In the last hour of this lecture, I'm going to look at the customer discovery process in detail.
We've just looked at the preparation for it. And first of all, we're going to look at testing that.
The problem that you think exists for customers and you're serving with your product actually exists.
So question anyone, how do you test that?
Your customers have the needs that you think they do. We're going to go and speak to them.
It's obvious. And. You may have heard or read this phrase, get out of the building in relation to the Lean Start-Up.
But now is the time you need to get out of the building and go and speak to some people.
That's how you find out whether or not they've got the needs. You don't go and get a market research agency to do this for you.
You need to do it and you need to go out there. And that's that's your starting off point.
It's about having lots and lots of face to face conversations with target customers
with an open mind and being ready to learn from what you hear from them. And you should have as many conversations as you can.
Five isn't enough. 20 might be. 50 is much better.
And so what you want to get out of the conversations that you're having at the beginning?
Well, the interviews are an opportunity to develop a really deep understanding about the lives of your customers,
their work, their working lives, their home lives, what's what's their working day like?
What technology do they use in working at home? What annoys them and what do they dream of?
What their hopes and aspirations? The more you learn about your customers, the better able you are to serve their needs.
And this is why many really successful entrepreneurs are building products for themselves because they have a deep understanding of the customer.
They are one that they're able to construct a product which really serves the needs of that customer.
And this is your opportunity to develop that understanding.
And really importantly, you're looking for signals from the customer that they are experiencing the problems that you think that they are.
Now you might think there are some there are some products that that so that aren't actually serving a need or a problem.
They're actually delivering a pleasurable experience, perhaps.
Well, that's still serving a need. It's an emotional need.
Understand it and then go and test to find out whether or not it exists.
And I've taken teams of people out into the street to do this.
I've conducted a lot of interviews myself,
and I can imagine what some of you might be thinking about the very idea, hard work and probably a bit nervous.
What will it be like? Will anyone want to talk to me? And some of you might be thinking, it sounds like a bit of a waste of time.
I already know my customers and it's all I really need to go through this.
And on every single occasion that either I or a team that I've been working with have gone out and talked to customers.
We've learned something which is fundamentally changed our ideas about the product that we're building.
So it is never a waste of time, I would say is essential. And.
Just to give you one example, I have an events business that runs technology events and we are launching a new technology conference.
This is to a market that we understand to customers that we already sell to.
We know inside out. But the ending of the events business took the time out to go and interview
20 of our target customers and find out and find out about that their lives,
what they're interested in. Well, what motivates them to go to conferences?
And as a result of those conversations with people that we thought we already knew,
we drew a line through one of the streams of content in our conference completely.
It just wasn't very interested, and we thought it would be it wasn't going to work.
And we and we potentially stopped ourselves from launching a conference which which would ultimately fail.
I'm so conducting those interviews. Your job is to get the customer talking.
It's not to speak yourself. You're looking for a free flowing conversation where you're mostly listening.
Don't stick to a structured interview. Ask open questions and let the customer talk.
And it's and it's in those snippets that you get from the customer when they go off on a tangent that you get the real gems.
So get the real learning and make it very open, free conversation.
One good open question to ask is asking them about the biggest problem that they face in the particular area of work you're focusing on.
That can get you quite quickly to an answer that's useful, but then don't be happy with the first answer that you get.
Dig deeper. To give you an example of this, we were out in the street talking to people about their health concerns,
the biggest health concerns facing and I spoke to one lady, he said her biggest problem was was staying fixed.
I said, well, can you tell me about when the last time you experienced that problem was?
And she thought for a moment and said, you know, now that I think about it, it's actually not much of a problem.
Yeah. No, I don't really have any problems associated with with them, with my health.
If I'd stopped at the first answer, I wouldn't have found that out.
I asked another guy 5 minutes later down the street and he said, My biggest problem is motivating myself to get fit.
I said, What's the. Can you tell me about the last time you experienced that problem?
And he said, Well, last week and gave me a very specific, specific answer.
That was a real problem that he was experiencing. So dig deeper.
The big the big one here, which I think you've probably heard before, is about not selling your idea.
If you mention it at all and mentioned it at the end of the interview and at a very high level,
most of what you hear back is going to be it's going to be useless.
It'll just be somebody congratulate you on having a good idea.
