A lot of startups begin with the product and end up focusing too much on the cool technology that is underlying the product or service. It’s the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality, and it rarely works. Technology is great but it needs to solve a problem for someone. Hopefully you set out having an idea of what problem your product or service aimed to solve. If not, now is a good time to do a status check.
The challenge with focusing on the technology is that you quickly get into the weeds about all the features you have built and why it is so cutting-edge and way ahead of the competition. However, listing features is not a story and it doesn’t sell. The only way to know if you are telling the right story is by knowing your target customers deeply. You need to understand what problem you are solving, what pain your customers are feeling, and what they would gain from your solution.
It is important to start by doing customer interviews with existing or potential customers, and complement the input with insights from team members in customer-facing teams such as sales, customer success, and customer support.
When I worked at Techstars Seattle, a leading startup accelerator, the 3-months program made customer research a key pillar of the curriculum. They required you to go and talk to as many existing or potential customers as possible. A few are not enough, you need enough input in order to identify patterns in their responses. The goal is to inquire about potential customers’ pains, how they solve it, and what they wish they could have or do. Aim to deeply understand what your target customers’s biggest problems are, what they currently do to solve them, and why.
You may be inclined to divide and conquer such interviews between multiple people, especially as your company gets bigger. Don’t. Try and have the same person or group of people do all the interviews. If you split the interviews between multiple people, no single person really gets the full picture and patterns will be missed.
To get started you want to have a hypothesis that combines a specific demographic with a problem. Depending on where you are in your journey, you may have enough data from existing customers to help inform your hypothesis, or if you are not sure who your target demographic is, engage your customer-facing team and ask them to describe the ideal customer profile.
With the hypothesis in hand, formulate a series of non-leading questions to understand their struggles, current solutions, and wishes. You will want to hover around a topic area, and you will possibly need to lead them slightly in the direction of the topic you are interested in. Avoid asking questions that do nothing but confirm what you want to hear — be intellectually honest and objective during this process. If you find that you have to lead the interviewee quite a bit to get to your topic area, chances are the problem you thought they had, isn’t really that big of a deal. In that case, you may have to start over with a new hypothesis that focuses on a different demographic or different problem.
Nothing beats talking directly to existing or potential customers but don’t forget to engage your customer-facing teams and get their input too. Not only will they have invaluable input from people who ended up signing deals, but they will also have insights on deals they didn’t land and why. Involving them in the process is also crucial to getting buy-in into a positioning process. You can run this internal interview process in parallel with your customer interviews.
You can have them respond in writing, or make it a discussion with multiple team members, the benefit to the latter is that it will give you a sense of where the consensus and disagreements lie.
Like any research, market research requires you stay objective and avoid incorporating existing biases into your research. This is one of the reasons hiring an external consultant can be beneficial. You get a trained professional to design the survey and research approach, who is able to pick up on patterns, and stay neutral as information is gathered. Read more about how I help find product-market-fit.
Written by: Anders Maul
Photo by: Lindsay Henwood
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It all starts with the customerA lot of startups start with the product and end up focusing too much on the cool technology that is underlying the product or service. It’s the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality, and it rarely works. The only way to know if you are telling the right story is by knowing your target customers deeply.
