Test your Business Model Canvas: the Customer Interview
Summary
TLDRIn this video, Steve Morris discusses the importance of conducting customer interviews for testing hypotheses in your business model. He advises entrepreneurs to approach these interviews with an open mind, avoiding confirmation bias, and to ask follow-up questions based on customer responses. Morris recommends doing interviews in two rounds, focusing first on understanding the customer's needs and then assessing how the proposed solution meets those needs. He also emphasizes the value of face-to-face interviews and suggests involving the founding team due to their deeper understanding of the business context.
Takeaways
- đ Customer interviews are crucial for testing hypotheses in the business model canvas and are part of the customer discovery process.
- đŻ The primary goal of customer interviews is to validate hypotheses about value propositions, customer pain points, and gains, rather than selling a product.
- đ§ Confirmation bias can skew customer discovery; it's important to remain open-minded and seek feedback that challenges existing beliefs.
- đŁïž Interviews should not be a fixed list of questions but a dynamic conversation that allows for follow-up questions based on customer responses.
- đ„ Face-to-face interviews are preferred for better understanding and observing body language, but video calls can be a good alternative.
- đ Conduct interviews in two rounds: first focusing on customer needs and later on validating if the product or service meets those needs.
- đ„ It's recommended to have a two-person team for interviews, with one person focusing on asking questions and the other on note-taking.
- đ€ Founders are often the best interviewers due to their deep understanding of the business context and the problem they aim to solve.
- đą Interview at least 30 prospective customers to gather a diverse range of feedback and insights.
- đĄ Finding prospective customers requires creativity and getting out of your comfort zone; leverage your team for brainstorming potential sources.
- đ Prepare a script to convince potential interviewees that the conversation is not a sales pitch but a request for their insights and time.
Q & A
What is the primary purpose of conducting customer interviews?
-The primary purpose of conducting customer interviews is to test key hypotheses in your business model canvas, also known as customer discovery. It helps in understanding the customer's perspective on the job to be done, pain to be avoided, and gain to be realized.
Why is it important to verify the dissatisfaction with current solutions during customer interviews?
-Verifying dissatisfaction with current solutions helps to ensure that your solution addresses the job, pain, and gain better than existing solutions, which is crucial for validating the value proposition of your product or service.
What are some hypotheses that customer interviews help in testing?
-Customer interviews help in testing hypotheses around value proposition, customer relationships, channels, selling and marketing strategies, and revenue streams, including verifying that customers are willing to pay the expected amount.
Why should the customer interview process not be treated as a sales pitch?
-The customer interview process should not be treated as a sales pitch because the goal is to test hypotheses rather than broadcasting a sales message. The focus should be on asking questions to gather information and potentially adjust hypotheses based on customer feedback.
What is confirmation bias and how can it affect customer interviews?
-Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms one's existing beliefs. In customer interviews, it can lead to overlooking or dismissing feedback that contradicts preconceived notions, which can compromise the accuracy of hypothesis testing.
Why is it recommended to have a two-round interview process?
-A two-round interview process is recommended to first understand the customer's perspective on their needs and pain points without the influence of your product. The second round then focuses on verifying if your solution meets those needs, ensuring a more accurate assessment.
What is the significance of face-to-face interviews in customer discovery?
-Face-to-face interviews are significant because they allow for probing questions and observing body language, which can provide deeper insights into customer feelings and reactions that might not be conveyed through other mediums.
How many customer interviews are recommended for effective customer discovery?
-It is recommended to conduct at least 30 customer interviews for effective customer discovery. More interviews provide a broader range of feedback and insights, which can lead to a better understanding of customer needs.
Why is it suggested to have a two-person team for customer interviews?
-Having a two-person team allows one person to focus on asking questions and listening to the customer while the other takes notes. This setup ensures that the interviewer can maintain the flow of conversation without being distracted by note-taking.
How can founders find prospective customers for interviews?
