Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users

hi everyone my name is Eric Richard Kazuki I'm a partner here at YC I actually started a company that went through Y Combinator back in 2011 I started a company called pebble we made one of the first smartwatches I am really excited to be here to talk about talking to users because this is one of the perennial things that that you always hear about as one of the critical factors in starting a company the best founders maintain a direct connection to their users throughout the lifespan of their entire company they maintain a direct connection because they need to extract information from from their users at all different stages of running their company often times people think that you know they're the CEO or they're the CTO they're the technical kind of product leads of the company they can outsource this this that they can outsource this research to other people in their company they can hire salespeople they can hire heads of product but at the core the best companies are the ones where the founders themselves maintain a direct connection to their users if you are the CEO it is your job it is in your job description to talk to customers so take the time to learn how to do it well all founders need to need to participate in this process as well don't if you're the engineer if you're the developer don't think that you can escape this process just because you're the person who's coding there's a pretty classic scene from the movie office space where they there's an individual who says I'm the person who who is the go-between between engineers and users I know how to talk to people I have people skills and that is one of the things that you do not want to have happen at your company you want to make sure that the founders and the the the core the core members of your company are the ones who develop the skills for talking to users so you do not have to hire someone like that to be the go-between talking to users is so critical that at the core of kind of ycs teachings there are only two things that you must do in order to search your company you need to code or build your product and talk to users so this is easier said than done I want to provide today some tactical advice on how to plan your strategy for talking to users as well as some some questions and strategies that you can use to conduct your own user interviews at the beginning of your of your company a lot of the advice that I that I'll present today is actually synthesized fantastically in this book actually written by a YC founder called the mom test the name of the book comes after kind of the the process in which we probably all go through where we want to tell our parents about the company that we're working on and we I think that by talking to people that you know love us and want to support us we're actually extracting good or useful information about how to how we could adjust or improve our company but at its core this is not the best way to get information so the mom test as Rob actually explains it's three common errors that we make when we try to preach I to conduct user interviews the first problem the first mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about our idea we're founders we love to pitch our idea we love to talk about the the product that we're working on but during a user interview that is not the time to be pitching the product the goal of a great user interview is to extract information from the person that you're talking to to extract data that will help you improve the product or improve your marketing or improve your positioning it is not to sell them on using your product so at the core of a great injury user interview you need to learn about their life you need to talk about specifics around the problem area that you're trying to solve that the user may be going through second mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about hypotheticals we talk about what our product could be we talk about features that we want to build we ask questions like we ask questions like if we built this feature would you be interested in using it would you be interested in paying for it that is wrong instead talk about specifics that have already occurred in the users life this will give you stronger and better information in which to make product and company changing decisions you also want to talk in general about the users life you don't want to just talk about the specific problem or sorry the the specific solution that you're presenting try to extract information about the users the path that led them to encounter that problem ask them questions about their life in kind of more broader and more broader ways to extract context around how they arrived at this at this problem learn about their motivations learn about why they got themselves into that problem in the first place and the third trap that we pretty much all fall into is that we talk we talk a lot or founders we're always pitching investors were pitching employees we're trying to hire people we're trying to partner so we tend to spend a lot of our time talking in a user interview try to try to restrain your your your interest in talking and really listen take notes and listen to what the user is saying because in that span of time that 10 20 30 minutes that you spend with the user you're trying to extract as much information as possible so that when you return to the office and when you return to your co-founders you're bringing hard data real facts about users lives to the table I think that there are five great questions that everyone can ask during their their early customer interviews the first question is what is the hardest part about doing the thing that you're trying to solve let's take Dropbox for an example now many of you may not remember our world before Dropbox but put yourself back in the position of Drew the founder of Dropbox in 2005 when he was initially working on kind of the the initial idea of Dropbox while working while studying at MIT imagine you're in the computer lab at MIT and you're sitting