Survey & Interview Customers

Gautham

Time

Steps

1. Idea2. Prototype

3. Early Customers4. Efficiently adding customers

5. Scaling Business Operations6. Being Operational Break-even

7. Generating Business Profits8. Defending Profits from competition

9. Recovering Business Investments10. Return on Investment for Shareholders

Recap : Idea to ROI framework!

T= 10 yearsT= 6 monthsT= 0

No amount of money or experience can replace a “customer insight” on which a business is build

1. Find an Idea that will have customers

Why should I survey and interview customers?

• We’re human beings. We lie to ourselves daily to get through life.

• If we lie to ourself about a consumer insight, then the market will teach us a very hard lesson. We’re smart people, we can skip that lesson.

• Figuring out a consumer insight is hard, it takes time, effort and massive empathy

• All of us have this super power called the ability to ask questions.

Great customer survey is all about asking great questions

the right way!

Watch the Video!Action learning framework is all about

asking great questions.

What are the biggest things you can learn from a good customer survey?

• Pricing

• What to launch first?

• Who to launch to first?

• How should I engage early users?

• What do you get repeatedly wrong about users? Is there a pattern?

Be shameless about asking questions!

“How far you go in life is directly proportional to the number of awkward conversations you are willing to have”

How do we do this?• List down all of things you have assumed about your

product/company

• Discuss among your co-founders and identify the assumptions that all of you agree on (blindspots) / fiercely disagree on (problem points)

• The TL then uses common sense to arrive at a priority list of at least 10 items among the blindspots / problem points

• Include any other assumption you think is relevant.

Examples of some assumptions• The customer will actually take pain to download an app that I build to solve

the <problem your company is solving>

• Customer will agree to subscribe to my service

• I just have to build the right product. Customers will automatically come

• Users don’t know what they want. I know what the users want.

• The login screen should ask for phone number, full name, email and the desired username

What are some good ways/forum to ask questions?

• Asking in person to a friend. Your friend may not the right target audience. Pay attention nevertheless.

• Send a survey to a large user list. Doesn’t really work bro. People are tired of answering email surveys

• Ask on Facebook to a group? Not a bad idea

• Twitter polls.

• On Product Hunt. Hunt your product and be prepared to ask great questions you want answered.

• Show HN on HackerNews

• Best idea: Come up with a compelling question people are delighted to answer because it’s a questions they wanted to ask and answer themselves.

What happens when even asking great questions leads your nowhere?

• You gotta experiment!

• We’ll deal with that in the next target!

Don’t forget to have fun!