to make the call and something came up. If that happens, the best thing you can do is follow up. I like to do so twice for anyone who seems to be flaking:
5 minutes after the start time: This is a last ditch effort to get them to join you. Be brief, polite, and simply include the link or dial in info to your call.
30 minutes after the start time: At this point they’re obviously not making it, so now this follow up is a “Sorry we missed you email” which then you give them a link to reschedule to a better time.
Neither of these are perfect, but I’m always amazed at how effective they are.
I find that anywhere from a quarter to a half of my flakes will respond to one of these and ultimately lead to us having a call.
And a couple settings for your benefit:
While you’re in your calendar scheduling tool setting things up, a couple other settings that will really help you be more effective:
Allow for no more than 3 calls in a day. Trust me, you’ll be drained, and this way you can still get other things done in your work day.
Leave a 30 minute buffer between meetings. This helps with any bio breaks you need, making sure you’re prepared well, and avoids fatigue.
With a few tweaks and tactical additions to your process, you can significantly change how often your customers flake on your customer interviews.
How do you avoid customers flaking on your calls? Leave a comment with any other tactics you recommend.
Further Reading:
Want to learn more about having great customer interviews? These other posts can help you:
Always have a script so you ask good questions consistently and learn the right things.
Prep before every call, so you don’t have to ask anything you already should know and can find unique things to ask based on their behavior. Here’s how to make the most of them.
And if you want hands on help creating a repeatable process for interview customers and turning those insights into great products, I’m available as a coach and consultant for a limited number of engagements. You can sign up for a call here, or learn more about my work here.
I was as surprised as they were when I learned that it’s not typical to be able to take notes while also asking the majority of the questions in a customer interview.
To me, it comes naturally. Yet, now that I have taught dozens of PMs how to interview customers and regularly coach product managers, I recognize this is not normal. In fact, I haven’t really met anyone who can do the same.
Knowing this, the questions become:
How do you make the most of your customer interviews?
How do you take notes, so that you make the most of every discussion?
As I’ve helped dozens of PMs over the years master their customer interviews, I’ve noticed a number of approaches that can help, so I’m sharing them here to help you today.
How to Take Notes like a Pro during Your Customer Interviews
Start there, then come back to this post once you have a great script; it’s the foundation of a great interview that brings the best insights and feedback for your product.
Okay, now that you have a good interview script ready, how can you make sure you never miss a valuable insight you hear from a customer? Try this.
1) Have a template you use every time.
A customer interview script is more than just a list of a few questions you plan to ask your customer. It should be a complete template that organizes and prepares you for the interview.
When I make an interview template, it typically includes:
Title area: This includes the person’s name, background, any existing customer and behavior data from your product, and links to relevant information (like their linkedin, any admin profiles in your systems, analytics data, etc)
Introduction: If the customer has never spoken to you before, having a few notes about how you’ll introduce you, anyone else on the call, and the goals of the interview can help.
People: Understand how your product fits in their life. Get to know what their job is like if your product is B2B, or their life around the aspects your consumer product relates to. Best of all, this warms them up as they also happen to be good rapport building questions.
Problem: This is the meat of your customer interview script. It should include a collection of questions to learn about their problems, priorities, and feedback.
Solution: Once you have learned all about them and their problems, the last step is to share any solutions for feedback. This can be walking through a new feature, having them try a clickable prototype, or sharing mockups.
Key Takeaways: I use this after an interview to summarize what I learned. I place this near the top so that I can easily compare notes and find the right interview to reference later.
A little structure and organization goes a long way. The hour or so of prep I do before my first interview to create such a template and then brief prep before each call allows me to get 10X out of my interviews compared to most people.
2) Do your prep ahead of time, every time.
A good customer interview is only as good as the prep you do for it. Not only does that include the template we just went over, but it also includes filling in answers to any questions you can find the answers out on your own.
When you already know something about your customer, fill it out. You can find out many of these things ahead of time with just a little bit of digging:
What are they reading on your company blog and other content?
How and what parts of your product do they use? Which features?
How long have they been a customer?
What support tickets or feedback have they submitted?
Which plan are they on? Have they upgraded or downgraded?
Any recent experiments they were a part of and which version they saw?
This saves you having to ask about these things live on the call, and can lead to unique questions you’d only ask based on what you learn.
For example, if I see they use an obscure feature, or use our product in a unique way, I make sure to ask about that. I also look for signs to determine if they’re a power user or brand new. Both will have valuable insights, but different perspectives you’ll want to differentiate.
Yet, you’ll only be able to pull on unique threads like that if you do prep and research beforehand.
3) Bring a friend.
The best way to take notes is to have a team member join you. It does not have to be the same person for all interviews. In fact, it can be beneficial to rotate through others, so many of your colleagues get the experience.
For example, on a typical product team, you may rotate through:
An intern eager to learn
An engineer that wants to hear straight from the customer
Your designer, who also should be eager to talk to customers
The product marketer launching the feature you’re researching and looking for copy inspiration
Having a coworker from your team with you means you have someone who can not only then take notes, but also ask questions you missed or would not have thought of. As you transition to various steps in your template, pause and see if they have a question they’d like to ask. Often, they notice something you missed, or bring a perspective different than you would, deepening your learning.
4) Embrace a little silence.
Sometimes the best question you can ask is a good pause.
By taking a minute to review your notes to find the next question, write down something important they said, or otherwise take a breath, you give space to your interviewee to think more, too.
Often, the person you’re interviewing will fill that space with more detail beyond their initial answer. This often leads to more great insights you wouldn’t expect, or would have missed if you had already moved onto the next question.
This is particularly relevant when they’re recalling a story or example for you; typically, you’ll first receive the high points from them. With some time to pause, I find you’ll usually hear more rich details, some of which will be extremely interesting and relevant to you.
Important: You need to ask good questions to get good answers from customers. Avoid asking “Yes or no” type questions, which will provide limited insights. Instead, focus on asking “What” and “How” questions, which get customers talking because it requires details to answers them. (i.e. – compare asking, “Do you use [Feature X] in the morning?” to “What prompts you to use [Feature X]?”)
5) No matter what, record it!
Even with the best help taking notes, there is no better record to have than a full audio recording (and video if appropriate). Here’s why:
Easy to review something later. You’ll sometimes have a conversation you want to revisit. Hearing it live is better than relying on your memory, or even the best notes.
Extract exact wording. This is great for marketing copy, as well as copy inside your product. Use their words, which are best revealed in a recording.
Build credibility with your team. Too many PMs make stuff up. To differentiate yourself and build confidence especially with skeptical engineers, sharing the recording of exactly what you heard builds huge credibility.
Important: Always ask for permission before starting a recording. Some will say no (definitely respect that, especially given some state laws require it), but for those that say yes, having it for future reference is priceless.
6) Follow up after.
After the interview, your work is not done! There’s a couple things you should still do to maximize your learnings and customer insights:
Review and clean up your notes: Sometimes your notes will get sloppy in the moment. You’ll jot down the best shorthand you can. Be sure to go back, review them, organize them, and add anything else you remember that you didn’t notice the first time. If you think you missed a lot, it can be helpful to listen to the recording to add more notes.
Add Key Takeaways at the top of your notes: This is the veteran move. By putting your biggest 5-10 takeaways at the top, it will make it much easier to revisit the notes later once your memory has blurred or faded. This saves you re-reading all the notes instead of quickly scanning the takeaways to find the right interview.
Followup with your customer: Always message your customer thanking them for their time. Follow up on any issues they raised with you, and of course deliver the gift card or other compensation. This is also the perfect time to ask 1-2 follow up questions if there’s something simple you missed asking.
The little details add up and are what really separate good and average PMs from great ones. By following up after the interview, you can fill in any gaps and easily make up for any mistakes or misses during the interview.
Remember: Interviewing customers is a habit.
Becoming great at interviewing customers is a skill to build like any others. You may not be great at it in the beginning, but by making it a habit and practicing these 6 steps, you’ll make the most of interviewing customers.
