The beginning of the article is here.
ASKING IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
Once we start trying to ask non-biasing questions, sometimes we overcompensate and ask completely trivial ones.
To ensure that you aren't asking trivialities you need to search out for world-rocking scary questions you’ve been unintentionally shrinking from.
Imagine that the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it as a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn about those critical pieces.
You can tell it's an important question when its answer could completely change or disapprove your business.
Love bad news
One of the reasons we avoid important questions is because asking them is scary. It can bring us to the unsettling realization that our beloved idea is fundamentally flawed.
But think about this.
If you hustle together $50K to start your business and spend all $50K on your first idea only to see it fail, that's bad.
But if you have $50K and spent $5K to learn you are running down a dead end, that's awesome. You can spend the rest to find a viable path to your goal with the advantage of all the extra things you know now.
Learning your beliefs are wrong is frustrating, but it's progress. It's bringing you closer to the truth of a real problem and a good market.
If during the chat you spot apathy in the person, it's worth asking a couple of questions to understand the nature of their apathy. Is the problem actually not actually as big of a deal? Are they fundamentally different from your customers? Are they worn out and skeptical from hearing too many pitches? Are they just plain tired today?
After that say big thanks to them and leave them to their day. They have probably helped you more than the guy who said he loves it.
Look before you zoom
Another way to miss the important questions is by obsessing over ultimately unimportant nuances. We let ourselves get stuck in the details before understanding the big picture. Zooming in too quickly on a super-specific semi-problem before you understand the rest of the customers' life can irreparably confuse your learnings. Like if you’re building an app to help people stay in shape and go directly into asking “what is important for you in a fitness program” before asking them if the person actually cares about staying fit enough or at all.
You need to validate a top problem.
Gaze upon the elephant
Overlooking product risks is just as deadly as overlooking the goals and constraints of our customers.
Imagine that you’re building a marketplace to cut out the agents and connect event organizers directly with speakers. And you get feedback from a speaker you interview that he isn't happy with his agent and thus he is certainly open to dropping his agent and paying you 20% of the boost if you could get him more gigs or better-paid ones. It seems good.
But what did he actually tell? He said IF you can get him more gigs THEN he’ll pay a cut. This phrase shifts the burden from the customer to your product. Even though you had found a pain, your success is dependent on a bunch of other factors, such as your ability to grow a healthy supply of paying gigs that are a good fit for him. Will you be able to do that? It remains to be seen.
Product risk - Can I build it? Can I grow it?
Customer/market risk - Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them?
Prepare your list of three
Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person (e.g. customers, investors, industry experts, key hires, etc). Your questions will be different for each type of person you are talking to. Have a list for each. Choose the tough questions, that are important right now.
You don't need to repeat the full set of questions you already have solid data on. Pick up where you left off and keep filling in the picture.
Update the list as your questions change.
KEEPING IT CASUAL
By now we know that zooming prematurely and introducing your idea too early creates biases and delivers bad data.
Start with friendly first contacts. When you ask questions that pass the Mom test, the fact that they are friends won't bias your data. As your credibility in the industry starts growing, you will be able to get meetings without any real “reason”.
Back to the example, if you are building a tool to help speakers get more gigs and you bump into one at a conference. You’re not going to try to set up a meeting. Instead, you’re just going to immediately transition into your most important questions: “Hey - I’m curious, how did you end up getting this gig?”. As a side bonus, you’re now having an interesting conversation and you’re far more likely to be remembered and get a meeting later.
When you strip all the formality from the process, the conversation becomes fast and lightweight.
You can go to an industry meetup and leave with a dozen customer chats under your belt.
The meeting anti-pattern
Beyond being a bad use of time (which is the most precious resource of start-up founders) and setting expectations that you’re going to show them a product, over-reliance on formal meetings leads to overlooking perfectly good changes for serendipitous learning.
Instead of leaving wiggle room for the unexpected, everything becomes a process.
You can talk anywhere and save yourself the formal meeting until you have something concrete to show.
At their best, these anti-meeting conversations are best for both parties. You’re probably the first person in a long time to be truly interested in the petty annoyances of their day.
How long are the meetings?
Early conversations are very fast. It only takes 5 minutes maximum to learn whether the problem exists and is important. The chat grows longer as you move from early broad questions toward more specific product and industry issues.
A bit further along, you’ll find yourself asking questions that are answered with long stories explaining their workflow, how they spend their time what else they’ve tried. You can usually get what you came from in 10-15 minutes but people love telling stories about themselves so you can keep this chat as long as it's valuable for you and fun for them.
Learning the details of the industry from an industry expert takes an hour or more once you point them in the right direction.
