everyone. This is celiac

T and this is heating Shah. And today, on the startup chat, we're gonna talk about how to do customer interviews.

You like talking about more than just sales and market. We just want a bullshit and chat about business and life. And hopefully, while we're doing them for my long value, Teoh for people trying to get way, don't want to give you feedback. That's bullshit. You want you to do your best

and thes air specifically around what many people call customer development. And, you know, before you really jump in, I'll tell my story about it and how I got excited about it and learned how to do it. And then I'm sure. Still, he's got spots. So I got into this bunch of years ago. I was accidentally doing it for my first few companies back in 2000. Between 2003 in about 2008 sir, about five years when I think the SAS market and the market for you know kind of software was much less competitive. I would do a lot of things around customer support, asking why to customers when they sort of had problems and not taught me a lot about software and my business and how to improve it fast forward a little bit and back to like about 2008. Basically about 2006 onwards, the lean startup movement started happening with Erik Reece blogging a lot about how start ups should be created, especially as there was a downturn and everyone had to get more efficient if they wanted to keep running their start up.

At that time, customer development came out because a lot of the lead started principles. The original ones and ah, a couple of them came from this course on customer development by Steve Blank, who's a professor at Stanford, and I think Berkeley as well. And he wrote a book back in the day called Four Steps to the Epiphany, which is all about this process he called customer development On this customer interviews is just one piece of it. But the way I got really, really great at it is I hired a product manager at Kiss Metrics a few years into the company about a year in, actually, when we really had figured out the product we wanted to go after in the market, and she was her name. Cindy Alvarez. She actually wrote a book called Lean Customer Development and her and I Would would learn a lot together about customer development, customer research,

specifically customer interviewing one cause she was really good at it. Like, you know, this is not a new insult, but like she's like, kind of stone cold when she does these interviews. And that's gonna be my first sort of point, which is when you want to do interviews and get emotion and stories out of your customers or potential customers. It's very important to like, actually be quiet. You know, if you ask a question, you should shut up and wait till they answer it if they don't answer it in like amount of time when you want to talk, asked the question a different way but don't need the witness. Don't give him a specific answer. Or don't try to,

like, don't try to talk too much around kind of trying to tell them what to say or anything like that. Instead, just keep asking the questions. But I learned a lot of these things by doing customer development with her and another product manager we had and just one of the key tenants of it is like, Don't leave the witness, Don't lead the customer down a path and instead spiel like what I would call stone cold, which is like, basically act like you have no emotion or act like you have no opinion and you're gonna get a lot better insights from customer. So to me, that was a one big learning I had that still like, is something I practice every time I do these interviews, which is often times I'll even do this. I'll ask a question in a customer interview and then all hit mute on myself and I might say some stuff, but they can't hear to be because I'm ready for them to respond because I like to talk. But anyway,

so my story is that I got really great at it once I realized that, and everything gets really competitive. And once things get competitive, your your best weapon, your best tool is your ability to understand customers better than anyone

else in the market. Yeah, that's the I truly believe him. We've talked about this before. I feel that weather understand the customer the best will eventually have them is their customers, right? If your competitors know the problems of your customers more intimately, they you do. Sooner or later, they're not gonna be a customs anymore. They're gonna be their customs. It's a simple of that. So interviewing in the early process. But even beyond that, this is a separate topic. But I feel we feel in the sort of world it's got more popular that we need to do customer development, quote unquote like talk to potential customers to truly understand what the problems are,

how they're thinking about the solutions out there, how they think about the solution. You are thinking about building and truly just understanding customer a lot better before you built the solution and you launch it. But as you launch it and you see some success and it grows, customer development is not done because the market is changing. Your customers are changing. Your company's changing. Your product is changing, so you have to on an ongoing fashion forever. Keep doing some customer development to make sure that you truly still fully understand the customer or I'm now understand the customer. Even better. Now understand the new customers that you're gaining since you've grown the product to be serving, you know, much larger market or different market. So this customer development thing is not like a This is how you started, and you never have to do it again. You always will have to do because you always will have to understand your customers. Good. Well,

yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, there's there's no you don't have an option anymore. S o. Okay, So I've done a bunch of customer interviews lately around fundraising. I've done other other interviews. I'm actually about to start a whole Another set of interviews on a very specific category and my business partner and I are very excited about. And I'd love to give people, you know, obviously some tips and things like that on how to do this. There's there's there's interviewing that you do early on in a business when you're just starting out. So let's talk about that. And then I think we should also talk about what happens later, right when you have a product stuff like that.