next to your friend you turn and you ask you're working on this project to create Dropbox and you you want to learn more about how other people are sharing files so that you can learn you know are these other potential users here or what are the problems that I can help solve with this new technology so you turn to your friend and you ask what is the hardest part about working on a group project with school computers you're sending in the computer lab it's the perfect context for asking that kind of question and you begin open-ended conversation trying to extract information about how that person currently works on group projects together with friends hopefully you'll learn about specific pain points that they have like they log on to a shared computer they have to get their files from somewhere they may have a network drive attached to the the university system but they're working with someone who may not be logged on to a university computer at that time maybe you learn about problems with synchronizing of shared work maybe you're both working on the exact same document at the exact same time how do you begin how do you currently attempt to solve that problem in general the best startups are looking for problems that people face on a regular basis or that they're painful enough to warrant solving this question can help confirm or or confirm for you whether the problem that you're actually working the the problem that you're working on is actually one that real users feel is a pain feel as something that they actively want to solve in their life the second question to the point that I was making earlier about trying to get to specifics rather than hypotheticals is to ask the question tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem the goal of this question is actually to extract context around the circumstances in which the user encountered that problem so for example in the Dropbox case you may be talking to your friend and learn about a week ago a specific time frame who were they working with which which which which class were they working working on which was this it was it's a computer science problem was this a an English paper try to extract as much information as you and about the the context in which they began solving this problem so that as you develop as you develop your product you'll be able to actually reference real-life examples of past problems that potential users have had and you can overlay your solution on top of that to see if it would have helped in that particular circumstance the third question is why was this hard why was the circumstance in which that student was trying to work on their their shared project their their project with other folks why was that hard what were these specific things that they encountered that were difficult the reason why you want to ask this question is because you'll hear many different things from different people going back to the Dropbox example you might encounter some people who say that maybe the problem may be the number one problem that they were encountering was when they emailed files back and forth they ended up duplicating work because they didn't have the exact same kind of document at the exact same time maybe other people will say that they submitted the wrong document in the end to the to the professor for their group project because they had like crazy strings of file version numbers on the end so the benefit from asking this question is not just to identify the exact problem that you may begin to solve with your solution to this problem but you'll also begin to understand how you market your product how you explain to new potential users the value or the benefits of of your solution in general customers don't buy what they don't buy the what they buy the why so in the Dropbox example they may not be they may not be excited and overjoyed at saying oh I now have this kind of file syncing tool that can that can keep all my files in sync but they'll by the Y they'll say well this exact product this product will help with this exact problem that I had just two weeks ago when I was trying to work on a student project with some of my friends so answers that you get from customers to this question of why why was this past problem that you encountered so hard may actually inform your marketing or your sales copy as you as you build out the rest of your product fourth question is what if anything have you done to try to solve this problem one of the biggest things that that I've encountered well while helping YC companies over the last few years is that if customers if potential customers are not already exploring potential solutions to their problem it's possible that the problem that you're trying to solve is not a burning enough problem for customers for them to be even interested in your better solution to this product so this question tries to get at the root of that of that of that issue is the person who encounters this problem already trying to solve this so in the Dropbox example you're working on a group project or you're talking to someone who's who's worked on group projects in the past try to figure out what what tools did they experiment with what tools did they try to use to solve this in the past maybe they they solve this by getting all the individuals together in one room to work on the project with four computers so that they could talk in real-time to to each other as they were working on the project maybe they maybe they experimented with email maybe they tried setting up as one of the top comments on Hacker News posted during the original Dropbox launch maybe they had set up our sink and they would already solve this problem with SFTP or something like that again you want to ask this question for two reasons one is to figure out whether the problem that you're solving or you're working to solve is even really something that people are already looking for solutions to you and the second one is what are the other competition out there what will your product be compared against as you as you as you end up rolling out your solution and