Once you have a product and the meetings take on a more sales-oriented feel, you’ll want to start carving out clear blocks of 30ish minutes.
COMMITMENT AND ADVANCEMENT
Once we’ve learned the key facts about our industry and customers, it's time to zoom in again and start revealing our idea and showing product. We’re now in a position to cut through the false positives by asking for commitments.
Commitment is when they’re showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as time, money, reputation.
The currencies of conversation:
Time
Reputation (intro to peers or a decision maker, giving a public testimonial)
Financial (letter of intent, pre-order, deposit)
As an advancement, they’re moving into the next step of your real-world acquisition funnel. They’ll either move forward or make it clear that they’re not your customer. Both are good results for your learning.
When you fail to push for advancement, you end up with zombie leads: potential customers or investors who keep taking meetings and saying nice things, but who never seem to cut a check.
As always, you’re not trying to convince every person to like what you’re doing. When you’ve got the information you came for (even if it’s that they don’t care), you can leave. But at some point, you do need to put them to a decision in order to get it.
Every meeting either succeeds or fails
A meeting has succeeded if it ended up with a commitment to advance to the next step.
Don’t consider rejection to be a failure. That’s good learning.
A real failure is not even asking for a clear commitment or next steps. This can happen because you’re avoiding the scary question or because you haven't figured out what the next steps should be.
The worst meetings are the wishy-washy ones that you leave with neither rejection nor advancement.
FINDING CONVERSATIONS
If you don't already know folks, where do these conversations and meetings come from?
Going to them
You hustle one or two from whatever you can, and then, if you treat people’s time respectfully and genuinely trying to solve their problems, those cold conversations start turning into warm intros. The snowball is rolling.
Cold calls
It’s far from ideal, but sometimes you have no choice. You will be probably ignored by 98 people out of 100 you reached out just because people don't like getting cold calls. But you only need one yes to get you started.
Seizing serendipity
Beyond hard hustle stay open to serendipity. There are lots of ways to get lucky when you’re in the mood for it. If it sounds weird to unexpectedly interview people, then that’s only because you’re thinking of them as interviews instead of conversations. The only thing people love talking about more than themselves is their problems.
Find a good excuse
If you’re building a product that could help cafe owners educate customers on the origins and backstory of the coffee beans and nobody wants to talk to you, go to a cafe, say that coffee is amazing and you want to ask a manager about the story behind the beans.
Immerse yourself in where they are
If you’re building products for public speakers and conference organizers, hit the conference circuit. The speaker lounge may become your customer conversation machine.
Landing page
A landing page can be a great way to describe the value proposition and collect emails to further reach out to people who signed up to say hello and strike up a conversation.
Bringing them to you
We should look for ways to separate us from the crowd so they can find us. Before saving vast sums of time and frustration, bringing people to you also make them take you more seriously.
Organize meetups
For marginally more effect than attending the event, you can organize your own and benefit from being the center of attention. You’ll have an easy time chatting about problems of your segment but also it will bootstrap your industry credibility.
Speaking & teaching
This can be both a learning and selling tool. Having expertise and opinion how things could be better makes up a magic combination for being an effective teacher.
You can teach at conferences, workshops, through online videos, blogging, and by doing free consulting and office hours. You’ll refine your message, get a touch with a room full of potential consumers who take you seriously, and will learn which parts of your offering resonate (before you’ve even built it).
Industry blogging
Even when you have no reasonably sized and relevant audience, blogging still can be helpful.
When you send cold emails from your blog email address, folks would often meet with you because they checked your domain, saw your industry blog and figured you’re an interesting person to talk to.
More to that, blogging is a good exercise to get your thoughts in a row. It makes you a better customer conversationalist.
Get clever
If you want to sell to top-tier universities, organize a semi-monthly “knowledge exchange” call between the department heads to discuss the challenges around your topic of choice. Other universities could also dial in and listen to the best practices of the big ones.
By organizing the call and playing host, you can understand their problems and absorb all the credibility of the top universities and get direct call access to a pile of great leads.
Creating warm intros
The world is a relatively small place. Everyone knows someone. We just need to remember to ask.
Industry advisors
If you don’t know an industry and nobody takes you seriously hire advisors for some percent of equity and they will make a butch of intros regularly without it being a huge time burden for them. You’d be surprised by the quality of folks you can get to join your advisory board.
Investors
Top-tier investors are great for B2B intros. Beyond their own rolodex and company portfolio, they can usually pull off cold intros to practically almost industry. They can also help you choose better advisors.
Cash in favours
Sometimes it's time to call or send a message to those people who brushed you off by saying “Sounds great, keep me in the loop and let me how I can help”.
