11 Easy ways to find customers for your problem interview or experiments

by José Enrique Rodríguez

TL;DR

Once you decide you want to run an experiment everyone is faced with the question: where do I get the people to run the experiments with. These are some of the methods I have tried to solve this dilemma.

1st: Your address book.

The first place you want to start looking at is your address book. Thats a simple yet very overlooked place to start. Figure out who in your contacts fits some of the criterias you defined for your early adopters and shoot them an email asking them if they would like to help you out by giving you 15 minutes of their time. If you are afraid of interviewing your own contacts, or for some reason you don’t know anyone who fits your defined criterias, then the next solution is for you.

2nd: Referrals.

Asking for referrals to your contacts or during interviews is a must. Because asking the interviewee for referrals or introductions is a good way to meet new candidates for the experiment but also a way to break out of the “cold email” situation. In fact, referrals have the highest probability of a close, the lowest cost, and all you have to do is ask for them.

If you are being introduced by someone you have a much higher chance that the person would agree to meet with you.

3rd: Go to the places where these people meet or go.

Sounds simple, isn’t it? This is very overlooked also. Most of the times there is a good chance that the kind of customers you described for your experiment, are already meeting somewhere else. Let me give you some examples.

For instance, if you targets are parents or people with kids, there is a good chance you will find them at schools either dropping or picking up their kids, or at football practice, etc. If they are runners, there are particular locations in your city that are very well known by runners as great places to go practice, you could go there. If its people looking for a place to work with their computer, you can go to coworking spaces, starbucks, libraries, etc. You get the idea.

In general there is a really good chance they are already going to a particular place easy to find and get to. Just show up and ask.

4th: Find communities where these people engage.

If it exists, there is a community about it. How else would you explain this and this.

Online communities are a great way to get to know your customers and how they think about the problem you are trying to solve. It is a good way to understand them and to find information and early adopters since people who join and engage in online communities are usually very motivated and passionate about it so they will probably be happy to help you understand.

The moral of the story being, you just need to find those communities, or create them! Although that last part is very demanding and time consuming.

Also, lurking or posting in communities is not a replacement for actually talking to your customers.

These are just a few places you could look for them: meetup.com, mailing lists, google groups, reddit, linkedin, facebook, etc.

5th: Paid advertisement + Landing Page

This is a very well known method. If you have heard Eric Ries’ talk or read The Lean Startup, you probably know about it. However, the times where you could do this for $5 a day are over.

Competition for certain keywords in most Adwords campaigns is pretty high nowadays. Meaning you need to spend more. Not something you want to try if you are on a tight budget.

6th: Your current product or service.

If you already have an existing customer base, you can take advantage of that by A/B testing some of your assumptions with them.

There are several tools that will allow you to do that with little or no effort. Google Analytics Experiments is one of them.

Just be careful not to end being booed like Facebook.

7th: UX testing sites.

You can run your own user experience tests, either by A/B testing or by interviewing people directly. However there are ways to do that in an easier way and in some cases for free.

Sites like UsabilityHub, UserTest and others allow you to submit your questionnaire and mockups, chose a segmentation criteria and run a number of experiments to test some of your assumptions regarding the user experience of your site.

Don’t underestimate the power of user experience testing. You can find real gold nuggets there.

8th: Cold emails.

Cold emails are hard to write for most people. When you are trying to contact someone you don’t know and get the to pay attention to you it is not so simple, especially if they are busy people. But is it available, if you know how to do it.

Here are some a good articles with some practical advice on how to use cold emails to build relationships with the press or others.

9th: Message boards. (like craigslist)

By posting a real or fake ad, you can get people to give you the feedback you need.

10th: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Although this could be considered some kind of “cold” communication, a very good ways to find people that fit some of your profile characteristics are to use the already established social networks that exist.

By searching and filtering results on these networks by demographics etc. you can find potential people to interview. I use socialbro.com to segment and find people to follow, or just monitor what people are saying.

11th: Amazon Mechanical Turk or similar.

I have a friend who hates the whole concept of the Turk Machine. But like this article explains it can be very helpful if used right.

That’s all for now!

Which other ways do you use to find your customers? I would love to hear about them. Remember to share this article or comment I would really appreciate the feedback!

9/3/14

Turning market risk into technical risk, or how to start your customer discovery.

by José Enrique Rodríguez

No comments yet

TL;DR

After the initial Lean Canvas it is easy to get lost on what to do next when you have so many assumptions so I use some techniques to help me keep on track.
I will take you through my train of thought with BARconWIFI.com as an example.

Picking up where we left it...

In my previous post I talked about how I use the Lean Canvas in order to analyse and better visualise what I know or don't know about how I think my business model will work. But, a problem for me, specially at the beginning, is determining what to do next.

The thing is, once I have done the canvas, I am faced with so much uncertainty and possibilities that deciding what to do next is not trivial. Maybe you have had the same problem, where you find yourself asking: What should I go for next? Better yet: What am I trying to accomplish with it so that I learn the most out of it?

Well, Lean Startup, is about constantly performing a ruthless exercise on prioritisation and waste prevention. Taking the riskiest core assumptions, and learning as much as I can about them, as cheap as I can. That way I try to diminish the uncertainty about the whole business but at the same time move forward. This is what the whole MVP strategy is about.

Like Eric Ries likes to say, you are taking market risk (is someone going to buy my stuff) and turning it into technical risk (will I be able to build other stuff to test that and learn from it the answer?)