-Founders can find prospective customers for interviews by brainstorming as a team, leveraging their network, and getting creative about where to find customers. They may need to get outside their comfort zone and be persistent in seeking out potential interviewees.
What is the recommended approach to convince prospective customers to participate in interviews?
-The recommended approach is to clearly communicate that the interaction is not a sales pitch but an opportunity for the customer to help a startup understand their needs better. A well-crafted script can help in getting customers to agree to participate in the interview.
Outlines
đ Customer Interviews for Hypothesis Testing
This paragraph introduces the concept of customer interviews as a critical tool for testing hypotheses within a business model canvas. It emphasizes that these interviews, also known as customer discovery, are not sales pitches but opportunities to challenge and verify assumptions about the value proposition, customer relationships, channels, and revenue streams. The speaker, Steve Morris, advisesćäžè to approach interviews with an open mind, aware of confirmation bias, and to ask probing questions rather than just broadcasting their sales message. The importance of face-to-face interviews is highlighted for better understanding of customer needs and reactions, with video calls suggested as a viable alternative during challenging times like a pandemic.
đ Structuring Customer Interviews in Two Rounds
Paragraph 2 discusses the strategy of conducting customer interviews in two distinct rounds. The first round focuses on understanding the customer's perspective on their needs, pains, and gains without introducing the product or service. This approach helps to refine the solution based on genuine customer feedback. The second round then verifies if the solution addresses these needs effectively. The paragraph also touches on the importance of starting interviews from the customer's viewpoint to avoid biasing the conversation towards the product. It suggests interviewing at least 30 prospective customers for comprehensive insights and recommends a two-person team approach for interviews, with one person taking notes to allow the interviewer to focus on dialogue.
đ„ Engaging the Right Interviewees and Team Dynamics
This section stresses the importance of involving the founding team in customer interviews due to their deep understanding of the business context. It also advises on finding prospective customers through team brainstorming and getting out of the comfort zone to approach potential interviewees. The paragraph provides tips on how to convince customers to participate in interviews by clarifying that the interaction is not a sales pitch but a request for their insights to help shape a better solution. It also suggests creating a script to secure these interviews and emphasizes the value of persistence in the face of rejections.
đ Preparing for Customer Interviews
The final paragraph outlines the preparation process for customer interviews. It suggests listing the hypotheses to be tested, creating starter questions, deciding on the interview teams, and developing a list of prospective customers. The speaker also recommends developing a script to secure interviews and provides a brief overview of upcoming videos that will cover example questions for round one interviews, round two questions, and strategies for understanding customer willingness to pay.
Mindmap
Keywords
đĄCustomer Interviews
đĄHypothesis Testing
đĄValue Proposition
đĄConfirmation Bias
đĄFollow-up Questions
đĄFace-to-Face Interviews
đĄCustomer Relationship
đĄPain Points
đĄGain
đĄChannels
đĄRevenue Streams
Highlights
Customer interviews are crucial for testing hypotheses in the business model canvas.
The process is also known as customer discovery.
Interviews help verify understanding of the value proposition from the customer's perspective.
They assess why customers are dissatisfied with current solutions.
Interviews test hypotheses around customer relationships, channels, selling strategies, and revenue streams.
The interview process is not a sales pitch but a way to test hypotheses.
Confirmation bias can be a danger during customer discovery.
Interviews should include a mix of starter questions and follow-up questions based on customer responses.
Face-to-face interviews are preferred for better understanding and observing body language.
During a pandemic, video calls can be a good alternative to in-person interviews.
Interviews should be conducted in two rounds: one focusing on the customer and the other on the solution.
The first round of interviews should be about understanding the job, pain, and gain without discussing the product.
The second round of interviews verifies if the solution addresses the job, pain, and gain.
It's important to interview at least 30 prospective customers for accurate feedback.
Having a two-person team for interviews can help with note-taking and providing a second perspective.
Founders are often the best interviewers due to their deep understanding of the business context.
Finding prospective customers can be challenging and may require getting outside of your comfort zone.
When approaching customers, clarify that the conversation is not a sales pitch but a request for feedback.