offering it to end customers the fifth question is very tactical so what don't you love about the solutions that you've already tried this is the beginning of your potential feature set this is how you ask the or this is how you begin understanding what the features are that you'll build out for your better solution to the problem now note that this is not the question of what features would you want out of a new file syncing product in the Dropbox example because that's a hypothetical question users in general are not great at identifying the the next features that they want in the product just like the old you know Henry Ford quote you know our when we were developing the automobile or our users would have wanted a faster horse rather than that car so this question specifically targets what are the what are the what are the problems with the existing solutions that they've already tried these are these are specifics and you can begin to kind of figure out what the diff the differential between your new solution and the existing solutions already in the market will be talking to users as I said before is useful I pretty much all stages of your company but there's three critical phases to an early-stage company I would kind of define that as a company that has not yet reached product market fit in which talking to users would be extremely beneficial those three stages are at the idea stage before you've even begun developing any any of your product at the prototype stage where you have the first kind of rough beginnings of your product but you haven't really gotten in the hands of any paying customers or any users yet and the third one which is after you've launched and you're iterating towards product market fit how do you guide that journey so I'll talk about a few tips for for each phase at the idea stage you may have the back of a napkin idea you may have a thought may or may be you may be commercializing some technology that you've been dreaming of but you don't yet have any first users so you need to begin finding the first people that will be interested in either providing information about the problem that they've encountered or potentially signing up to be your first users the best the best you know people come to come to me to ask how can i how can i talk and how can i find my first users honestly some of the best companies are products or services that are built for the founders themself so start with yourself begin like test test your user interview strategy on yourself try to walk through a situation where you've encountered that problem the next step after that is to talk to friends is to talk to co-workers to get warm introductions it doesn't take a lot of people you don't have to talk to thousands of people you every good user kind of research strategy begins with just one or two people the critical the critical feature here is executing a unbiased and and detailed customer or user interview strategy rather than just trying to to pitch your idea to them another cool hack that that we've seen some great success with actually a YC company in this batch is using this - a YC company this batch is actually selling selling products to firefighters and they realized that cold email introductions was just not working was not a way that they could get through to the customers so what they did was they actually just dropped by fire stations in person they didn't even you know email them to say that they were coming ahead of time they just showed up and they said hey could we speak to the fire chief could we talk to someone about this problem that were that we've got a solution to and you know what it worked great they managed to get dozens of in-person no 10 to 15-minute long meetings just by showing up so when in doubt if there's a specific target customer base that you're looking to get feedback from just try showing up never it feels a little bit weird because it feels like you're imposing on someone but at the end of the day the mindset that I like to get into is if you truly think that you're solving a problem that your target customer base is facing you'll actually be doing them ahead you'll be helping them out by taking their 15 minutes and and learning more about the problem industry events are another great way to get a number of new customer interactions I remember that when I was working on pebble we actually went to CES which is this large consumer electronics show in Vegas we didn't have a booth we just went in guerilla-style we just like randomly started setting up in setting up meetings with potential users and we met them in like the coffee shop I would side at the conference we did that for $0 without any sort of marketing budget just because that was where a lot of people in the industry were and we knew that there was like a high concentration of potential people that we could talk to some tips for this stage take notes take detailed notes because like I said before you don't you'll never know until later which key facts of these user interviews may be useful if you're not great at taking notes while you're talking to someone bring a friend bring a co-founder ask the person if you could record it when in doubt capture as much information as possible keep it casual like I said before you can just show up you don't have to like pre-planned this you don't have to have you know 20 minute blocks on your calendar scheduled for days on end of user interviews feel free to react like honestly you'll learn so much through the first 5 or 10 user interviews that you know you'll your your process will dramatically improve from those first interviews to the next batch so don't feel like you have to do a hundred user interviews all at the same time just start with one start with three start with five until you get the hang of it the third thing is you need to be cognizant of the other person's time again going back to what I said at the beginning you know we love our idea we're founders we love talking about our idea so you need to you need to keep yourself in check and make sure that you're cognizant to the other