At the core of all this is the Build-Measure-Learn cycle. You build and experiment (or MVP) to test the market assumptions you are making. You then measure the response, and finally based on the data you can decide what you want to explore or build next. So... in order to start learning we need to start building.

Now, selecting what you want to build, requires you to have some idea of what you want to learn about. This is where the phrase that is often used to describe why startups fail comes in.

Paraphrasing Steve Blank: Most startups don't fail because they didn't build their products, they fail because they didn't build a product people wanted in the first place. So, the biggest risk one faces when starting a startup, is actually building the wrong thing and that is what the first step in the customer development process is about: customer discovery.

In customer discovery we are trying to find out if we are building the right thing. We want to validate that we know who our customers are, that we know which problem they have and that we are able to, not only give them a solution for that problem, but also that we are able to explain to them what that solution is, in an effective way.

However with so much information out there where do you go first?

Here is what I do to find out and organize that first wave of thoughts. I'm hoping it will be helpful to you.

Down the rabbit hole.

Like I mentioned at the end of the last article I not only filled in the boxes for the BARconWIFI.com's Lean Canvas, but also had a section for questions that would come up as I was thinking and filling in each section of the canvas. This is definitively not by chance.

While I am filling in each box, I ask myself the questions that someone who would have to do the job, would ask me, or questions that would help me understand the way the business would work.

For instance, if I say that my customers are freelancers and I know I will want to communicate with them some natural questions follow. For example for customers:

Are these really my customers?
(Remember, biggest risk, not building the right thing for these people)
What similarities do they share?
(Everyone is different, but there needs to be a pattern if you plan on selling to them in a consistent manner)
Which ones are going to be my early adopters?
How many of them are there? (Market size)
...

In the case of the channels. If I say that I assume will use Twitter to deliver some of the value and to communicate with them, then:

Are they even on Twitter?
How will I get them to listen?
How will I get them to spread the word?
...

Or when filling in the problem:

Do my customers have this problem?
How often do they have it?
How painful is it?
...

The list goes on and on... It is long. Yes.

There is a lot of stuff I don't know and that is exciting!

Prioritising

To prioritize I first write down the assumptions one by one on post-it notes. Then I distribute them in two axes.

The horizontal axis with how much would it take to execute the experiment. This is based on my own notion of what "risk" is. For me its a combination of the cost in time and money I think I would have to invest.

As an example, a round of interviews would be easier to do than let's say, build a twitter account with 100 followers in two weeks, or write down piece of software. Also, some experiments are easier to run if you have money to throw at them. So some times you could have the same experiment rank differently on the same axis depending on your resources (time, money, team, software...).

The vertical axis represents how much I think I would learn. Again based on my own notion of "learning". Again you will have your own set of learning priorities, but for me at this stage knowing that my customers really have this problem is more important that knowing if twitter is the channel to reach them, or if they will use my yet incipient solution the way I think they will.

By doing this I am already forcing me to think about how I would test each assumption and I write down the ideas for tests also. Once I do this, I usually start with the ones that that give me the most learning and at the same time are easier to test.

Again, you can use whatever method to prioritise y usually assign numbers and do a quotient. From here on I start taking them and clustering them around the experiments that I think would validate them. With that prioritised list in mind you can now chose which experiments to run.

But before running the experiment, I rephrase the questions in the experiment into testable hypotheses. By that I mean, you can determine if its true or false. Otherwise you don't know what it is that you are testing or if you found it or not.

For instance the questions: Are these really my customers? Is not clear enough for it to be testable.

In an effort to make it testable, I would change it to: Do they have the problem or problems I am describing? Ok that's better, but still not specific enough for me. I ended up with: I know they are my customers if they have had the problem in the past 4 months.

Now that we have a specific assumption that we are making, I set an acceptance criteria. You know, the line in the sand. Where in the sand? That, again, depends.

Trevor Owens from the lean startup machine describes it in his explanation of the validation board as the minimum criteria that needs to hold in order for you to be satisfied that the assumption (hypothesis) is true.

Since we really don't have any idea of what we are going to find in most cases, this is usually an educated guess. I like not to be too optimistic. If I do better than random, I'm fine with that. To me it means I am on to something.

Now the experiment I selected for this question is a set of problem interviews. The acceptance criteria I chose is that at least 6 out of 10 people that I interview say that they have had this problem in the last 4 months.

Once you have done that, you go and execute the experiment. Of course, you can run more than one experiment at the same time if you wish.

First round of experiments.

Ok, so based on the assumptions I am making I decided to run a couple of experiments in parallel. If you have some comments I would love to hear them.

What I chose to do was:

Problem Interview: Easy to do when your customers base is so approachable, and I know some people who fit the profiles. It yields the greatest learning for this part.

Landing Page stating UVP and sign up form to start collecting leads: Easy to do since I am using instapage.com (free) and lets you customise your landing easily as well as connect it to Google Analytics. You can read my other post if you want to know about other free tools I am using to build BARconWIFI.com.

Data Research of various kinds:

Research on the Twitter channel to check on assumptions like: can I reach them, how can I deliver some of the value, are they even on twitter, etc.
Estimate market size from the INE statistics and other sources.
Find out if we can get the content to curate in sufficient amounts and quality.

This is all due to the fact that I am already paying for socialbro.com which allows me to easily run this experiments and research on twitter without much hassle and that I know how to use some other free tools to automate most of the process.

If that were not the case, I am not sure I would have gone this way.

Results.

In upcoming posts I will talk about some of the results for these experiments as well as some other details about executing the experiments. Until then, remember to share this article or leave a comment. :D

The Plan B Experiment

Another customer development lab...