So I'm just gonna riff real quick on the beginning part. So for me, it's like it fundamentally starts with you need people to talk to, and if you don't have people to talk to you, then you can't really do any interviews. So your first actually order of business is how do I talk to people like How do I find them? And so there's a number of different strategies for finding people. I could even we'll have a link in the show notes for this one. But whatever old product managers, he has a whole you know thing, I think is like 95 ways to find your first customer or customers or or find your first interviews. There's an event called the Lean Startup Machine, where, you know, in a two day period you're supposed to find customers and literally do interviews and validate and or invalidate an idea. And so I participated in all those.

And honestly, it's just a hustle. You have to identify who your customer is and figure out some, you know, rough idea of a guess or hypothesis about some problem they might have. And then you can create a bunch of interview questions out there or write up a bunch of interview questions and go find these people. So finding the people is really about my favorite method. I also have a bunch of audience in different places. I do have a lot of Twitter followers. I have a bunch of email lists, and also I have a lot of friends on LinkedIn and Facebook. So if I post something and say, Hey, I'm doing research on X So when I did research on fundraising, it was two tweets, and it led to 50 interviews,

which is something that's usually unheard of. Usually two tweets leads to, like five interviews, and this is literally an order of magnitude higher because the pain is there. And obviously I have a lot of followers, as I said earlier. So it is a little bit easier those cases and I want to be respectful of that cause of many of you that are listening probably like, Well, I don't have shit. And what I used to say is you you are literally trying to beg, borrow, lie and steal. That's my line on getting these interviews because these interviews are really critical early on to figure out directionally are you right or wrong about what you're thinking? You want to build So in the new project I'm doing. It's a consumer product and I have no way to reach this audience. And I actually don't want to use the channel that I have today and the ways I would do it for any kind of start up or tech related topics.

And so what we're doing is we're gonna put up a website and we're going to start driving traffic to it. It's gonna be a simple, like, type forum survey type thing, and we're gonna literally ask people for their and I have a whole block close on this to about how to, like, validate your business idea. But we're gonna ask people to fill out a survey or actually an application for him to either talk to us for consulting. If that's like appropriate, that's one approach, another approaches. You basically ask people for their opinion, and you say, Hey, we'd love your opinion on you know how you walk your dog. Let's say I want to provide a dog walking service.

It would be like we want. We want your opinion on a hot at how you walk your dog so we can help you do it better. We're building something for you or something like that, and then you make them fill out a bunch of stuff. And one of the questions is, Can we follow up with some questions for you? And then what you would do is you put up that website or a type form or surveymonkey thing, and then you would send traffic to it. Or use that in your link as a link in cold emails you might send out or whatever it may be. That way you can ask them questions and learn, but it's still like you have to learn a little bit about marketing. If you already don't know this audience and learn how to drive a little bit of traffic. Some people have actually done it on Twitter, so what they'll do is they'll try to identify people that saves things like I hate dog walking her. I'm walking my dog right now or something like that. They'll do searches on Twitter.

They'll find those people, and then they'll literally using their Twitter account, reply to them be like, Hey, I'm working on something to help solve the problem of dog walking, which can you talk to me and then you can either have them d m u or even go to your link. Usually, having them GMU or do something like that works out better. And then all it's about is getting on the phone with them and figuring out how you could get on the phone with him. Toe basically do these customer development interviews, so that's sort of one approach. But what you're trying to do is whatever you can to get these people on the phone with you. Sometimes, if you're doing something that's like local with doctor's offices or something like that, you might just walk in there and try to get 10 minutes with somebody and ask him all these questions. So that's that's sort of the number one question people have,

which is like, How do I get people? It's like, you know, it's a human interaction. You're going for us to find all the different ways that you can do it. My favorite is still using advertising or using Twitter or even Facebook toe like soliciting people to talk to you when you and here's the one key point, don't ask for their feedback. Don't don't tell them too much about what you're doing because you're not trying to, like, instep them or, like, bias them in any way. Just try to ask for their opinion. And 11 of the things if you're one quick tip before I move on but is in B two B if you just ask people about their their their day, like if you ask a martyr marketer, I'd love to talk about what you do every day if you get a very high conversion rate because people love talking about

themselves, especially if they feel listen to, which is very ire. It's very, very rare. So I just wanna comment on on these two points. I think that for people that are listening and eating has the self awareness to point it out himself, listening to heating and go well. It's easy for him to set up paid advertising campaign because he's an extra in that, and it's easy for him to tweet something at 15 just because he has hundreds of 1000 followers. How do I did? Stop with the excuses. You do the exact same way just with a different scale, right? So if you if you and Twitter and you don't have lots of follows. You can just search on Twitter. Who are the people that could be my potential customers.