Fortunately, these get easier and become more natural the more you do them. Your customers also will become more open to interviews the more it seems like it’s a consistent thing your team or company does.
Further Reading:
Want to improve your customer interview habits and learning? I’ve written more on the subject as I’ve mastered them and taught others:
Or, if you want hands on help building an amazing and insightful customer interview process, with help crafting a script, running interviews, and leveraging the best insights to build great products, then my coaching is the best option for you. Sign up for a free call to discuss your needs here.
For some, it’s shipping a massive feature that really struck a chord in the market. For others, it’s navigating a really complex challenge and finding an elegant solution. Or it could be any number of things like:
Amazing ROI on an opportunity you identified.
The moment you know you’d guided the product to product market fit.
Recognition from the CEO or a mentor you really respect.
After over a decade working in product, I have quite a few of those, and the story today definitely ranks way up there.
One of my proudest moments at KISSmetrics
Way back in 2012, I was the second, 1st PM at KISSmetrics. When I joined, it had been almost 4 months since the original, 1st PM had departed, and at that point, things had gotten pretty messy as no one was really doing what a good product manager does.
For instance, there wasn’t a lot of process, or commitment to talking to customers regularly, nor a way to channel feedback from those that were talking to customers into something actionable for the product team.
Over the course of my first 6 months there, with Hiten’s support, I slowly worked to turn the ship in a variety of ways to get us to be more customer driven. We were already product-led, well before “product-led” was a thing, but as an analytics company, we found it far more comfortable to rely on quantitative data in our KISSmetrics reports than qualitative data from our customers.
That’s why it was a really proud moment when the story you’ll read below describes when every single employee (over 30 at the time) talked to at least one customer that week. It led to one of the biggest morale boosts we had while I was there, and had a huge impact for our customers.
A big win for customers and us
When the KISSmetrics blog sold and some posts were no longer up, I had to rely on the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive to reference the story of this moment when we got everyone in the entire company to talk to at least 1 customer in the same week.
To ensure this story is preserved going forward, I’m reposting this story as told by my coworker, Chuck Liu, back in November 2012. Everything between the lines is his writing.
Getting Things Done: How Moving Fast Doubled Our Feature Engagement
As a SaaS business, we regularly make improvements in our software product because we care about our customers. We also want to give our customers a competitive advantage with our customer data so they can make better business decisions.
When we started working on our new version of Live two weeks ago, we had a lot of discussion about whether we should rewrite the whole thing or just improve the visual designs. I’ll dive more into that a little later, but one of the big influencers for a rewrite was that we wanted to make a dramatic improvement in reliability and uptime — one that wouldn’t be possible with just a simple design upgrade. What’s a new design worth if it doesn’t work?
Funny thing is, when we finished building Live, our customers said it was fantastic…but still there was something missing. We were not getting the engagement or adoption levels we had hoped for.
What went wrong?
Instead of going back to the drawing board, we kept it simple. We figured we’d waste time making decisions and changing a lot of things. It was going to take too long to plan everything out again. We learned that, a lot of times, all it takes is small changes here and there to get that bump in engagement.
In our case at KISSmetrics, we increased our engagement by making small alterations in design thanks to our customer-driven data. Test quicker, faster, and get more things done. Here’s our story:
Building the New Version of Live
KISSmetrics Live lets you monitor top activity trends, filter for specific activity you’re looking for with a new launch or campaign, and see information for individual customers — all in real time.
When we set out to improve our Live tab (which provides people with a real-time data stream of customer activity), we first looked to our secret sauce — customer feedback.
Thanks to our awesome customers, we were able to define a list of requirements and use cases that our Live tool needed to help customers get their jobs done better and faster.
Some key requirements included:
Reliability*** — Flash was causing all sorts of trouble
A way to drill down on specific people, events, or properties
A better way to view your own activity AND monitor the live stream
Getting into individual customer profiles more obviously
Flash was a big offender. It caused loading problems. The different versions caused different errors. It crashed. Customers were not able to see it at all because of their device. Customers lost their whole session.
The old version of Live, complete with annotations, after customer feedback was summarized by Jason Evanish, our product manager. Oof.
Before we got to any visual design improvements, we started with the back end. If our customers couldn’t use our feature, there would be no point in updating the visuals or functionality. Our engineers did the hard part by building a robust back end that didn’t depend on Flash anymore. They were able to deliver the behind-the-scenes magic that powers our new Live tab now.
With reliability improved, we could confidently move forward and implement the rest of our improvements.
Getting to Customer Needs
What do customers actuallyneed? To help answer this, we started with sketches, mockups, and wireframes.
One of the earliest sketches in our design phase from Eric, our support engineer.
We wanted to work with something low fidelity to show customers’ rough user experiences so we could see if our ideas were actually helping them solve their problems. This allowed us to focus on the jobs customers were trying to get done without having colors and major layouts get in the way of the feedback. It allowed us to differentiate what they needed (ways to filter, search, etc.) from what they wanted (button colors, perfect alignment, etc.).
Another idea from one of our designers, Jason Caldwell, with UI notes.
As a company that helps other businesses get to know their people, it was obvious to us that we needed to keep in close contact with our customers. And we did just that. After several cycles of interviews and testing, we were able to get to a point where customers agreed that they would be able to do the jobs they wanted to accomplish with our new improved tool. So we started building.
Problem Solved! …or so we thought.
Final design that was made by our lead designer, Ian, and implemented. Huzzah!
A job well-done, everyone! Let’s move on to the next thing, we thought.
Not so fast.
When we launched the feature two weeks ago, our feedback box started filling up with messages.
Some feedback messages all about stream activity being too big. Yowza. Thanks to everyone who sent in feedback!
A lot of the initial negative feedback focused on how the stream items were so large that it was impossible to scan for customer activity. Some people even wanted to switch back because it was not valuable without the ability to scan easily!
Luckily, we received positive feedback with regard to reliability, search filters, and trend monitoring. All the jobs were accomplished (yeah!), but we had a design issue to solve.
Here’s How We Got The Crazy Boost In Engagement
Yes, this is the actual metric chart with the huge jump. Since our data is tracked on a per-person basis, we knew something great happened.
The small bump in the middle of the graph was when we originally launched the new version of Live. We saw about a 50% increase in that week alone after an email to our existing customers to check it out and use it over the course of the week where it leveled off.
After the feedback wave, we hustled. We didn’t waste any time trying to come up with a quick change that would alleviate the main problem: customers wanted to see more activity and data in the stream.
What we rolled out a week later as Version 2. We increased how much activity you could see, while maintaining some Version 1 design elements on hover.
In the old design, you could see two customer activities, maybe two and half activities, in the stream. In the new design we came up with, you can see ten activities in the same resolution.
Here’s how some of our customers responded:
Valuable feedback turned into fix. Thanks Pejman!
Happy customer with the new fixes and improvements. Thanks Evan!
Best part? We didn’t do any additional marketing or launch emails when we implemented the new version. Our customers organically started using the feature A LOT.
So What Did We Do?
1. We started with tracking customer data. We made sure we established tracking for our Live tab with KISSmetrics. Tracking on a per-person basis steers you away from dangerous vanity metrics and makes you start analyzing the behavior of real people. One event each from a million people is very different from a million events from just one person.
We also got customer feedback data and made sure their problems were solved by our solutions.
2. With customer data, we were able to look into the whole lifecycle of our engagement patterns, all the way back to the first occurrence, as well as drill down into specific customers, if necessary. We were able to benchmark our performance to measure against dips, or in this case, gains.
3. We made small design changes according to most common customer requests. And we did it fast. It’s hard for any business to get everything right the first time. Or the second time. And so on. If you iterate quicker, you’ll learn faster about what worked, what didn’t work, and how to prioritize what’s next.
What a great story!
Because the company had become really in tune with our customers across a variety of methods (as you can see above, it even included tweeting at Hiten), we were able to understand our customer’s frustrations and quickly engage the whole team in a fix.