Develop a script to convince customers to participate in the interview process.
List out the hypotheses to be tested and create starter questions for the interviews.
The video series will provide example questions and further guidance on conducting customer interviews.
Transcripts
customer interviews or perhaps more accurately we should say interviews of
prospective customers are an incredibly important piece of testing some of the
key hypotheses in your business model canvas this
process is also known as customer discovery and in this video
we'll talk about some tactics that you should think about as
you're planning your customer interview process hi i'm steve morris
and i use this StartupSOS channel to provide practical
how-to advice for first-time entrepreneurs. The customer interview or
prospective customer interview is used to test a number of the hypotheses
in your canvas starting certainly with the value proposition
making sure that you correctly understand from the customer's point of
view what's the job to be done the pain to be
avoided and the gain to be realized and you're verifying that you correctly
understand why they're dissatisfied with solutions
that are in place today or with whatever they're actually doing today
and eventually you'll verify that your solution actually addresses
the job the pain and the gain in a better way
than the current solutions. But it doesn't stop there. You're testing
some of your hypotheses around customer relationship
around channels your selling and marketing strategy
and even revenue streams verifying that customers
really are okay with paying the way that you expect them to pay
and the amount that you expect them to pay that's a lot of very key
assumptions you'll be testing. So a few things to think about as you're planning
your customer interviews first of all this is not a sales pitch the whole idea
here is testing your hypotheses so you're approaching this with the
thought that some of these hypotheses may be wrong so rather than just
broadcasting your message your sales message to the
customer the goal is to ask questions to try to test your
hypotheses and if some of them are wrong you'll
want to try to figure out how you need to tweak them
to make them correct one thing to be aware of as you go through these
customer interviews is confirmation bias people always have
a tendency to hear what confirms the beliefs that they
already have and that clearly is a real danger when
you're doing customer discovery because you are assuming that you could be wrong
about these hypotheses so you want to keep an
open mind you want to listen not just for the feedback that confirms
what you believe but for the feedback that sounds like
maybe it doesn't agree with what you believe
those are the things that you'll especially need to really probe into
and understand what exactly the customer is saying
so beware of confirmation bias it really will work against you
in terms of doing a good test of your hypotheses
the other thing about the customer interview is it's not just a fixed
list of questions you will need a starter list
of questions to to get things rolling but the key is
that you're going to listen to the customer response and
ask follow-up questions the idea is you don't really
know all the right questions to ask because you're probably not
100 percent right about your assumptions about your key hypotheses
about your understanding of of the customer's
job pain gain and and so forth so it's really important that you think of this
not as a fixed list of questions that you
could just post on the on the web and get responses to
but rather it's a process of discussing these these questions
with a customer to get their feedback and to really understand
where they're coming from what they're saying literally what they're thinking
about the job to be done and that's why you'd really like to have
a face-to-face interview to do these customer
interviews because you're going to be probing
you'd like to listen to their response and if there's something that you didn't
understand or that was different than what you thought you'll want to follow
up with some follow-on questions to really probe into those issues and
understand again where the customer is coming from the other advantage of
face-to-face is you can watch body language you can
really get a better idea of what bothers the the customer or what
they like you know just by watching body language so the face-to-face
approach to an interview is definitely the preferred approach and of
course the best way to be face to face is in person if you can just literally
sit down with the prospective customer and and
talk to them i'm recording this in the middle of a
pandemic and face-to-face interviews are a little tough right now well a
second choice certainly is a video call at least then you can still
see the prospective customer get some
reasonable idea for body language and it's not quite as
good as being there but at least it's a close second i also
suggest that you do your customer interviews in two rounds
the first round would focus completely on the customer
on the job to be done on the pain that they're trying to avoid
and the gain that they're trying to realize
and some of the other topics that you'll cover like customer relationship
and so forth not about your product or service not about your solution at all
talk to a lot of customers just to understand
their perspective on the job the pain the gain and what
will happen is there's a very good chance it will
actually change your idea of what the solution is
