Stop thinking about selling your idea to your customers.
You're talking to them in order to understand the problem that you're trying to solve.
The best book on this that I've read is "The Mom Test", well worth the price
Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
61–70 of 116 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#62Maybe I can answer the question "where to find people to talk to." I'm in consumer research; here's what's worked for me. If you need b2b: LinkedIn, conference and trade show lobbies (you don't need a ticket to hang out in the lobby), email lists you can buy online. There are also companies that maintain lists of experts with every imaginable background you can speak to for an hourly fee; not cheap but worth it. If y…
>> Six people is often all you need to start seeing some common themes. That's interesting. I am curious how you came up with that number. Getting six people to give you their opinions is much easier than doing any kind of extensive research.
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 talking to only a few people can reduce uncertainty with a pretty amazing accuracy, but I don't have a copy handy.
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#63Here's a specific anecdote of how I did it in Palo Alto (after just arriving in the US from South Africa): The first day I was in Palo Alto (and the US), I had absolutely no contacts and was severely jet lagged. I had just moved to the US to establish my startup ( https://journeyapps.com ) in the US, raise "Silicon Valley VC" and chase the dream ;) tl;dr - JourneyApps is a platform for businesses to quickly developer…
Hi there, I watched the Emerson video; very neat. Is JourneyApps something that I'd be able to utilize as a third party to create solutions for clients I've had previously and future opportunities? Or, do you work one-on-one with all of your customers and develop only in-house?
It (used to be) accessible to any developer on the internet as a platform :-)
Unfortunately, it's shifted to internal use (Journey employees, and enterprise employees).
Also - Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#64Cart 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…
What industry are you in that this is common, or even accepted? Nowhere I've worked would have answered yes to a site visit by a random salesperson.
Ask friends. Ask friends of friends. Go to a party or local event and ask others (after striking up real conversations). Are you a regular patron at any establishment? Speak to a low-level employee you regularly interact with; then speak to their manager. Ask your mail carrier; ask your paper delivery boy; ask your milkman. If it's 7-degrees of indirection to get to Kevin Bacon, it's probably just 1-2 degrees for people in your community.
Just start talking to people... or to the parent's point: Listen to people (and follow up!). You're looking to build relationships, not marks (I hope).
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Six people is often all you need to start seeing some common themes. That's interesting. I am curious how you came up with that number. Getting six people to give you their opinions is much easier than doing any kind of extensive research.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#66Earlier 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 :)
Before that I ran my own semiconductor brokerage abd the approach was the sane. "what about your job sucks?" "it sucks when I plan a build for Monday and 49 chips show up but 1 doesn't arrive until Wednesday. So my customer is mad that we are behind schedule and I pay mt staff to stand around.". So I started selling complete kits. One vendor, One PO and one box of components that arrives on time with everything in it…
This is one of the most inspirational sentiments I've read on HN, thank you for sharing!
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely this. This is also one of the reasons why there seem to be many successful business where the founder "scratched an itch" - they built a business on something they knew a lot about.
I think the "build a product to scratch your own itch" is one of the worst pieces of advice for entrepreneurs, especially first time entrepreneurs. The reason is that most entrepreneurs end up building businesses to scratch an itch, not solve a real serious problem. Source: been there, done that.
I think that it's good advice for people with interests outside of tech. If you are a developer, then it's easy to think of things that you could make for other developers, but for various reasons, developers aren't a great commercial market.
There are probably still a lot of non-developers out there using bad software, because developers with a genuine interest in that field and the skills to make great products for them haven't showed up yet. I work for a SaaS company that found a poorly served market, and it's been like pushing on open doors: there were a whole bunch of people with the same problem, but it's not a problem that developers care about, so the most popular solution in the market before us was Excel spreadsheets.
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#68From experience, it's much easier to recruit from a list of people who've already said that they'd be willing to talk to you than doing cold calls. Cold calls work, but expect a way lower response rate than if you find a way to pre-assess your customers.
For example, I've worked with clients where we would insert an NPS question at some strategic point in the digital parts of their service. Not at a point where it would be intrusive, but rather, for example, at the very end of completing a bank transfer. Make it very small: 1) The NPS 1-10 scale, 2) Field for free comments 3) Checkbox to the effect of "is it OK if we contact you for more questions?"
This serves the dual purpose of finding people who are willing to talk to you, as well as giving you an idea of what they think of your service at the current moment.
You can now contact the people who put less than 9 on the NPS scale to do two things: 1) find out what you can do to improve the service, and 2) take care of the complaints they might have and improve your relationship to the customer in question directly, potentially turning a negative impression into a promoter.
Obviously, if the product doesn't exist yet, you will have to find a different way to reach your potential customers rather than inserting it into the existing service.
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#69Earlier 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…
Aren't the statements "the account exec bullshitted his way in" and "Just treat people well" a little contradictory?
Re: Ask HN: How to actually “talk to your customers”?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the "build a product to scratch your own itch" is one of the worst pieces of advice for entrepreneurs, especially first time entrepreneurs. The reason is that most entrepreneurs end up building businesses to scratch an itch, not solve a real serious problem. Source: been there, done that.
100% disagree. Building something to scratch an itch is by far the easiest way to proceed initially. Many, many tools and services were built to scratch an itch.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been pitched a bill splitting app. It's an itch, not a real problem.
For all of the positive examples of companies that were "built to scratch an itch", there are thousands or tens of thousands of failures where the itch turned out to be a tiny market worth nothing, or no market at all.