As I’ve learned over and over again in my career, if you get engineers and designers hearing the words straight from customers, it motivates them deeply to do their best work that customers love.
And this situation was no different as we quickly fixed the feature to be exactly what customers needed.
With that win under our belt, it became commonplace for everyone to ask what was best for the customer, and to go talk to customers if we didn’t feel we knew the answers yet.
You can do this, too.
Wish your company was more product-led, or your product team was more customer focused? I can help you.
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You can have the best idea in the world, but until you find someone besides yourself that wants it, it’s not really a business. To find those people, as Paul Graham wrote in a recent essay, you have to “Do Things That Don’t Scale.” The problem is, it is often unclear what those “Things” are.
Before we get into the massive list of tactics below, I want to be clear on what to do with this list and what to expect when you find a few tactics you want to follow:
Understand you’re going to have a low success rate. There is no silver bullet for finding users for your startup, just tactics like the ones below that work to varying degrees depending on your idea and market. Even for good channels, a 10-20% response rate is normal, so don’t get discouraged.
Don’t worry about scaling! None of the ideas below are really scalable when taken literally. However, like Paul Graham said in his essay: don’t worry about scaling right now. Just do whatever it takes to find people and the scalable methods will emerge later. If you have a cofounder worried about scaling early, have them read the Paul Graham essay.
Remember your manners and personalize. You’re likely asking people to talk to you when you have nothing but an idea and maybe a prototype of some sort. Be respectful in communicating with them. Also realize that no one likes a form note, so the more you personalize it and make it feel like they’re special, the better chance you have of a response. Elizabeth Yin of Launchbit has an awesome slideshare with advice on reaching out to customers effectively.
Don’t get banned. If you abuse any of the tactics below, many of the sites and groups will ban or block you. Pay attention to restrictions to how often you can do certain things (like Meetup.com allows you to message 12 users per day). Realize the more times you break a terms of service, the more likely you are to get noticed and banned. On the flip side, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Just don’t be egregious.
A special thanks to these people that helped edit & provide ideas for this post:
95 Ways to Find Your First Customers for Customer Development and Sales
Linkedin:
1) Use Linkedin Answers: Look for people asking questions around your problem and market or ask your own.
2) JoinLinkedin Groups: Join Linkedin Groups for your target market. Engage in discussions there, reach out to people that post relevant ideas or questions, or post looking for help.
3) UseSearch + InMail: If you know the kind of person you want to talk to, try searching for them (like VP Marketing at companies between 25-200 employees) and using InMail to message them.
4) Check your existing connections: People change careers a lot more than you may expect. You may have also lost touch with an old classmate that is now in just the right market. Either way, your existing connects are very likely to respond and you’ll have access to their email address, which is better than their LinkedIn inbox.
5) Ask your connections for intros: It’s quite possible the perfect people to talk to aren’t already a connection, but they may be one degree away. Don’t be afraid to ask connections you have a good relationship with for an intro.
6) Post to the Linkedin Social Network: Linkedin now has status updates you can post. It’s a lot less active than other networks, but it can’t hurt to see if anyone notices.
7) Run Linkedin Ads: Linkedin is the network for professionals and their careers. If your startup idea has them as the target customer (say marketers or executives), then an alternative to the high maintenance of Linkedin Groups can be to run ads. Linkedin also has a partner network for a lot of business content sites which can further the reach. There’s a great guide on KISSmetrics for Linkedin Ads here.
Facebook:
8) Look up your friends: For most people, their closest people in their life now and in the past are on Facebook. If you haven’t already exhausted your existing network on Linkedin, definitely look to see if any of your friends are in the market and worth talking to.
9) Ask your friends: There’s also a lot of random people you met in college and other times. You never know who knows who so you have to ask. I just got introduced to another person in tech through someone I was in a beirut league with in college.
10) Look for Fan Pages: There’s fan pages for just about anything you can think of. People that run those pages in your market are great people to talk to both as potential customers and to see if they’ll post something on your behalf on their page. Friends who have leveraged this have found it cheaper than Facebook ads, even when they pay the Fan Page owner. Just click the “message” button on the fan page.
11) RunTargeted Facebook Ads: If you think you really know your audience demographics, then running a small set of Facebook ads to a landing page, can be a great way to garner interest.
12) Try the new Graph Search: I haven’t had a lot of success using it, but it’s worth searching for things related to your market to see if anything else turns up, especially now that you can message people you aren’t friends with. In particular, Facebook has a great geographic filtering ability you won’t find on Twitter or otherwise.
Twitter: (My personal favorite)
13) Ask your followers: If you have any kind of follower base at all, you should definitely tweet about who you want to talk to. If you don’t have a big follower base, ask the people with bigger followings you’re friends with to ReTweet you. As you develop your idea, you may want to tweet different requests, which may be seen by different people since no one sees every tweet of their followers.
14) Ask your followers for referrals: It’s not just about who you know. The bigger benefit is who your network knows so be sure to not just ask people you follow or follow you if they’re a fit, but ask others for referrals.
15) Run Twitter Ads: Twitter ads can be a cheap way to reach people you’d never know otherwise. We got thousands of sign ups for MyAnalytics App at KISSmetrics using them. Like any channel, the more mature it gets, the more expensive it will become, so by 2015, this may not be nearly as economical (like many Adwords today).
16) Ask Twitter Accounts to tweet on your behalf: Just like you can ask Fan Pages on Facebook to talk about you, you can reach out to Twitter accounts in your target market to see if they’ll tweet something for you or ReTweet you. If it makes sense for your business, you can also ask some celebrities via tools like BuySellAds and Sponsored Tweets.
17) Search for relevant Hashtags: Hashtags are a big part of Twitter for many markets. For example, in the analytics market, there’s #Measure. Find accounts using the hashtag and reach out to them and join the conversations happening. Find relevant hashtags by asking others or checking out sites like Hashtags.org
18) Join a Twitter Chat: Many groups have regular chats that can be found based on the group’s hashtag they use. A great example is the Community Manager chat, #cmgrchat. This is a great way to ask questions and engage your target audience if they’re holding Twitter chats.
19) Search Twitter for People Talking about your Problem: Remember that time you were really annoyed at a company? What did you probably do? You tweeted about it. Try searching different ways for people talking about frustrations and you’re bound to find people happy to talk because they’re excited someone is going to make things better. I’ve successfully used this to talk to people about, of all things, email migration.
Email:
20) Email relevant friends/contacts: There’s a right way and wrong way to do this. Yes, you can spam all your contacts in one big dump asking for help. What will yield a better result is if you invest the time to be more targeted in who you reach out to. Close friends and family won’t mind and those actually related to your target industry.
21) Start a personal newsletter: I’ve known some people to start a personal newsletter to have their contacts *opt into* that then regularly updates them on your startup journey and can ask for specific help then repeatedly in the newsletter. This works great for getting mentors and early supporters engage in a small ask (just opt in) and later help more as you have different needs.
22) Use Rapportive to find emails & cold email: Somehow you may have stumbled upon someone you’d *love* to talk to, but you don’t know them. You can use tools like Rapportive to guess the email address and send them a personal note asking to speak with them about what you’re working on. You can find more advice on this tactic here and here.
23) Make your GChat status a call for help/intros: This may seem simple and passive, but you’d be surprised who reads your GChat statuses. Adding a note of what you’re looking for and leave it up for a few days and you might just get a few people to help you out. This works for other chat tools as well, of course.
24) Make your signature a call for help/intros: Just like your GChat status is a long tail way to get people’s attention, you can use your email signature the same way. Below your name in your signature is the perfect place to let people know. Don’t forget to update your mobile app’s signature as well as your computer’s.
Meetup.com:
25) Join & Attend Meetups in your category: Meetup has become an amazing hub of groups around just about any topic you can think of. Whether you’re making an app for LARPers or a hardware startup, there’s a meetup group likely in your area you should join to meet and talk with group members in your target market.