If it's people in marketing, you just search for people that tweet about marketing. That our marketing experts. There's so many lists of, like top Twitter people to follow in, marketing top people to follow in this, and you don't just paying the experts, you see who follows them because they're usually also that profession. And you just interact with people you know, Twitter or Facebook or different. I think. Then you go to these groups, you just hustle. You make up for the fact that you don't have in a massive installed audience already by hustling and going with the audiences and interacting with them. One by one, you can ask your friends.

You know, we're all just two or three people connections removed from almost anybody in the world today at 55 connections anymore. And you know, if you want to sell something to CEOs and you don't know anybody, just ask yourself. Who do I know works in a company that has a CTO? Just go and talk to them and see Hey, you know, if an engineer Hey, who's the head of engineering? Can I talk to these people? And then when you talk to head of engineering, you ask a You know, Can you connect with me with somebody else in the company of Higher up? There's events you can go to. There's lots and lots of ways to reach people.

They might not be easy. That might not be convenient over there. My feet right? But the my main point is, don't come up with excuses. Just come up with solutions, right? And you don't have to call with the way that gets your instant access to thousands of people. Start with one. Just talked to one perfect, relevant and into another. She could get to 10. That's great. If you could get to 100 that's amazing. But I got there hustle, figure out a way,

and there's people have done this very successful bit where you know that had just immigrated to this country and knew nobody and where nobody's and within a few months that down an amazing amount of customer development, just hustling and doing the work that's necessary. So I just wanted to comment on that. You know, anybody and everybody in today's world can go and find potential costume, useful dissolution. Talk to them if they really put the working, and then the second common is, you know, just like he said. When you reach out to talk to these people, there's a big difference when you do customer validation or customer interviews. There's a big difference between your intense being to get people to tell you your ideas great and your intent being understanding that person better in the standing that problems better. There's a massive difference, right? And we've talked about this before on he didn't set this before.

I'm like you should care more about solving the problem than your own solution to the problem. And if you do, you will approach them and you'll realize my never goes to really get to know this type of customer and really get to know their problem very, very intimately. And then I might propose my current solution to them. But if my current solutions up the right well, I don't care. I'll come up with another solution of the my. The thing that I care about is too solving this problem or so then my version of a solution. If you come into these interviews with the intent to learn, truly learn more about them and not with intent to get validation for your specific idea. I think that can make all the difference in how valuable these interviews are gonna be. Because what you're gonna get what you're seeking, if you're seeking validation, you're gonna find validation. You know,

you're gonna make people tell you. Yeah, that idea is not bad. And you're gonna go boom. My ideas validated. Everybody loves my idea. Are you gonna trick yourself into working on something without truly having the knowledge that you think you have? All right. What if some beyond you know when you want to do customer interviews reaching the right audience, trying to truly learn and be open minded and be listening sort of talking. There's some other quick tips on, like framework. It shouldn't be very long. Should be short. Are they like some questions? You always using these custom interview that people can apply in very different ways for the very individual. But some other tips that we could give people on me how to do the interview itself.

Yeah, absolutely. And then we can at least talk a little bit about yeah, how to do it when you ready have customers because it's it's still the same process of the questions and everything that I think you're not gonna tried about now. But it's a little different cause I already have a custom. So I think for me when I do this, the one goal I have the main goal is I know I'm gonna have to do at least a dozen interviews every single time I've done it. I hit about 12 13 14 15 like that interview number. And if I picked a narrow enough market, which is usually pretty easy to do these days, I already I start getting bored. I'm like, Oh, I keep hearing the same thing over and over again. I better go analyze everything I heard. So when I thought about it like that very early on, I realized that all I'm really trying to do is I'm trying to get some specific data like,

Oh, what's your marketing budget and things like that. But those were not really interview questions. Those air, just like demographics, type of things, like data. What I'm really trying to say I want stories, So I love to ask questions like Please tell me about a time when a marketing campaign failed and then I shut up just like that anyway. And they say, And I think and they never say I've never had a marketing campaign, right? But sometimes they're embarrassed. And then I say something like, Oh, don't worry.

