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Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

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Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

#111

Post by erikb »

mattmanser wrote: post #85
erikb wrote: post #82

No contacts, no domain experience -> you need 5-10 years to build these. Contacts+Experience are also a longer way to say "business value". You have two ways to build it. One is always coming from the outside, hoping for nice/stupid people to explain it to you, hoping to get shitty contracts to make some kind of money. This way will be the slave road. The alternative is becoming an excited new employee at a customer…

I respectfully disagree. I know two different entrepreneurs who set up internet businesses in domains completely unknown to them and simply walked into all the businesses they wanted to target and signed people up in the first weeks of operating. Restaurants + B&Bs were the domains.

You forgot the affiliate link to the $200 course where they explain how they did it. ;-)

Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

#112

Post by atsaloli »

Spooky23 wrote: post #57
conanbatt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you work in a "9 figure web hosting company" might be a cue of why you can start a conversation, because of the brand of a company. Im sure Airbnb can get into a broker house any day to have a chat. Do you think it would be easy for you to walk into Uber in the next few days and someone tell you what you should be building that they would buy? Im honestly asking, i do b2b, please tell me some secrets :)

Persistence pays. I was an account manager intern at a VAR in college and was really shocked to discover this. I sold about $50k of training to a big company based on a cold call. One time a guy called looking for advice on sharing files on NT4 and ended up in a conversation about licensing -- I sold him an EA. Another time I was in a wingman role for a site visit with an account exec. On the way back, we stopped at…

What's an EA?

Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

#113

Post by smilebot »

goatherders wrote: post #10

Cart is ahead of the horse. Getting out of the office to talk to potential customers has NOTHING to do with selling. It has to do with learning about the sector you THINK you want to be working in. In other words, you need to accept that your foundational knowledge is largely made up of information that made its way to you by going through your filter of preconceived notions and biases. My advice to my sales team (an…

My potential customers are college students. Do you have any ideas on how I can approach them? I'm working on a cheap textbook finder app.

Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

#114

Post by brett40324 »

smilebot wrote: post #113
goatherders wrote: post #10

Cart is ahead of the horse. Getting out of the office to talk to potential customers has NOTHING to do with selling. It has to do with learning about the sector you THINK you want to be working in. In other words, you need to accept that your foundational knowledge is largely made up of information that made its way to you by going through your filter of preconceived notions and biases. My advice to my sales team (an…

My potential customers are college students. Do you have any ideas on how I can approach them? I'm working on a cheap textbook finder app.

As in 'i misplaced my book and i want geo locate it', or 'I need to find this textbook to purchase'? You should skip the students and work toward relationships with campus bookstores, community colleges, trade schools perhaps, and show them why their students should be encouraged to use your app.

Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

#115

Post by ivv »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #65
ivv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience of doing a bunch of interviews and surveys over the years, after about 6, you'll start hearing patterns. If you are new to the subject you are researching, doing some reading and talking to about six people will get you to a point where you'll be able to evolve the questions you are capable of asking, or formulate hypotheses for testing. "How To Measure Anything" has a great chapter on how ta…

I hadn't heard about that book. Thanks for the recommendation.

Here's another place where I remember reading about 5 users, took me a couple of days to find it: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...

Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?

#116

Post by raminassemi »

jaf656s wrote: post #11

Your problem with figuring out how to talk to customers is that you don't know who you are trying to talk to. First you need to figure out who you want your customers to be. If your answer is local coffee shop owners, then it's easy to make a list of customers and you can call them, email them, or visit them in person. There are many places on the internet that give free advice on how to do cold calls, emails, visits…

> But if you don't know who to talk to, then you are trying to solve two problems at the same time: who to talk to and how to talk to them.

Great point

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