person's time honestly you'll be able to get probably the best information out of say a ten to fifteen minute long first interview and that might be all the time you need just just for that initial chat as you move past the ideas stage into testing your your prototype with users the next major kind of benefit that you can that you can get from talking to users is figuring out who will be your best first customer this is critical because it's possible that if you choose the wrong first customer that you may be led down a path that that constrains you or artificially traps you without actually getting paid by that first customer so we've created a framework that you can use to begin to identify before you begin working with them who the best first customers will be during user interviews at this stage I love to to ask questions that extract numerical answers to three facts about the customer that I'm working with the first one that I like to get that I want to get to the bottom of is how much does this problem cost them today and I like to get a hard number either in terms of how much revenue do they stand to earn if they solve this problem or how much how much expense do they currently spend trying to solve this problem how much money is wasted today as they try to solve this problem second one that I like to get to the bottom of is how frequently do they encounter this problem do they encounter it on hourly basis a daily basis quarterly basis yearly basis the best the best problems that startups can can target are ones that are encountered more frequently this is usually beneficial for two reasons one is they encounter a problem on a more regular basis it means that the customers feeling the pain of that problem on a more regular basis and they'll be much more receptive to a potential solution the second reason why you want to tackle a problem that people encounter on a more frequent basis is you'll get more chances to know whether your product is actually solving a problem in my case with pebble I love the fact that I was working on a device that was kind of intended to be used every day you know you wake up in the morning you put your watch on that was great for me because I knew that if they weren't if users weren't wearing their watch on a regular basis that meant that I was doing something wrong so the best first customers are ones that have this problem very frequently the third thing that you want to get to the bottom of is how large is their budget for solving this problem you can imagine that say you're solving something for an industrial assembly line problem on the industrial assembly line if you're talking to the operator the person who's actually there on the kind of the assembly line they may encounter this problem on a really regular basis but they just don't have the budget they don't have the authority to actually solve the problem that's their boss so that's someone above them in the in the office of in the headquarters so again as you're trying to identify the best first customers make sure that you're trying to that make sure that you're asking questions about whether they actually have the ability to solve the problem given the choice I like to visualize answers to these to these three sets of customer questions as overlapping Venn diagrams with the best first customer being at the center of the Venn diagram where they have the highest kind of numerical answers to the three questions that I outlined so let's take a quick example imagine if you're working on like a super smart blender that's designed to produce the the tastiest new fruit smoothies you talked to several users let's say you're talking to McDonald's the French Laundry and the Google cafe you create a spreadsheet that simply has three columns with the answers to the questions that you've extracted through your user interviews via this data can actually be used in prioritizing which customer you you begin to sell your product to first so for example the French Laundry is an amazing restaurant up in Napa maybe maybe they have an opportunity to to roll out a new extremely fancy over-the-top smoothie with your new technology they can extract a lot of a lot of money from each sale but the frequency is not that high there's just not that many customers that are interested in a fruit smoothie at the French Laundry and you're talking to maybe the the sous-chef at the at the restaurants so you realize that they don't really have that much money to solve this problem even if they wanted to the other the other potential customer that you're talking to is the chef at one of the Google cafes unfortunately for you Google gives away their food for free to their employees so that person doesn't actually stand to earn more money or save that much more money if they were to use your new smoothie technology in their in their restaurant granted there are a lot of Googlers so there probably would be a lot of smoothies made per week but at the same time again you know they just don't have the budget to be able to to really dig into this problem so you learn through the initial customer interviews that McDonald's is actually the best potential customer AB attention potential first customer for your product while even though the the the cost of a new smoothie at McDonald's may not bring in you know a large dollar amount per transaction they have a ton of stores and each of those stores services a ton of people and on top of that you happen to get a warm introduction to the like chief food officer of McDonald's which I'm not even sure they have but that person actually controls like a multi-billion dollar budget and if they wanted to solve this problem they would have the authority and they would have the the budget to do so and so you put that information in your spreadsheet and you actually do like a simple stack rank that just pulls the best answers to those questions up to the top and you can use this framework for for kind of pulling together all the information that you get from various user surveys to to find the best customers the last stage a four product market