26) Ask organizers to message the group: Organizers have unique privileges to send messages to their groups. You don’t get what you don’t ask for, so don’t be afraid to reach out to group organizers to talk to them (they may be a great target user) and see if they’ll message the group. They often make no money in running their groups, so you can think of them like the Facebook Fan Page owners previously mentioned.
27) Ask the organizer to allow you to address the audience at a Meetup: Potentially even better than getting into everyone’s cluttered inbox is the opportunity to address the whole group at one of their events. This allows people most interested to immediately approach you. This can be a great consolation ask if they don’t want to message their whole group since this requires no work on their part.
28) Mention in your Meetup profile what you’re looking for: Like the GChat status, this is a passive move that alone won’t get you everyone to talk to, but you’d be surprised how often people read the profiles of other new members in a group. Be sure to include your desired contact method if you want Meetup members to reach out to you.
29) Message users on Meetup.com: Not every member of a Meetup group attends every event and if there’s no upcoming meetups or it’s a group outside your area, you can still reach users by sending them individual messages. Per a great write up by Melissa Tsang, Meetup has a limit of 12 messages per day, which is still enough to get some quality responses as she writes in detail about.
30) Create a Meetup group: Just because a group doesn’t exist, does not mean there would not be interest. Countless people have launched successful businesses based on the idea of organizing a high value group. Just remember that if you do this, not only will you build trust and relationships with all the attendees, you’ll be the organizer who can send all those messages, decide who addresses the audience, etc.
Your Blog:
31) Write a blog post about the problem you’re solving: If you feel you know some of the key problems that users are facing in your target market, write about it! If it resonates with them, they will share, upvote, tweet, etc it and some will even sign up as long as you remember to have a call to action to sign up at the end. You can see an example here, where 1,000 reads turned into 10 sign ups and a look at some famous companies that started with a blog here.
32) Post your blog to discussion sites in appropriate categories: Sites like Reddit and HackerNews are awesome to access established audiences for your market. Before posting, do your homework so you actually post it somewhere it’s welcome; a baker would not be well served to post their baking innovation on HackerNews, but a marketing startup would do very well posting to Inbound.org. By posting it to these sites you’ll significantly increase the reach of #31 and might also get some interesting commenters there you can reach out to like this example from Vero.
33) Update your About Page for what you’re looking for: Just like #23 and #28, it is always beneficial to list what your looking for on your About page. The most engaged people on your blog are likely to click to your about page to see who you are and if they see this, they can help even if they don’t read your specific blog post about your idea.
34) Make a page on your blog just about your market: Depending on your blogging platform, this could be easy or hard, but it can never hurt to organize your information in a way that people can easily navigate it. If you’re writing a whole series of items or have already created a lot of related content, this can be a great way to assert your expertise and act as a honeypot to draw in interested potential customers.
35) Start a blog just to talk about your industry: Don’t already have a blog or don’t want to talk about your startup on your existing blog? Then start a new one. It helps to have more content than just one post, so if you go this route, try to have a few posts you can post over a few weeks. If you know your startup’s domain, you can make this the start of your company’s blog. Especially for blogs like this, try to get users to either sign up for an email list or to explicitly sign up for customer interviews.
Other Blogs:
36) Reach out to other bloggers for interviews: Chances are, there are other people writing about the market and potentially even the problem you’re interested in solving. These people are generally very knowledgable on the market and so they make great customer interview candidates and can also shed a light on more places to look for people in your market.
37) Ask other bloggers to run an ad for you: Many bloggers, like those fan page owners, don’t make a lot of money, so they may be willing to run an ad for you for very cheap or mention you in a relevant post just because they’re nice or like you.
38) Ask other bloggers to write about you: Going beyond an ad (which may be seen on multiple posts) you can see if a blogger is willing to write a whole post about you. If you’ve already interviewed them and they’re excited about your idea, this may be an easier ask than you think (and thus do it for free).
39) Ask to write a guest blog post: If your own blog has no audience, the best thing you can do is get a post you’d write on your market/problem on a blog that does have your desired audience. Bloggers love having more content to share, so if it’s a good post, they’re very likely to be willing to publish it. Look for guidelines and advice on guest blogging on sites you want to write for like on KISSmetrics’s blog.
40) Use Blog lists to find the right blogs: Not sure who to reach out to? Sites like Technorati, Blog Catalog and AllTop are great for finding out top blogs for things like Top Fashion Blogs or just about any other category. You can also look for other influencers on sites like Klout and PeerIndex.
41) Reach out to commenters: If you see passionate comments on someone else’s blog, follow the link and the profile/name from the comment to find out who they are and reach out to them. People usually will include a link back to their own blog, About.me profile or Twitter account from such a comment. This will give you a more direct, personal way to reach them, and avoid writing a bunch of comments, which the blog owner may then mark as spam and never be seen.
42) Reach out to people that ask relevant questions: If you can see who asked a good question related to the problem you’re solving, reach out to them using any methods the site allows to see if they’ll do an interview.
43) Answer questions about your problem/market: If you’re already knowledgable on your market, don’t be afraid to jump in and answer open questions. The people that ask can become great people to talk to and are more likely to be responsive if you already helped them with your answer. Don’t be afraid to drop a mention of what you’re working on right in the answers. Thomas Schranz at Blossom.io has done a great job of doing this in a helpful, non-spammy way.
44) Reach out to great answers: If you see someone who has given some great answers, they are likely very knowledgeable in your market and the problem you’re solving. Reach out to them to do an interview. Obviously, you’ll want to be careful it’s not a competitor. ;)
45) Ask questions to see who answers: There’s no reason not to join the conversation by asking questions as well. Reach out to the authors of any answers you find satisfactory or interesting. The best part of asking your own questions is that virtually every Q&A site will send you alerts when your question gets answered so you can easily keep track of them even if you ask a few.
46) Put Calls to Action in your Profile and Answer Subheadings: Sites like Quora allow you to put whatever subheading you want below an answer, so don’t be afraid to mention something about your startup there. Also, like the other sections, always put in your profile what you’re up to so anyone that checks you out (even for answers you may have written in other areas) can find you and potentially reach out.
47) Approach people in native environments: Would your target customer be found in a coffee shop, grocery store or mall? Then go there and try talking to people. Like anything this is a skill. This can come off as harassing or creepy (and the store may ask you to leave) or it can work great. The founders of Sincerely have been know to walk over to a nearby mall and offer strangers money and app credits so they can see how a user uses their app.
48) Look for people unhappy with a service: Are you trying to make a real world activity (like finding a locksmith or a good mechanic) better? Then looking for disappointed people near that service may be just the unhappy customers you could delight with your service. After taking a bad cab ride, you’d be the perfect person to explain all the reasons you’d likely prefer to take an Uber next time.
49) Go to conferences for your target audience: Just about every industry has a few conferences related to it. Established businesses get booths, thought leaders speak and many deals get done. You should be there too as you’ll never find such a concentration of people in your industry. Take advantage of attendee lists to figure out who you want to meet with. Offer to volunteer or just ask for a discount ticket because you’re a startup and you’ll be surprised what you may get.
50) Go to trade organization events: Depending on the business you’re in there may be regularly “Chamber of Commerce” style events where your target customers may be. This would work especially well if you’re targeting people who own brick and mortar stores or provide contract services.
51) Go to places you know they’ll congregate: Have an idea for people that own boats? Then going to your local marina is a *great* place to find boaters to talk to. Golfers might just be at the golf course or driving range, frequent fliers at an airport and teachers at a school. Timing is obviously everything, so be cognizant of when someone looks like they’re approachable and have time to kill versus trying to hurry somewhere else.
52) Ask people on long train rides or airplanes: I’m always amazed by the kinds of people I meet when riding Amtrak or flying. Sometimes serendipity can work in crazy ways, so don’t be afraid to tell random people you meet what you’re working on. They might just be helpful or someone nearby will overhear and jump in.
