I am running late with my assignment - I am late with all sorts of things these days. This is for our second presentation at Annetta’s class: talking to users. I am going to break it down to What, Who, and How? I am leaving an important topic When out of the discussion, because it changes the answers to all three questions. This post will be for when your startup is at idea & prototype stage.
1. What.
Henry Ford famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Some one hundred years later, Steve Jobs, after quoting Ford, continued to explain: “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.... A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
When these visionaries speak down to us mere mortals from the altar, we are left puzzled: Didn’t business school 101 tell us to talk to users?
The way I see it, is that Henry Ford and Steve Jobs were advising us what to talk about, or more precisely, what not to talk about. Don’t ask your users to design your products. Don’t talk to users about features. However, you should talk to users to understand their problems and their pain points.
2. Who.
The best kind of startup ideas are the ones where the founders themselves are the users. If you have the flexibility to pick, please take this advice and thank me later. Not only does it grant you unlimited immediate access to the most generous, resourceful and critical users (yourselves), it also pulls you through the tough times - oh trust me, there will be plenty of those.
The natural next step would be family & friends & users with warm introductions - the caveat here is that they may love you too much to tell you the truth, but they are great practice opportunities to prepare you to talk to the real ones.
Who should be your first real targeted users? You find yourself in a catch-22 situation, because ironically by talking to users help you decide who your target users should be. Luckily you can bootstrap yourself out of the situation. Cast a wider net and gradually narrow it down and chase after people who encounter the problem the most frequent and stand to benefit most from your product. For example, when we interviewed our friends, who found the problem resonate the most with the friends who also work out, therefore we start to target gym-goers as users.
3. How.
Most importantly about How, all founders have to talk to users directly. There shouldn’t be a middleman between you and your most valuable assets (users and their problems) at this stage.
If you are like me, it is very uncomfortable to approach people to ask questions about your idea & product. I often preface a conversation almost apologetically by saying “I am not selling anything but can you ...” If that’s you too, I don’t have good advice for overcoming your discomfort. Here you just have to simply throw yourself into it. Ultimately your product is supposed to make their life better, right? Why feel bad about it? Just remember to be polite and respectful to people’s boundary.
Once you got yourself out there, I ask you to take notes and be disciplined. Ask open-ended questions, be a good listener, look for quantifiable answers that can help you build benchmark and baselines. For example, after asking “tell us how do you usually prepare meals,” you can further ask “how often do you shop for groceries” and “how often do you cook” if they haven’t already answered them.
Lastly, here are some good resources that I’d like to share with you:
Good luck talking to users! Steve Jobs and Henry Ford are on our side.
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