Startups Unplugged

Category: Interviewing

Blog posts that involve customer interviews.

  • Going Gonzo to Build a Better Bootcamp

    Hunter S. Thompson practiced Gonzo journalism, a format where the reporter participates in the story. Here’s the start of the Gonzo startup advisory (what I used to run as a “bootcamp”).

    In my experience, if you’re an early-stage entrepreneur and working with someone like me to learn Customer Development techniques, you will have some common troubles. One of the most common ones is to use customer interviews as a way to learn about your target customers, their problems and what they value. It will take you time to become comfortable interviewing or even with the idea of going out to talk to people. You’ll delay doing it entirely. And when I think you’ve understood it I won’t really know how it goes out in the wild.

    I’m convinced that practicing Customer Development is a set of skills that cannot be learned without active practice, so I’m going gonzo. Salim Virani brought up the participatory idea over dinner and I’m making it a part of my work. I will go on customer interviews with startups in the early days of working together to observe, take notes and when needed, contribute to the discussions. I’ll give direct feedback right after the interviews so that the founders can improve more quickly without me needing to guess how well it’s going.

    I’ll report back later on results from going Gonzo.

  • School’s Out

    A few years ago when I started working on a social voice service I thought a potential customer segment was college students. I spoke to around 120 students to test the concept. During that time I learned a lot about design and UX but also realized that this segment did not have the problems I thought. College students as a segment was invalidated but I was struck by how I was able to easily get access to people on or near campus.

    Recently, while running a Startup Weekend-like hackathon we gave teams themes to build for. Since Customer Development was required, they went out to test their hypotheses.

    Two days later I was surprised to see that most of the teams built for and tested with college students.

    Nothing in particular would have led them to this segment. But many of them had the same idea. In general, they also did more interviews and made more progress in learning than teams that chose other segments.

    But apart from competitions, should startups test their real products with college students? Among the good reasons to test with college students: startups know how to find them, accessibility is pretty easy, they exist in large numbers and they’re willing to stop and talk. They will forget you after you make mistakes interviewing them. The bad reasons: you’re probably not really building a solution for them.

    Beyond college students, I see similarities with startups that develop for any market that is easily reached compared to those who deal with difficult to reach markets. I’ve seen teams who are building something valuable spend a lot of time just trying to get in front of people. And I’ve seen other teams find creative approaches to reaching their markets.
    In an artificial environment like a fake two-day project, going with an easily reached segment can be smart. But for a startup building something real over time, it’s better to figure out who your segment is.

    The faster you do this, the faster you’ll learn if you’re on to something.

    Note: I’ve since seen this behavior repeated in multiple other startup programs. After I started to teach entrepreneurship at USC, I flipped the above around and actively encourage students to build projects for a college audience. The point being, build a Disposable Startup in order to get operational experience.

  • The questions you ask determine the answers you get

    I recently participated in a brainstorming group to help a friend generate ideas for her startup.

    First of all, it was a lot of fun. My friend had the session led by a creative brainstorming trainer (who ended up being quite good), organized it very well and I think got a lot out of it. I’m looking forward to seeing what she applies to her business.But one part of the session sticks in my mind. We brainstormed solutions to several questions and I realized that the way the questions were framed influenced how people responded. This is an obvious point, but since I’ve been on the asking side for a while I forgot what it was like to be the one answering the questions.

    One question related to her business was “how do I get people to buy tickets?” (which is her business model).

    I found that I had trouble answering the question because I had already assumed that the individuals would not be the sole purchasers of tickets and that the revenue would come from other participants or sponsors.

    Now, if the question had been “how do I generate revenue?” or “who has this problem?” the results would be very different. When I think back to my own experience demoing my startup for people in cafes, I made the mistake of not understanding how people would or wouldn’t become repeat users.

    When I first went out, I focused on whether people enjoyed using the service, how long they used it, whether they had any problems with the design. I saw that users played with our service for quite a long time, which was surprising to me. But since these were all one-off demos with people, it took me a while before I realized that while people played with the service for a long time, they also didn’t return for weeks or months afterward.

    That was a very important behavior to learn, but it took much longer than needed.

    Once we learned it, we then approached selling to users in a very different way and got our first business clients. I’ve tried to remember that lesson ever since.

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