They might not have actually meant it, but who cares?
You’re not trying to minimize your failure rate, you’re trying to get some conversations going.
The people you’re being introduced to won't know the backstory anyway so it’s a clean start from there.
Asking for and framing the meeting
If you don’t necessarily have anything to sell but need to talk to someone senior outside of your network, it's unclear what the meeting is for. The right explanation and framing can do wonders:
You’re an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z. Don't mention your idea.
Frame expectations by mentioning what stage you’re at and that you don’t have anything to sell.
Show weakness and give them a chance to help you by mentioning the specific problem that you’re looking answers on.
Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, help help.
Explicitly ask for help.
Once the meeting starts, you’ve to grab the reins and be in control. You set the agenda, you drop into the first question, you keep it on topic and you propose the next steps and ask for commitments.
Don’t be a jerk about it but do have a plan for the meeting and be assertive about keeping it on track.
How many meetings
Every meeting has an opportunity cost. When you’re getting prepared, travelling to that meeting, hosting it and processes the outcomes - you aren’t writing code or generating leads or drinking margaritas.
You should keep talking to people until you stop hearing new information.
Second, it’s not about “how many”, it's about having enough for you to really understand your customers. You want to know them in the same way you know your friends - their goals, their frustrations, what else they’ve tried and how they currently deal with it.
This isn’t about a thousand meetings. It’s about quickly learning what you need and then getting back to building your business.
CHOOSING YOUR CUSTOMERS: SEGMENTATION
When you start too generic, everything is watered-down. Your marketing message is generic. You suffer feature creep.
When you have a fuzzy sense of who you’re serving, you end up talking to multiple customer segments all at once, get overwhelmed by options, receive confusing and mixed signals and aren’t moving forward.
In their early days, Google started by helping PhD students find obscure bits of code.
Before we could serve everyone, we have to serve someone.
When we’re in a moment, choosing a really specific customer segment, it feels like we’re losing all the other options. And that loss is painful. You’ll get to the whole world eventually. But you’ve got to start somewhere specific.
If the feedback that you’re getting is totally inconsistent, maybe you’re having on conversations with dozens of different types of customers.
If you’re facing a generic or varied set of customer segments, you can use a customer slicing to pick a concrete starting point. Start with any segment and then keep slicing off better and better sub-sets of it until you’ve got a tangible sense of who you can talk to and where to find them.
Now that you have a bunch of who=where pairs, you can decide who to start with based on who seems most:
Profitable or big
Easy to reach
Personally rewarding
RUNNING THE PROCESS
When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck.
Symptoms are:
“You just worry about the product. I’ll handle the customers”.
“Because the customers told me so!”
“I don't have time to talk to people - I need to be coding!”
Avoiding bottlenecks has three parts: prepping, reviewing and taking good notes.
The most important preparation work is to ensure you know your current list of three big questions. You should also know what commitment and next steps you’re going to push for at the end of the meeting.
Prepping
While prepping, if you come across a question which could be answered as desk research, take a moment to do it.
Sit down with your whole founding team, both business and product, when you prep.
Reviewing
After a conversation, review your notes with your team and update your beliefs and big three questions as appropriate. The goal is to ensure the learnings are on paper and in everyone’s head. Talk through the key quotes and main takeaways of the conversation, as well as any problems you ran into.
Meetings go best if you’ve got two people at them. One person can focus on taking notes and the other can focus on talking. As the second person, you may notice the lead asking bad questions or missing a signal they should be digging into. Just jump in and fix them.
How to write it down
Taking good notes is the best way to keep your team (and investors and advisors) in the loop. Plus, notes make it harder to lie to yourself.
When possible, write down exact quotes. You can later use them in your marketing language or to resolve arguments with sceptical teammates.
In either case, you can add symbols to your notes as context and shorthand:
Emotions | Their life | Specifics |
Excited 😃 Angry 😠 Embarassed 😑 | Pain or problem 📍 Goal or Job to be done 🏹 Obstacle❗ | Feature request or purchasing criteria ✅ Money or budget or purchasing process 🔀 Follow-up task ☑ |
Google Docs spreadsheets and Evernote are both great for team-sharing, search and retrieval. Spreadsheets are wonderfully sortable if you write your key signals in their own column. Index cards are also great.
If you’ll find customer chats coming out of nowhere and catching you by surprise, you’ve got notes written on paper plates from a pizza party or on newspapers from the cafe. Just transfer them over to your main storage system once you get back to the office.
There you go.
Now you know everything about how to talk to your customers and benefit from maximum learning in minimum time. Go build your dang company already.
It's going to be okay.
If not, don’t beat yourself up. Eternity will forgive.
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