startup ideas just does not happen on Lazy sunday morning
How to talk to users
01 Why the best founders talk to their users throughout the lifetime of the company
Talk to customer even before you have product
Users
Who should you talk to
people in your network
coworkers
people you don’t know
linkedin
reddit
…
in person events (meetups, make a meetup!)
process Starting a new startup
My plan
01 Interview potential customers
02 Learn about the problems & motivations around carbon emissions
03 Understand what an MVP will look like (minimum viable product)
Speak with
founders, CEO’s, CFO’s at different sized companies
people that work in companies with titles that include carbon, climate, ..
What l’m looking to learn
Does your company care about their carbon emissions?
Why do you care or not care?
Who in your company is relevant here?
Cold mails
People i know or don’t know
How to interview
Video, phone, or in-person. Body language gives a lot of info
Build rapport
Don’t introduce your product
this might bias their answers
Listen, don’t talk
Ask open-ended questions
Take notes
Example interview
Do you care about carbon emmisions? Yes, consultant creates PDF once a year
What do you do with PDFs? Nothing, info is dense and they do not understand it
Tell me more about it - Seems they need expert to let then understand the data
Questions to ask potential customers
Tell me how you do x today
What is the hardest thing about doing x?
Why is it hard?
How often do you have to do x?
Why is it important for your company to do x?
What do you do to solve this problem yourself?
If we can watch and they can show us how they solve the problem - this is the best - Ask follow up questions
What do you mean by that?
Can you tell me more about that?
Why is that important to you?
Don’t ask these questions
Will you use our product?
Which features would make our product better?
Yes/no questions
How would a better product look like to you?
Two questions at the same time
Next steps
synthesize your learnings
create problem/solution hypothesis
Start sketching MVP
Test that the problem is valuable
Are people paying money for solutions in this space today? - other companies solving this?
Have you tried to solve this problem on your own? Excel? To move them from Excel, it needs to be better
Some customers will always be easier than others to do research on. Selling to plumbers harder than to startups
Hand the MVP to customers, don’t tell them what to do and watch them. You can tell them smth like “Create a booking on Airbnb” but do not tell them how to exactly solve it
Slack group or smth with customers - make them feel specials. Great way to show prototypes