That's got nothing to do with whether or not they're actually going to buy from you at some point in the future.
So at this point, I'm not sure whether or not it's worth doing.
And what do you want out of this? Well, it's a good idea to keep a record of your of your interviews.
When I'm in the car, I usually kind of get into the car and make a recording of my recollection of what's just happened.
Or I find a quiet space and out. But write it off immediately.
And you may well leave the interview with somebody having agreed to be an early adopter for your product.
So that's that's that's one of the things you should make sure you collect is people's contact details.
And you'll probably have to go back to your business to canvas and change a few things based on what you discover.
And we also find it really helpful to build a picture of our target customers,
which we call a persona that's just a one page description saying this is a typical customer we're going to give her, you know,
give us give her a photo, give her a name, describe her work environment, her tech environment,
and describe what we've learned so that other members of the team and we can remind ourselves of of who is that we're targeting?
And then finally, you need to create a school, cause it's great.
It should be in a central place. We put awesome Google spreadsheets of everyone on the team who gets them.
You should decide up from what goes into that school cards. But it's definitely include badges for how painful the problem is for the people
that you're talking to and also whether or not they've found a workaround.
Workarounds are really good signs that you're on something because if a customer is feeling a problem acutely enough,
then they will have figured out a way to solve that problem for themselves, either using a convoluted workaround or by using an inferior product.
So, you know you're on something. If you start hearing a lot of workarounds and also record how excited people are, you know,
you need to be you need to know that there's real motivation there around that need that you're exploring.
Interviewing customers is not the only way that you can test the existence of
a problem that they have and that they care enough to do something about it.
The other option is it works in particular for digital products or real world products or services that need to be activated online.
And here you create something called a low fidelity MVP, which is a minimum viable product.
And we'll talk a bit more about that later on. But essentially, it's the minimum smallest version of your product,
which will get people excited enough to buy it or use it so that you can start learning from them.
Although for a low fidelity MVP, we're using the word viable in the loosest possible sense.
And the classic example is Dropbox, which Reese cited in his The Lean Start-Up Book.
Cedric Houston, he's the founder of Dropbox, created a video demo of Dropbox working perfectly.
Dropbox is a is a service that you use to backup your files from your personal computer in the cloud.
And he released the video and had it link through to register your interest form.
And overnight he had 75,000 people enter their email address into that form literally overnight.
He hadn't built his product yet. He was just finding out whether or not there was any demand for it.
And I think he probably found out that there was.
Another form of a low fidelity MVP is the landing page, as can be a really simple web page like this.
And this is something we just did as a as a random test.
This identifies the needs, the customer need that you've just discovered and explains the solution that
you're planning to solve that needs the clear call to action to sign up now.
But typically you pay for a bit of traffic to go through to that landing page using AdWords or Facebook ads or something like that,
and see how many of the people who arrive on the page attempt to sign up.
And that's a measure of whether or not they identify that need and they think the solution that you're offering can solve it.
You don't have a product to this point. When they click through, this is the kind of thing that they'll see.
And there's a few things to note here.
One, we're collecting the email addresses so these can be our early adopters for when we actually start building the product for real.
To the fact that somebody actually leaves an email address on this form is a good sign that even though they know the product doesn't exist,
that they've got a need that's fairly acute because they really want to get their hands on it.
And three, we've tried to learn something else.
If you remember what I was saying about making sure that you're maximising your potential for learning.
So here we're asking them to explain a bit about why they want the product.
And this has been produced using a tool called Quick MVP and which you can is very low cost and you can try it online.
To give you another real world example of this, we were exploring a project where we've been asking, we'd spoken to lots of lots of customers.
We identified three potential value value propositions, each of them distinct based on what we'd learned from the customers we spoke to.
We created a landing page for each one, just like the one I've just shown you.
And we paid for some AdWords and Facebook traffic to go to those landing each of those three landing pages on one of them,
we had 20% of people sign up, another 1% failure or another 10%, a bit of a lukewarm response.
So you know which one we took forward. And when we took it forward, we knew we could get customers to start using it when we actually launched it.
And we also knew how much it would cost to acquire those customers because we'd just run some Facebook tests.
So we know we know we know the cost per user acquisition.
And it costs about $600 to run that test and about three days to put together and get the results.
And we knew like the voice book search at that point, we had something.
We knew there was a need. We knew people would act on that need.