Your existing user base (even if small)
53) Offer a user Referral Program: You need a great product before you should be trying to aggressively hack your growth, but that shouldn’t stop you from offering an incentive to your existing users to help you get more users. They likely know where to find more of them (their social graph, emailing friends, etc) so a little incentive will get them to help you out. There’s a great Quora thread on the subject here.
54) Ask your users via email: Especially in the early days, you should regularly talk to your users and be updating your whole user base regularly. As part of those updates for new features, major bug fixes and outreach, don’t be afraid to ask them for referrals to more users or people to talk to.
55) Always ask your users when you talk: Whether you’re doing a customer development interview, usability testing or just talking to a user about a support case, remember that you don’t get what you don’t ask for. Ask them both if they know anyone specific who might also be interested in your startup as well as places they generally find other people. The latter may turn out to be a meetup, a Twitter chat or something else that is very target rich for you, but you would never have known.
Craigslist
56) Look for relevant postings: Does your startup idea do anything that is relevant to one of the many Craigslist categories? Quite a few companies have had great success building a massive business off just 1 category (see below). Try reaching out to posters to talk to them and later you can potentially scale this. AirBnb is the most famous recent example, which Andrew Chen highlights well here.
57) Make your own post: Just like you can respond to posters, you can also make your own posting in the appropriate category and filter the ensuing responses to find the right people to talk to. A friend working on a startup recently used this to success by making a basic post and then sending all respondents a qualifying survey to make sure they were a match. A small cash incentive in the posting will generally drive a solid response rate.
Forums, Micro Networks & Communities on the web
58) Join in the conversations on the sites: Just about any community exists on the web today. Many of them are in places you would have no idea exists until you dig in. If you can’t find them initially, ask some of the early users you meet using some of the other tactics listed in this post. Once there, look around for people already talking about your problem you’re solving and join that conversation to learn more. You can also post new discussions specifically on your target subject to see who is interested.
59) Message individual users of interest: If you see someone talking a lot about the problems or opportunities you’re working on, see if you can send a private message to them on the forum or at worst just reply to one of their comments asking to speak with them. Anyone sufficiently passionate will be excited to share their thoughts.
60) Reach out to moderators: If this is truly a community site (and not another company’s forums) then the moderators are often the most passionate people of all. Reach out to them as great people to talk to and learn from. As a moderator, they’ll be spending as much time as anyone following all the conversations there so they could provide valuable insight beyond their own experiences. If it is a company’s forum, then tread a bit more carefully depending on if your idea is competitive or complimentary.
61) Ask Moderators to post on your behalf or run an ad: Many forums on the web are run with very little revenue and more as a passion project. Therefore, much like some of the previously mentioned Fan Pages, etc, they may be open to posting on your behalf or running an ad for a very small fee. They’ll know the ins and outs of the site, which will give you a better chance of reaching the maximum audience.
Google Adwords & other ad networks
62) Run Adwords with a landing page: An efficient (though at times costly) way to build an early user list is to run a quick, targeted Adwords campaign linking to a sign up landing page. You can learn how to set that up here. There’s also good advice on evaluating the success or failure of such a campaign here and here. Realize that paying to get a bunch of people on a list doesn’t validate much on its own. It’s then using that list to reach out to users and talk to them and ask them to pay for something that does.
63) Run ads on lesser known networks: Google may have the largest audience, but not the cheapest or best targeted. Consider your market and think about if other ad networks would work better. There’s everything to consider from Yahoo and Bing to mobile ad networks or blogger ad networks. You can find a list of alternatives here.
64) Have your SEO basics in order: What’s better than the perfect Adwords campaign? Showing up organically for searches on your problem. Great SEO takes time, but you can make sure to have the basics right from day 1 so that you can at least get a trickle of interested users to your blog or site. There are a lot of great tips on the KISSmetrics blog including this great SEO Guide for Beginners.
Newsletters
65) Talk to newsletter owners: Just like passionate people often run forums simply for the love of it, others will run newsletters. If you already subscribe to them, don’t be afraid to just reply to the newsletter and ask for a few minutes to talk to them. Most people are excited to hear from people who read their work!
66) Buy Ads using a newsletter ad tool: There’s a great newsletter ad network called Launchbit. It can be a great help in both finding out what newsletters exist in a category and allowing you to quickly set up an ad campaign across multiple such newsletters.
67) Ask for mentions in a newsletter: In addition to talking to newsletter owners as potential early adopters, you can also ask them for exposure. Many newsletters have no formal advertising system like Launchbit, so often you can just go direct to them to ask for a mention for little or no cost. The more excited they are for what you’re doing, the less likely it will cost you anything.
68) Start your own industry newsletter: If you don’t find any newsletters in your category or are think there’s room for another one, then don’t be afraid to start your own! It will take time to build up an audience, but it’s a great way to put to work all those signups you’ve been driving to your landing page. Often times, it’s easier to first get people on a newsletter and then later convert them to a paying customer.
Complimentary Startups
69) Reach out to complimentary startups: No matter your industry or idea, there will be others in the market you compliment. At KISSmetrics, there were many other SaaS tools we were happy to integrate with and swap customer/mailing lists. In most cases, our analytics was something their users needed and many of our customers could use a support tool, call tracking metrics or track a MailChimp email campaign. The best case for success with this method is to target companies of similar size (ie- mailing lists and user bases are of similar size) as that assures an equally mutually beneficial relationship.
70) Ask to guest post on their blog: Just like there are industry blogs run by volunteers and people just generally passionate about the space, there are also companies with prominent blogs. One of the biggest challenges they often have is having enough content. Reach out to someone on the marketing team or any contact info you see on the blog and propose topics that allow you to naturally link to what you’re doing.
71) Find their users and reach out to them directly: If you think your idea would be helpful to that company’s audience, look for people actively engaging and discussing the company on all the platforms I’ve been writing about throughout this post. While it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission, remember again to use tact so as to not be spammy or offend the company.
Your Competition
72) Watch what they do: As the saying goes, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Chances are your competition has figured out at least a couple of spots where your customers exist and you can enter the conversation there as well. In more modern terms, if something they do works, then consider Jobs’s favorite quote, “Great artists steal.” Like their Facebook page, and follow the company and key employees on Twitter for some inspiration based on what they link to.
73) Look for social mentions: Especially if you’re trying to disrupt a large incumbent, there’s likely many people talking about your competition. Look for especially people complaining about the product or experience. These are perfect people to reach out to learn from and hopefully convert to giving you a try. This also works for other startups you’re competing with.
74) Use research tools: Tools like MixRank, which shows the ads a site has been running, and Spyfu, which shows you the expected ad spend and keywords purchased for competition. If you’re looking for inspiration on the kinds of ads to try, those tools will help you get there.
Data Research Tools
75) Use Datanyze: This tool will tell you what apps any of the top 1,000,000+ websites are using as well as what they’ve recently quit. It’s transformed more than one sales team I know and provides priceless information on the state of just about any web SaaS market. Their free demo can help you understand market share, while the pricey version has alerts for specific tools and lets you see what any site is currently using.
76) Leverage tools that tell you contact info for key roles: If you know the persona of your target customer, then a list like Hoover’s or Jigsaw can help you find some of those types of users at especially bigger companies. Note that this lists they have aren’t 100% accurate, nor are they cheap. Try to hustle access via a friend or advisor.
Your College, University or School
77) Ask your professors: Many professors live vicariously through their students, and are happy to help out current students as well as alumni. If you had a professor that you had a particularly strong relationship with that is relevant to your startup, definitely reconnect with them. Also realize that many professors will talk to alumni who they never taught. Most professors have industry contacts they can help you with introductions as well as be a great channel to their students as potential customers or hires whether via emailing them or letting you address the class.
78) Leverage your alumni network: Whether it’s old clubs you belonged to, a fraternity or sorority or simply the alumni group for the city you’re in, you’d be amazed what people may be doing after school regardless of major or study habits. Don’t be afraid to both reach out to old classmates and club members as well as reach out to the clubs themselves for help from current members. Every student group I was in loved to hear from alumni.