This is just between us. This is really important for me to understand, but you notice I didn't try to hint at anything. I just I just kept doubling down on that. Then I would say something like, Yeah, you know, if it's a little difficult for you to think about a time when a marketing camp field campaign failed, why don't you tell me when a tool failed on you when it should have worked for you? So that's another way to say it a little bit different, and then eventually I'll get into the failed campaign because I'm really trying to understand where their problems are. It's really about finding problems, and you can't find problems unless I believe you're getting stories out of people. Because those stories one story doesn't matter. 10 15 20 stories from customers about one thing, like failed campaigns that will tell you exactly where the problem is with marketing campaigns,

especially just ask it like that. So to me, it's about very open ended questions, even if the person lays out a 10 minute like rain about a failed campaign. I love that I want more of that. So I tried to talk about 5% of the time, and I want the person I'm interviewing to talk 95% of the time and so I'll spend way more time asking open ended questions that aren't leading them right that are just very sort of not generic, but very specific. But open ended to the point where they have to tell me a story. And when I do that, I get some of the best content and there's a lot of other ways you can ask questions. But that's my one trick I would give you is just remember, you're trying to get stories out of people, and if you can get the same category of story like failed campaigns, if you're building a marketing tool for campaigns, then you're gonna get gold and all those all the all the data that you get from the interviews.

I love it. I think that super powerful and al just reiterate my earlier point on u N can truly matters. Here. People will be as open or is closed around sharing these problems very intimately or not so intimately. More generically, depending on the the read they're getting on, how closely and how cheerfully you are listening and how much you care about what they have to say. If you come across somebody truly like leans in open eyes, open years, open mind, open heart and they feel like this person really, really cares and has the time of the patients to listen and to big deep on when you she doesn't fully understand something, they'll you know they'll they'll fall out with the question because they really want to understand me. They will open up and they'll tell you some things they've never thought about. It never told anybody else. So I think making sure that you take the time on this interviews and you're not really rushed. You schedule him in five minute blocks.

You just try to get to your three questions and get some answers and get to the next three questions. But you really take the time you really come into the conversation with. My singular focus is to understand this person as well as often would truly defend that problems as intimately as possible to come in with that, intending you ask questions that elicit story. They will share things that are really powerful. They're gonna be really enlightening. So, yeah, I love that. I love that point. I think that that's you know, the difference between a good customer interviewed. A bad one is Do you really care about the answers that you ask the questions for? And do you ask questions that are kind of just a zoo said earlier, giving you some data points so you can run off to the next interview? Are you eliciting stories? And with those stories, you really gaining a better understanding off the context off the problems? What?

Yeah, I want to add that this really aligned with what I said earlier about. Basically, people love talking about themselves, right, like the stories that they tell you, and we love stories as humans. So for me, that click of like just getting story thought of people was like the game changer on custom development, cause when we were doing the fundraising interviews, you just asked people tell us about your experience fundraising so far. And we didn't have to say shit for, like, 10 minutes because they were just going off. I think this this person was bad, that this didn't work and that this person help me. And then my pitch deck this and I did 10 iterations on it.

And it's like we couldn't have asked all those questions. And these calls were supposed to be about 20 minutes, and many of them went to 25 30 35 minutes, one because we were giving advice to them at the end. But also because I think we're just going off and they have lots of experience is another sign that you're on the right track is when people have a lot of stories. Yes, they have a like I wanted, Uh, okay, so I want to give some time to You already have customers. What should you do? Right or how Shit. What are the tips? I'll go here. Go ahead. Yeah,

I'll start with one that really got me at Kiss Metrics, which is we actually just started having customers come in and show us us meaty as much as the team is possible. Especially the people that didn't get out and talk to customers often enough, like engineers or even salespeople who didn't talk to customers about the product. We had them come in and show us how they use apart. And to me, that's a form of interviewing in the same way. It's like, Tell us a story. Well, don't just tell us a story. Show us how you use the thing. And that was a game changer. We had engineers that literally were chomping at the bit to go fix a stupid problem that we hadn't fixed for like, a year. Because a customer right in front of them is like,

this sucks the sucks. This Taylor committee clicks. It takes me. And if we opened it up like I was in the room and I would tell the customer, Look, we're not here for you to be nice to us. We're here because we know you love the product. But you got to tell us how we're gonna make a 10 X better for you. So don't hold back and nobody's gonna get their feelings hurt because we're here to make it better. And when I did that, the whole thing changed. Like people were making things better right away, and we even at, ah company off site, we had a customer come and talk on stage about like some some marketing attribution. Sources thing,

And he was just going off at how, like every tool sucks and we suck at it. And right away some engineer had an epiphany, and that engineer was like, basically, Oh, I know what to do. I'll fix this in five minutes, literally. We better fix this. So then they huddled, figured it out in five minutes and then wrote a bunch of code and it was deployed, like within the next couple days. So this this visceral reaction that you get when you do this is amazing.