fit that can benefit from user interviews is actually the process of iterating towards product market fit Paul Graham's cut definition for product market fit is when you've made something that people want Marc Andreessen also has an amazing blog post about product market fit where he describes it as when the product is just being pulled out of you when you no longer have to push the product on customers they're just pulling it pulling it from you but the problem with these definitions of product market fit is that they're vague they're also retroactive in that you have to already have product market fit in order to know that you've reached it so they're not as useful for helping you figure out which features you can use which features you need to build in order to iterate in order to improve your product to get to product market fit you may have heard of the app superhuman which is a super fast email client well the CEO published an amazing blog post a little while ago about how he built a well how he was actually annoyed with this a vague definition of what product market fit is and how it was a lagging indicator that didn't help him predict product market fit had only told him whether he achieved it or not he wanted to create a real-time quantitative system that had that had helped guide his company towards product market fit and of course it involved talking to users he wrote a great blog post on this you could just google it I would just gonna touch her kind of touch on it but I would highly recommend reading the entire thing because it is it is fantastic but in it he describes a process where on a weekly basis he asks pretty much all his customers but it doesn't even have to be your entire customer base it could just be you know 30 40 users a critical question how would you feel if you could no longer use superhuman three answers very disappointed somewhat disappointed not disappointed he measured the percentage of users who answered the question very disappointed these are the users who most value your product this is these are the users who your product has now become a key part of their life it's kind of weaseled their way into their daily habits he read some analysis that said that a 40 percent or more of your user base reports that they would be very disappointed if your product went away on a weekly basis that that's kind of the signal that's the the differentiation point that it says if you get past this point your product will just grow exponentially and he evaluated a number of other successful companies and realized that the answer to this question was always around or above 40 percent so again I probably won't be able to go into it too much more in detail but I would recommend reading this blog post if you're at the stage where you're iterating and you actively have users that you can ask this question of this can be an immensely useful thing for quantitatively determining whether the features that you worked on in the previous week we're actually benefiting or adding to your product market fit or potentially detracting from it as well some other great tips that we found at this stage is kind of a simple hack ask your users for the phone number during signup because oftentimes you'll be looking at the data and you'll be wondering you know why did why is the data showing this particular kind of learning about our customers and you maybe like thinking and aggregate like you know 20% of people have this problem sometimes it helps to just get on the phone and talk to one person who's encountering this problem so I always encourage founders to put contact to put contact information including phone number which is like a direct connection to customers pretty high up in the user signup flow second one is don't design by committee you can't simply ask your users what features they want you have to begin to understand whether those features are truly going to going to help make your product more sticky and more useful you can do this through kind of the the advice of the superhuman CEO lays out in his blog post or you could ask other tactical questions like instead of asking you know do Tweel users be interested in using this new product or this new feature instead say here's us here's an upgrade flow if you want this new product put your credit card or if you want this new feature put your credit card information or pay more even before you actually built out the feature this could help give you information about whether the feature that you're working on it's actually something that the users are going to use the third thing to do during user interviews at this stage is to remember to discard bad data some of the some of the kind of worst bad data that you may encounter is compliments people may say oh I love the new design or man this thing is really useful you may love that during the course of user interviews but they actually are not useful information because it's not specific it's more of a general statement about your product and it's not tactical it's not giving you correct information on what you can change or what you can improve about you're um you're probably the second main type of bad data that you may encounter is fluff they're hypotheticals these are generation Eric statements whenever you're in the middle of a user interview and you start getting onto onto this hypothetical you know oh here's what it here's what the product may look like in the future try to steer it back to specifics again you're conducting a user interview not to pitch your product but to learn about problems or the issues that the user has faced in their past so that you can improve it in the future that's it that was meant to be like a quick quick short dive into talking talking to users I don't know if we have any time for questions cool awesome I'd love to answer any questions but other than that thank you thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 205,685

Rating: 4.9471278 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, startup school

Id: MT4Ig2uqjTc

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019