79) Use your alumni directory: Many schools have searchable alumni directories that can allow you to track down contacts at some of the most powerful positions in the world. The shared experience of going to the same school is often all you need to mention to get someone who normally would be unreachable to suddenly be accessible to you for a meeting, mentorship or the right introduction.
80) Reach out to student groups: Even if you weren’t a member of the group, student groups are usually excited to hear from alumni. If any student group fits as a target customer for your startup, you should reach out to them. Playing the alumni card often gets you a great response and can often lead to offers to help you in many ways. They can email their list, let you address the group at a meeting or assist in recruiting help.
Leveraging the Physical World
81) Post an offer in public places: Bulletin boards still physically exist in many places and people still put up physical signs for all kinds of things. The stereotype are things like meetings and guitar lessons, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get attention being creative. If you know there are places your target audience will go to or pass by, consider posting something to get their attention. If you’re doing a Concierge MVP for your idea, this is a great way to start.
82) Use handouts, fliers or mailers: If hanging something up and hoping people will read it and respond doesn’t work for you, consider a more 1 to 1 communication through handouts you can give out or mail. One person I met that had a parking ticket app would carry fliers with him and put their flier under the wiper of a car that already had a parking ticket on it as well. It had a massive conversion rate. Get creative like this pizza shop!
83) Buy someone’s service: So you want to start a business serving artists, or maybe housecleaners or some other service? Try buying their service and take a few minutes before or after their service to talk to them. If they care about customer service, they’ll be happy to discuss their problems with you. A friend of mine started his mobile invoicing startup based on the problems his cleaning lady had tracking payments.
Kickstarter & other funding sites
84) Look for products getting funded in your industry: Funding sites are booming which means all kinds of companies and ideas are getting funded. Others in your industry can be incredible sources of knowledge not just on how to run a campaign, but what they’ve learned from interacting with their new customers.
85) Ask complimentary funded projects for help: A fellow crowd-funded project that has finished their funding will be very busy trying to deliver their product to their supporters, but they might just be willing to send a message, tweet or post on your behalf. If their funding is still open, you may be able to swap promotion to your audience and theirs. Remember: You don’t get what you don’t ask for!
86) Reach out to users that backed the project: Every Kickstarter has a tab for Backers which includes their profiles, which you can click to see what else they’ve backed. While they have no messaging system (Indiegogo does), with their full names on Kickstarter, you can likely Google or search Twitter or Linkedin for them and message them there.
87) Put your idea on a funding site: If you feel you’ve validated your idea enough, then running your own crowd-funding campaign is a great way to validate interest for your idea. There is tons of information on the web about making the most of a campaign, just search on Google or Quora.
Youtube
88) Talk to Youtube Channel owners: Youtube is filled with creators making content on all kinds of markets. If you go to Youtube’s channel search, you can search for your category and see who has channels and how many subscribers they reach. Just like you can talk to bloggers as experts in a market, you can learn a lot by interviewing channel owners.
89) Ask channel owners for promotion: If your idea resonates with the channel owner, there’s a good chance you can get them to talk about you on one of their episodes or maybe even have you as a guest. They may charge you a fee, but if it’s your exact target audience, it might just be worth it.
90) Start your own channel: If you think video is a great medium to communicate with your audience then creating a channel to connect with them may be a great option. Just like starting your own Meetup group, it can initially be hard, but once you’ve built an audience it will have a great, long-term payoff.
91) Run ads on Youtube: Youtube leverages Google’s ad powers to run targeted ads. You only pay for the ads people fully watch (not skip) so if video seems a powerful way to communicate with your audience, it’s worth experimenting. Remember, Dropbox started with nothing but a video and got over 75,000 signups (although they did not run it as a video ad).
Your own Product:
92) Put your name on it: If any part of your product can be seen by a non-customer, make sure your name is on it. This is easy, free marketing that your customers can provide for you simply in using your product. KISSinsights (now Qualaroo) had incredible growth without doing any paid advertising because of a simple link in each of their pop up surveys.
93) Make sharing an option for more access: If your product has metered usage, then you will always have customers who are uncomfortable moving up to a new, costlier tier. MixPanel has a free 50,000 events plan that can become a free 175,000 plan if you put their logo on your homepage.I’ve seen countless startups with that logo in their footer for just this reason, so don’t think your users won’t do it until you try.
95) Run ads in your side project apps: A number of my friends have built apps as side projects that end up having a few thousand users that never really monetized or amounted to anything. As a free user base you can always insert your own ads into your app. I met one of the founders at QBix that built the Groups App for the iPhone (helping you organize your contacts) and they used this tactic to drive people to their other apps. You can also send them to mobile landing pages to avoid building anything.
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Woah…that was a lot. Thank you for making it to the end.
I hope a few of these have inspired you and point you in the right direction to find those difficult first few users. While some of them are paid options, I hope you see how many alternatives there are to paid acquisition on Day 1.
I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of the Lean Entrepreneur* and have been reading it on my commute for the past few weeks. After having spent time reading many other Lean books and blog posts, I’m excited to see this book released. In the interest of keeping a review MVP, here’s why you should, and shouldn’t read this book:
This book is like an FAQ on Lean. It beats down all the stereotypes (like Lean is only for software) with specific examples and thoughtful explanation.
2. You want to hear real life case studies of Lean in action.
The authors went to great lengths to get great case studies from everything from hardware companies to commercial cleaning products to prove that you can apply lean to *any type of business*.
3. You want help evaluating how you’re really doing at being Lean.
One of the best things about this book is that between the concepts and case studies are a ton of checklists that help you see if you’re really properly evaluating your company at each step of the lean process.
I’ve been doing lean basically full time for 3.5 years now and I still learned a lot. You’re bound to learn a few new things.
2. You like detailed, helpful diagrams and pictures.
Sorry, I know we’re all supposed to love @FakeGrimlock, but I’m underwhelmed by his drawings. I don’t think his drawings added much to the book or were helpful other than to give the book a lighter, more accessible feel.
3. You were hoping for the nitty-gritty details of exactly what to do.
This book won’t help you write your customer development interview script (here’s a post for that) nor help you find the phone numbers of your customers. What it will do is answer the critics’s questions and get you asking the right questions about your business.
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Overall, I thought this was a solid book that adds a lot to the conversation of the evolving Lean Startup movement. I read a lot of books and this falls in at a 7.5 on my rating scale.
It goes much further and deeper into how to approach actually doing Lean in your business than Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup book. I hope that some of the people at companies with case studies in the book will share some more tactical advice that didn’t fit in this book.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, May 2005
One of the most common questions I’ve heard over the past few weeks from younger members of our community, especially students, is how to build a career in startups. Unlike climbing the corporate ladder, it’s not a straight forward, linear process. As I just made a major move in my career to join KISSmetrics, I’d like to share how I ended up going from Boston startup connector to SF Product Manager. This will also help answer questions I know some of you have about how I landed this job.
Connecting the Dots – The unorthodox journey of one startuper
To really begin this story, you have to go back to my days at oneforty. When I joined oneforty, I was given the title of Customer Development Manager and asked to help make oneforty a Lean Startup. Since I had only spent a few months working part time with John Prendergast as his cust dev intern, I really had very little experience. Laura Fitton, oneforty’s founder, took a leap of faith I could learn it, but she also was wise enough to know I could not do it alone. That’s why she set me up to have mentors from day 1.
Immediately upon starting at oneforty, Laura connected me with two Valley Lean experts she got to know while she was out west raising money for oneforty and Pivotal Labs worked to build V1.0 of the site. These people were internet mentor legends, Dan Martell and Hiten Shah. Once a month I seemed to find myself on the phone getting what I would happily call an “ass-kicking” from Dan helping me realize all the things I was doing wrong and most importantly, could do to improve my custdev methods. Roughly every other month I would have a similar discussion with Hiten.
These discussions were priceless in my career development. I would take copious amounts of notes and seriously reflect upon what Hiten and Dan discussed with me each time. I would also share these notes with Laura to make sure I truly understood them and to force myself to teach someone what I learned (a great tool for deepening your understanding).