Yeah, I absolutely love these tips. I think that I let my two thoughts tips on this and we'll wrap up the episode. I think one thing that I've talked about before and I've written about it we could look up to the article in the episode show notes, was visiting your customers doing customer visits and doing that and having as many people the company do that as possible that we often times when we do team retreats and we kind of get everybody around the world together on a city will make a concerted after to see how many customers do we have in this place and how many of them can we visit? And we split up the team in different groups and will go and visit the customer just to get to know the custody of their problems, that people that work there, it be exposed to the culture and also really not just talked to the, you know, ultimate buyer of the product. In our case, that might be the founder of the V p of sales, but really talked all the users and see that probably used in the wild like see people screens with our software on it and what other software they use in what their workflow is and what they struggle with them. What they hate. There's no better cure. Awful. You know everything that's wrong about your product and seeing it in the wild.

Seeing people use it in a while, they're busy. These customs to truly understand the better. And the second thing you just said is something we just started doing. So it's really interesting. We just hired a bunch of engineers on. We're talking about how to make sure that you know these new people that we hire on the product team get more exposure with our customers on. One thing that we started to do is that we have these success managers that due account reviews with custom. They'll look. They'll take a lot of time and really kind of take inventory of how the customers using the product and try them spot opportunities to increase the value that the customer gets through the product will help them with a certain issue. A problem will understand, kind of with their most pressing feature requests on wine. All that and so what we started just to do is on rotation. Have engineers joined thes success cults right there, usually with some screen sharing, So the customer shows how the use of product,

what they do the success manages, talking them through different solutions and how to make improvements stood and we just have the like, more more engineers. Now all the engineers on the party joined the success cult with a certain frequencies of them more more exposed to our customers, that problems and how they currently actually using the product. So that is definitely something that I think is incredibly valuables easy to miss. It's easy to put this further down in your priority list because there's so much stuck everybody needs to work on and get done. But if you if you're getting the wrong things done, if you don't truly understand your customer anymore, if you're not, if you're losing touch with your customer, I think that's maybe a good way to put it. If you if you're as your company grows and progresses, if you are getting out of touch in need in touch with your customer, you're putting your business in massive risk, and you're probably going down the wrong directions with many things, especially with the product. So it's definitely, absolutely crucial to keep

doing this. Well, there you go, like I think that's that really sums it up, why we're even, you know, here to do business for where we have customers, that we don't know anything about him, and we're building the wrong things so we should spend more time getting the whole team, like, you know, having it. I think a lot of the schools on the empathy you actually have empathy for your customer to the point where you want. You want to believe when you're wrong, right believing that you're wrong. It has a lot to do with this, too,

because often times what I find is people deep in the company that are working on core parts of the product. Usually engineers, or even sometimes product managers and designers like they don't actually have enough empathy, and thus they don't know what's important to work on versus what's not. And this leads this process even after you have. Ah, custom, you know, after you have a lot of customers is really, really, really important, and spending time to double down is great. I'm gonna give my tip because I know where about a time. Moreover, my tip is this. Don't just talk to customers who love your product,

talk to customers who hate it, signed them, fuck the shit out of them and get them to talk to you because those people that hate it are the ones that you really get a lot of value from, and the reason for that is the ones that love it. I'm not saying don't talk to them. You want to make sure they still love it, but it's the one set Hate it that can tell you where your your thinking is wrong and where you really hurt

my absolute love. It also double down on this tip. I'm sure something that we do. We just have one meeting a week as a company. It's Monday mornings is very short 30 minutes and one thing every T. Everything basically reports what they've done last week in what they're doing this week. But also every team reports a customer story, and some teams have this woman where they will report the high in a low with a possible civil. Say he is a You know, sales will say he is a prospect that really loved X, Y and Z and decided to buy because of these reasons. And he's a prospect that decided, but with a different solution because they really hated that. We don't do acts when they really needed this and we don't have it. The same thing will go from the support team here. The biggest. The customer that had the biggest pain and where was in the worst spot because something went wrong with that product last week. And here's a customer really was empowered and loved. It was really grateful for what we're building, so we kind of try to highlight both things on a on a weekly basis with the entire company.

I love that. Yeah. Customer stories. Air Sochi.

Yeah, that's it from us

for this week's happy interviewing.