How to talk to users the right way

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Talking to users may be the most intimidating but important part founders must do. You have to face a lot of rejection. Even if you can find and invite people for interviews, there are a lot of traps during the interview session, such as asking the wrong question, getting misleading feedback, etc.

It’s not easy to talk to users correctly to make the most of it. So I have done thorough research and found two most valuable resources out there about this topic: The Mom test book by Rob Fitzpatrick and How to talk to users – Ycombinator Youtube.

In this post, I will share with you lessons I have learnt from those sources.

1. How to interview

  • Video, phone or in-person
  • Build rapport
  • Don’t introduce your product
  • Listen, don’t talk
  • Ask open-ended questions
  • Recoding video or at least taking notes

2. Questions to ask potential customers

  • Tell me how you do x today
  • What is the hardest thing about doing x?
  • Why is it hard?
  • How often do you have to do x?
  • Why is it important for your company to do x?
  • What do you do to solve this problem for yourself?

3. Ask follow-up questions

  • What do you mean by that?
  • Can you tell me more about that?
  • Why is that important to you?

4. Don’t ask these questions

  • Will you use our products?
  • Which features would make our product better? Customers’ job is to tell us about their problems, while your job is to think about features. So don’t ask customers about your job.
  • Yes/no question
  • How would a better product look like to you?
  • Two questions at the same time

5. Next steps

  • Synthesize your learning, categorize them into buckets and prioritize
  • Create a problem/solution hypothesis
  • Start sketching an MVP
  • Show MVP to customers, not tell them what to do with this MVP, watch them

6. Is solving this problem valuable?

  • Are people paying money for solutions in this space today?
  • Have you tried to solve this problem on your own?
  • Some customers will always be easier than others to do research on

Remember in the interview, focus on problems, not features. Users have no incentive to say no to features.

Reference

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