A Chance Meeting
Fast forward 12 months at oneforty and it is April 2011. I’ve learned a ton about customer development and lean startups, enough that Trevor Owens, founder of Lean Startup Machine (which was just getting off the ground at the time) invited me to be a mentor at the Lean Startup Machine event in New York City. As destiny/fate/karma would have it, Hiten Shah was also one of the mentors for the weekend.
Being a mentor traveling in from another city is very different from mentoring in your home city. When you’re in your city, you likely only stop by for a brief period of time that fits your schedule. But, when you go to another city, you find you spend the vast majority of your time there…which both Hiten and I did in New York City.
After Saturday’s activities wrapped up, all the mentors went out for drinks. This turned into an audition and test for me.
With Hiten Shah to my right and Patrick Vlaskovits (co-author of the awesome Lean book at custdev.com) grilling me on all sorts of topics from lean startups, to lessons learned at my first real startup job to topics on psychology and body language. At the time I was dead set on leaving oneforty to start my own company so all Hiten said was, “if you raise money for your idea, come out west and I’ll give you some intros.” He also encouraged me to quit ASAP to start doing my own thing if that’s what I was passionate about. Coincidentally I did just that on Monday back in Boston.
Out on my own, but on the Radar
After leaving oneforty, I set out to start my company I’ve always dreamed of. After spinning my tires for 6 months though, I found myself pretty empty handed and a bit discouraged. After a meeting with Sim Simeonov, I refocused my efforts on the lean startups movement. After a month of interviews and discussions, I published the results, which caught Hiten’s eye when they were tweeted out.
Hiten DM’d me after my first post and we had a call to discuss my findings, which confirmed his suspicious: Lean as a concept is far ahead of actual solid execution of it in the startup world. At the end of the chat, I mentioned that I was planning a trip out to the Valley in early December and asked if we could meet while I was in town. He agreed.
Meeting in SF and an Offer
When I met with Hiten in December during my Valley trip, we barely talked about KISSmetrics or my potentially working there. The vast majority of our one hour chat was about my strengths and weaknesses and where I was at in my startup career.
Hiten tried to sell me on the idea that coming to the Valley would solve many of my problems, but I presented a series of challenges that I felt prevented it from being the right decision for me. He countered I could come work for him and it would resolve many of them. I noted the offer, and it did intrigue me, but it mostly sat just sat in the back of my mind.
By the end of the trip, I was much more interested, thinking it may be the next logical step in my career. On the flight back, I emailed Hiten expressing great interest in the role, especially as I discovered I could potentially be filling the shoes of the departed Cindy Alvarez (who just weeks before my visit had left KISSmetrics to join Yammer).
Getting Serious
With the holidays fast approaching, Hiten and I took things slowly, talking about the the potential first in loose terms then in much more specifics. After one phone call where Hiten lifted the proverbial kimono on everything I wanted to ask regarding KISSmetrics as a business, all that was left was an answer to the question, “When can you come meet more of my team for an interview?”
With that, I booked tickets to take a quiet trip to SF for the interview in early February.
Sealing the Deal
With an interview scheduled and a focus on landing this job, I employed my proven job acquisition system that requires me to produce, insightful, valuable content for KISSmetrics. I happened to be reading a psychology book at the time and so I produced a massive document on different ways KISSmetrics could improve their site based on the principles I found in the book. I also aggregated all my lean learnings in one place so the rest of the team could see the credibility in Lean that Hiten knew I had.
I wasn’t sure what to expect in the interview. All I had were the names of the people I would be talking to and a vague idea that we’d talk about the KISSmetrics product. Most of the interview turned out to be focused on implementation: how would you do this, what’s wrong with that, what would you do in this circumstance.
Despite not really preparing for such questions, I was able to crush the interview for one simple reason: the last startup idea I had worked on was a Lean Product Management tool. While the idea didn’t pan out, it led to me talking to 40 people who run product at companies. Through this, I picked up on many best practices and common mistakes. I was armed with more than enough fodder for the interview and believe I’m really armed to take on my first full time product role.
Conclusion – You Never Know…
Whether it’s lessons learned in a failed startup idea’s customer development interviews or an event you’re randomly invited to in another city, you never know what will lead to the next great opportunity in your career. Startups are all about embracing serendipity. Embrace the machine and you never know where you’ll end up.
Do you have an example of unrelated events that looking back were instrumental in a step or moment in your career?
For the past couple of months I’ve been working on ideas in the lean startup space. As explained in previousposts, it seemed logical: I have a solid background in it from my days at oneforty as well as consulting before and after and the subject is hot now with Eric Ries’s book out, Steve Blank’s book coming soon and a seeming never-ending discussion about the principles in our community.
After initially exploring the opportunity to provide tools for performing customer development, I pivoted to the broader idea of providing a tool to help with Lean Product Management. Initially, the response was great; I wrote a blog post on the concept of Lean Product Management and it was universally loved. It’s the most read blog post on my blog ever and it generated significant inbound interest. At the same time, I talked to quite a few people that had interesting feedback on the process and where they were coming up short. I also met a number of people and companies that needed help in the areas I was looking for the product to work. However, in the end, a few major issues are leading me to place this idea on the scrap heap with the other previous 8 ideas I’ve evaluated over the past year.
The Concept – Product Chasm
The biggest problem in developing this idea was a major gap between the buy-in to the concept I wrote about and the actual execution of the concept.
In the product management world, it seems everyone has a different way of implementing it. Some people are absolutely hardcore and have impeccable wikis and project management tools (like a 1-2 punch of Jira and Confluence). Others keep it loose with simply a Google Spreadsheet and a Kanban board (both real and virtual). Finally others have utter chaos and have absolutely destroyed their project management tool by jamming everything in there (usually Pivotal Tracker or BaseCamp). It seems individuality is greatly valued in the world of product management…
This presents a series of problems:
1) There is no silver bullet
The difference between a Kanban board and a wiki based product management tool is significant. This would mean any tool that was valuable for one is unlikely to be interesting to the other.
2) Marketing is a nightmare
With everyone having their own ideas on how to implement product management principles, targeting and acquiring a customer would be extremely difficult. Even those that I confidently believed had problems in their process often either A) did not perceive there was a problem or B) even if they knew they had a problem, they weren’t actively seeking a solution.
3) There was no MVP
As I talked to over 40 people who owned product at their company, I found no consensus on what part of the process was broken for them; without this consensus, there was no way to build an MVP. More importantly, the lack of consensus showed no agreement on a core problem which could be used as the tip of the spear towards acquiring customers and building out a platform over time; building a Lean Product Management tool would take significant time to become a complete, full life cycle solution, but there was no clear path for doing so.
A Greater Problem – Passion?
One of the most fascinating things about my trip to Silicon Valley in December was seeing how entrepreneurs interact with one another there versus here in Boston. Specifically, I’m talking about the first questions an entrepreneur is asked about their startup/idea. There is no right or wrong here, just different.
In Boston, common questions are:
What stage are you at?
How will you make money?
Do you have any customers?
In the Valley, common questions are:
Why are you passionate about this idea?
How will you acquire customers?
What is the big vision for your idea?
Of all the questions, the one I found most jarring was, “Why are you passionate about this idea?”
Over the past 9 months of questing for an idea, I’ve been attacking ideas with laser focus and rigid customer development methodology. While this has likely saved me a lot of time on any of the ideas, it also was devoid of the thought of passion; was I ever really passionate about an idea in the moving industry or restaurant services? Being completely honest with myself, I don’t believe I was.
Rebooting – a Focus on Passion
Paul Graham, amongst many others, has always said, “solve the problem you wish someone would solve for you.” I actually have an Evernote full of “hack project ideas” that are just that. I plan to start looking hard at those ideas and working on approaches to test those ideas.
