Customer Discovery: Who Do You Interview, 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 the first thing we're gonna do is talk about who to interview now if you're like me you think that your cool idea can solve just about everybody's problem in the world but we know that that's actually not the case because if we try and solve too many people's problems we end up building a crappy product for a lot of people as opposed to an incredible product for one group of people and that's what we want to do but how do we figure out which group of people to build our product for so I've been experimenting with an amp recently an app to help people be on time to their appointments and I listed out all the customer segments who could benefit from this app if folks like real estate agents and college freshman techies with AVD folks with ATD they don't can't conceptualize time very well you know mommy bloggers so I had a whole list of customer segments but then I got like a little overwhelmed right which of these customer segments should I focus on which one should I go out to interview so I came up with something that I like to call the spa treatment so let's see how that works so what I'm going to do is write s P and a and then for each of my customer segments I'm going to score them as we take them to the spa and the goal here is simply to prioritize our customer segments list so we can figure out which ones we should start interviewing so the S here stands for size so we start talking about size what I'm going to do is I'm going to score each one of these customer segments from one to three I'm going to give it a 1 if they're if I measure this customer segment in terms of hundreds or thousands of customers if it's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers I'm going to give it a two and if it's a million customers or more I give them get a bid of three so let's see how this works real estate agents I'm going to say I don't know there's maybe like a hundred thousand real estate agents out there so I'm going to give it a two now notice that this is not scientific at all in fact I know that I'm just pulling this number out of thin air but I'm doing that because we're just going to try and prioritize this list so we can get out of the building we don't care if it's scientific we'll go validate all this stuff later alright so college freshmen how many of those do we think there are I don't know millions techniques with a DD and 20,000 30,000 let's put a 2 here so I would go through normally the rest of all the customer segments but you get what I'm doing let's talk about P P is for the likelihood that they'll pay so what we're going to do here is we're going to consider whether someone has money and whether they have the actual pain that we're trying to solve as to a combination it will tell us how likely they are to pain so if someone has a little money or a little pain we're going to give them a 1 if they've got a lot of money and a lot of pain we're going to give them a 3 somewhere in the middle we'll give them a 2 so let's see how this looks so real estate agents now these guys it's important for them to be on time for their work so we think they might have the pain and they also have a little bit of money because they have a job but of course real estate agents are somehow able to be on time now so maybe it's not the biggest pain in the world I don't know I'm just going to give it a 2 for college freshmen now these guys is when I was a freshman I knew I know I had this pain a lot I was always late to class but of course I also didn't have any money so I definitely fell in the one category and I imagine a lot of other freshmen do too all right techies with a DD now again people with a DD I know that they have this problem so it's a big pain but techies and now techies do they have money I'm considering a techie as someone with like the iPhone the latest iPhone or maybe and my s1 and iPhone so I can actually consider that they do have money and pain I'm going to give them a three all right now it's time to move on to a a is for access by access i mean how easy is it for me to access these customers to market my solutions them and to get them to pay me for it and i measure that in the amount of time it takes to get their money so if it would take me weeks to advertise my product i can get their money I gave them one if it would take days let's say I've got some email list I built up over time I just need to email people and then send them to some website and then give them get them to give me their credit card information you just take a couple days to get their money I'm I give them a two and if it's ours you know get a couple press write-ups launched on some forum and then all of a sudden we start making money I give them a three so in this case real estate agents these guys I don't know any of them I don't know any other pro Courage's so it's definitely not like a three but I imagine some number of them read a consistent number of blogs or on forums so I don't know I'm gonna give these guys a two on access when it comes down to college freshmen these guys are a different story like you know I might be able to get on some forums that cater to the college students but then it's all college students not just freshmen so if I just wanted freshmen then I'd have to like go to each individual school and talk to like counselors and housing that sounds like a nightmare and definitely it would take me weeks probably now techies with a DD that's an entirely different ball of wax because these guys I know which articles and blogs they read you know and I've got some connections in life hacker and some other media outlets you know plus some hacker news hacking and you know I could probably make some money on an app that was already the app store within a number of hours so I'm going to give these guys a three now all that's left is to multiply each of these numbers together and see which customer segment comes out on top so for real estate agents we've got a score of 8 for college freshmen we've got three and four techies with a TD we've got 18 so you can see here that from the list that I have right now techies with a EDD are the largest customer segment that I can access quickly who will also pay me for my solution so that's what I'm going to start and of course if it turns out that any of these assumptions are wrong and basically they're guaranteed to be wrong it's okay because that's what we're going to go do now we're going to get out of the building we're going to interview these folks figure out what we got wrong and if it turns out that we're totally wrong about their ability to pay or interest in paying us that's fine we'll move on to our next customer segment so that's how I take my long list of customer segments prioritize them so I can get out of the building and now it's your turn so go ahead and write down three to five customer segments give them the spa treatment and figure out which ones you should be interviewing 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: 43,473

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Id: m0kiZocBbO8

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2017