Customer Discovery: What Do You Ask, with Justin Wilcox

[Music] hey next attendees I'm Justin Wilcox I'm the founder of Nimbus health a software company where we help hospitals automate medical record processing now that's what I do for work but what I do for fun is actually customer dev labs it's a blog where I and other founders take our customer development experiences and we write them up and share them so that other people don't fall into the same traps that we did getting started so if you like what we talked about today definitely go check out the blog speaking of which what we're talking about today is for customer discovery hacks these are the four things that I found hardest to get started with customer development all right now that we've got our interview set up we need to figure out what are we gonna ask our customers and this is something that I really struggled with when I started customer development so that's why we have hack number three what to ask so a couple ground rules for interviewing number one no pitching this is about listening if you find yourself ever proposing a part of your solution just to get some feedback on it stop your pitching and we don't want to do that the reason being as soon as you start pitching your mind changes gears it goes from learning and absorbing information into trying to pitch something in sell a product and this time is all about learning so this is all about listening to your customer all about listening to their problems you'll have plenty of time to pitch later okay rule number two past and present questions are fantastic that's what we're gonna ask questions about the future like would you ever or will you ever hypothetical questions those are no good we want to ask questions like have you ever or tell me about the last time things that have happened in the past and are in the present now the reason is if we ask about future questions we're getting our customers predictions and those are basically useless in fact they can be worse than useless because if they tell us something that we want to hear would you ever pay five dollars for blah blah blah and they say yes we might mislead ourselves into thinking we have a real product the truth is they don't know - the answer to that question and it's gonna be misleading so we don't do it the other reason is as soon as you're asking would you or will you questions you're probably starting to pitch a solution and we don't want to do that okay so with those ground rules in place let's talk about what you ask your customers the script that I use looks a little something like this number one tell me a story about the last time problem context so for example tell me about the last time you were late to an appointment now the reason why we asked this question first is because it's very open-ended it's asking for a story and it's asking our customer to sort of go on whatever tangents they want and what we're looking for here are things that are particularly difficult or annoying for our customer so your job is to ask this question listen intently and then dig in when you find your customer talk about something that's interesting to you that you don't know about or you don't fully understand dig in ask questions why was that hard what was annoying about that why is that that way this is where you're gonna spend most of your time now if during this conversation it's not obvious to you what was the hardest part about this context you're gonna ask them explicitly what was the hardest part about this problem that you ran into then they're gonna tell you the hardest part and it's exactly what we want and now this question number three this is golden it's also very awkward you're gonna ask them why was that hard let me give you an example of why it's gonna be awkward so tell me about the last time you were late oh you know I was I had to feed the dog and I had to pick up my keys I couldn't find them and then I ran into traffic what was the hardest part about ah traffic was so annoying it was frustrating and then I'm gonna ask why was that hard and they're gonna think oh of course I know why that's hard it's hard because it was frustrating and we're gonna ask him they say you know why it was hard because I had to drive across a bridge and I was afraid was gonna run out of gas and I'm stuck in traffic and we asked because the Y is exactly what we're gonna pair it back to our customers when it's time to go pitch our solution we want to use our customers own words when we market to them so that we know it will resonate so in this case why was it hard afraid to run out of gas we can say afraid to run on a gas because you're running late that might be the best marketing message so this is really important even if it's awkward to ask make sure you understand why this was pretty pretty hard number four we're gonna ask how do you solve this problem now so I might ask how do you solve this lateness problem now they might say oh you know I just am NOT late at all I just don't care I don't do anything in that case we know this isn't a real pain for our customer because they're not trying to solve the problem if they are trying to solve the problem you know I set my clocks forward fast and and I I try and get reminders from Google and blah blah blah then we can ask the next question which is why is that solution not awesome if they say oh you know what I know the clocks are set fast and I just ignore the ignorant reminders we've got a problem they're trying to solve so it's a real problem and their solution is not awesome so maybe we can solve it in a better way alright so this is the outline for your interview these are the basics bonus points though if you can do any of these three things number one emotions take real note of the emotions your customer expresses during the interview frustration anger guilt greed happiness whatever it is note those down because those emotions that's how you're gonna connect with your customer when you can empathize with your customer they can feel that and that's how we're gonna actually move our solution number two three-peat once you get through this process you can start all the way over at the beginning tell me about another time you were late if you can get through this process three times you'll learn something new every time and you'll really understand your customer through and through finally five why's if you can ask why five times why was that hard why did you do it that way why is the world like it is you will understand the core crux of why someone is doing what they're doing and why it's difficult if you ask five times you'll get down to the core emotion the core motivation of what it is that they're trying to solve alright so that's my script and now it's your turn go ahead and write your version of this script and then go to a neighbor and interview him or her when you do make sure you're not pitching and you're always asking questions about the past and the present and never about the future good luck so all this information is documented up on customer dev labs comm go check it out I'm Justin Wilcox let me know what you learn

Channel: Techstars

Views: 104,903

Rating: 4.9412999 out of 5

Keywords: startups, advice, founders, customers, customer research, entrepreneur

Id: OTkP2JDeGWM

Length: 6min 59sec (419 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2017