Jason Baptiste wrote a blog post back before Cloudomatic (which came right before he and his cofounder discovered the OnSwipe opportunity) which covered a series of ideas he was thinking about. He got a great response from people showing who also cared about the ideas. I may do the same soon.
Embracing Fate
I had a great conversation with Eric Paley after a Dart Dinner early this past fall about my struggles to find an idea. He told me, “I think founders have to believe in a little fate; the right idea will find you at the right time.”
Those words have stuck with me and ring true with my first real venture: Greenhorn Connect. I could not have had that idea come to me at a better time both personally (it was the only way for me to build credibility in the Boston startup ecosystem and land a job 4 months later at oneforty) and for the ecosystem (October 2009 was the very beginning of our ecosystem’s awesome resurgence…the perfect time for a uniting site).
More importantly, I wasn’t even looking to start something when Greenhorn Connect happened. It just grabbed me and I couldn’t not do it. As many of you who knew me then may remember, I was a man possessed to make it work. Despite all the obvious reasons not to do it, I still did it (Lean Startups principles would have definitely it shot down). I will never forget my first Mass Innovation Night after launch and Adam Marchick and Michael Cohen both giving me the proverbial “You’re crazy. Why are you doing this?” speech. Both are great converts now, but it was only the passion and a touch of fate/destiny/luck that really possessed me to so blindingly go after the idea.
After 9 months of trying to force ideas, I’m trying to get back to basics. I need to find my passions and try to let the right idea find me instead of desperately grasping in the dark for ideas or trying to force an idea through the grinder. A quote from Drew Huston has stuck with me in this process. He said that of all the 5 or 6 companies he’s started, only Dropbox felt like, “the wind was at our back.” That feels telling and reminds me of the commonly discussed need of Skill, Luck and Timing to build a truly great company.
Alternate directions
It’s been 9 very long months since I left oneforty. While even today I have a runway left that most young entrepreneurs would envy, I’m realistic about my endeavor to start something; how long should you stick with it before you realize the timing isn’t right?
The great entrepreneurs say it takes Skill, Luck and Timing to build a great company. I believe I have the skill to build a great company, which is why I left oneforty. I was also inspired by this oft-tweeted blog post encouraging you to quit your job and start a company even if you don’t have an idea. However, as time continues to slip by, I ask myself if I’m making the most of my time.
That’s why I’m beginning to evaluate working opportunities for the first time since I started this process.
I’ve thought a lot about the framework of what I’m looking for; not needing the money gives me the luxury of weighting all my other priorities over compensation. I’ve realized the most important things to me are:
Working on a really big idea
Working with a truly great leader I can learn from
Having the opportunity to further develop skills that are assets to a business founder
No Regrets
I have ZERO regrets of how I’ve spent my time since leaving oneforty. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about myself, what I need in a technical cofounder and thanks to this most recent idea, how to manage product. I’ve also continued to build my network which is filled with mentors I know I can count on for help when I need it and people I can’t wait to invite to join me in working on that great ideaI know I’m going to find.
Like Steve Jobs said in his Stanford Graduation speech, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” If you found me 3 years ago and told me I’d have done the things I’ve accomplished thus far, I wouldn’t believe you. However, looking back I can see how critical each step was in this crazy journey. Frankly, the less logical the next step, the more it seems to have worked out for the best.
I can’t wait to see what’s next and hope you’ll stay tuned; my beliefs are unshaken: I will build a great anchor company one day.
It happens to us all. Your startup is cruising along, or at least you’re really busy running in a million directions. Maybe you’ve also got pulled away with some personal issues like selling your home, caring for children or relationship challenges. No matter what the cause, you get away from the most important thing: Getting outside the building and talking to customers.
So knowing that you have dropped the ball and need to pick it up again, what do you do? How do you get back on the customer development horse?
How Do You Get Back on the Customer Development Horse?
Step 1: Review your previous notes
The first thing you should do is go over all of your past customer development work. Look at how you’ve already progressed and jog your memory on what you have already learned. This should include previous raw interview notes, any summaries of those notes and progress from your Lean Canvas.
This is a good time to find out if you’re taking good enough notes! If you can’t efficiently figure out what you learned, than anyone else using your notes, canvas and summaries can’t either. A great Lean Startup should be keeping their team and their advisors up to date on customer development progress and most of what they’ll have to go on are these notes.
Step 2: Schedule new customer development interviews
Once your memory is set (this should hopefully only take an hour or two if you’re organized) then go back and see if you had any outstanding interviews to shedule. This is your low hanging fruit to schedule meetings. Reconnect with these people immediately and schedule new meetings with them as soon as possible.
Customer development is a numbers game, so regardless of if you had oustanding interviews, you need to get more feelers out for additional people to talk to; not everyone you reach out to will respond.
Here are a few ways I’ve found work to get more customers to talk to:
1) Your Early Adopters: Ask any of your early adopter users to talk if you haven’t talked to them (also get product feedback if you haven’t connected with them lately).
2) Ask Past Interviewees for Intros: Ask any past customer development interviewees that fit the problem you’re solving if they know anyone they could intro you to. (You should ask this at the end of any interview…it has a 4x success rate of responses compared to cold emailing.) In general, people want to be helpful and if you really are working on solving one of their problems, they’ll be happy to connect you with someone they know that also has the same problem.
3) Cold Email: Cold email, call or walk into the buildings of your potential customers. Unfortunately, this mode has a particularly low success rate (expect a 10-20% response rate on cold emails at best, but 5% isn’t unusual) so be prepared to have to do a lot to get results. I usually email 10-20 people at a time expecting a few responses.
If you know a good blog post on tips for cold emails for customer development, let me know and I’ll link to it here.
4) Use the Reverse Lead Model: I’ve recently fell in love with the reverse lead model: if your startup serves a group their has their own customers that your tech supports (such as a real estate agent software that helps them interact with homeowners or moving company software for booking moving deals), then pretend to be a lead for your target customer (ie- pretend to be a homeowner or someone about to move). Then turn the tables when they call you.
The trick I’ve found is when they call play along at first but be chatty. Pretend you’re still selling your house or moving, but then ask them about the software they use as you talk. As this first friendly conversation goes their way…then switch it up to talk about the problems you think they have and see if they confirm. If they do then pitch your product and try to get a face to face meeting (or separate phone call with a decision maker) to talk more.
Trust me, this works. I’ve actually had people complain to me about their software in these conversations…talk about a self-identified problem!
Note:This will take time. I’ve found that it generally takes a week to week and a half to get back into scheduled interviews; if you start emailing on Monday, you’re unlikely to have a full plate of interviews until the middle of the following week.
Step 3: Get your customer development questions updated
Now that you’ve started filling up your schedule with more customer development opportunities, you should determine what your goals are to discover in your current round of customer development.
Go back to your Lean Canvas and look at where you stand in testing assumptions. Remember that the goal is to test the riskiest assumptions you’ve made. If you’ve already verified some, then you should begin testing new assumptions.
Great customer development starts with a good script of questions. It will make you more confident and comfortable in the interviews and make sure you don’t forget to ask something important. You can (and should) go off script based on where the discussion takes you, but this is your anchor to bring you back to the key things you want to discover.
Step 4: Set a routine for staying on the horse in the future
In the end, the hope is you won’t fall off the horse again. The best way to do that is to set yourself a plan to keep it in your routine. This can be as simple as carving out a few hours one day a week to review customer development progress and see how many interviews you have upcoming. If you drop below what you find is an acceptable number of pending interviews, go back to Step 2 and try to get a few more in the pipeline.
You can also give yourself an added boost with some external accountability by setting up to regularly update others on your customer development. At oneforty, I sent out bi-monthly reports to the entire team on key takeaways from customer development and updated the management team every 4-5 interviews. This ensured the whole team was up to date and I had extra motivation to try to keep customer development cranking.
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Getting outside the building is never easy, but if you’re committed to being a lean startup, you have to stay on top of it. It’s easy to get distracted by other responsibilities. When that happens, now you know what to do.
What advice do you have for Lean Startups trying to maintain a routine of customer development?