so get that feedback first think about it analyze it process it see
how it might change the solution that you should be offering
and then go on a second round of interviews where you're asking
about the solution to really verify that you correctly understand
that it does address the job to be done it does deliver the pain relief they
want and it does deliver on the gain that the customer is
is looking for you'll get a better idea of the right
solution if you start with the question about the
job the pain in the game now maybe it's just not
practical to split these into two rounds of interviews and and you want to
combine it all into one interview well if you do that again the
suggestion is at least start the interview with the
job the pain and the gain start it from the customer perspective
to really try to understand the job before you pull out your your
product to see if it actually delivers on the job the pain
and the gain because as soon as you bring out your product it's going to
bias the whole conversation the focus will be on your product your service
its features its capabilities its limitations
and you'll limit your ability to learn about the job itself the customer pain
the customer gain so hold off on that until you really
think you understand the job the pain and the gain
and then bring out your your solution and start to talk about
whether or not it really fits the customer need
who are you interviewing well you're interviewing prospective
customers to practice your interview technique
okay maybe you'll interview some friends and family and other entrepreneurs and
even some advisors and investors but when it comes to the
actual customer interviewing customer discovery
you really want to be talking to prospective customers
friends family advisors other entrepreneurs
honestly their feedback isn't that helpful unless
they're actually in your target population unless they have the problem
that you are addressing with your product or service
so you'll want to go out and find actual prospective
customers to talk to and how many do you need to do uh in in this uh this
customer interview the customer discovery
process well there is no one right answer but more is
absolutely better i would recommend talking to at least
30 prospective customers in your customer interviews
more is absolutely better the national science foundation has
a very well respected program called iCorps where
startups in that program are required to talk to
a hundred customers at least to do their customer uh discovery their customer
interviews and well believe me by the time you talk
to a hundred customers prospective customers you get a very
good feel for the range of customer feedback get a
good feel for you know what's an outlier versus what's
really sort of at the the core of the value proposition you learn a
lot so don't talk to just two or three or four
prospective customers at least 30 is a much better target
and a lot more than that is is certainly better by the way thinking of this
statistically in terms of sort of the accuracy of your
your statistical uh measures 30 even even 100 is is a pretty
small sample from a statistics point of view but
i would still argue that you'll learn a lot and it's
valuable even though statistically speaking
even 100 is indeed a small sample size it's still a very important learning
process and well worth doing so do your customer
interviews and again target at least 30 and more if you can
now i suggest you tackle the interviews as a two-person team one person
being the main interviewer and the second person taking
notes so that the interviewer can really focus on
listening to the customer and asking follow-up questions
without having to pause and sort of break up the the flow by taking notes
have somebody else do that another approach to that of course is
is to record the session and then you can go off and and take your notes and
and think more about it later so that
certainly is an alternative but the other advantage in having a
second team member there is that that person is bringing a
different point of view if you're the interviewer you may miss
some nuance or or some small thing that was in the
customer reply that your your note taker maybe noticed and they
absolutely can uh you know contribute to the conversation with some some
follow-up questions themselves so two points of view is not a bad idea
in the interview process now the other thing i recommend is
the best interviewers are the founding team
the reason for that is you you simply know more about the context
let's say compared to maybe you know bringing in an intern
or some interns to do interviews they simply don't have
as much thought into the business as you do
as much understanding of the underlying strategy and
and and understanding of the solution that you have in mind
or or an understanding of what you believe that the problem is
and and what the customer gain and pain is
the founding team is likely to have a lot more depth of knowledge
in all of those areas so they'll be in a better position
to do these probing interviews to ask those follow-up
questions so my suggestion is founders are the best people to actually
do the interviewing one question that
always comes up is well how do you find prospective
customers and that is a tough one to answer in
general because everybody watching this video is going
to be tackling a different customer segment
maybe it's a business to business play maybe it's
a business to consumer play there's a huge difference
right there but even within businesses and consumers obviously there's a lot of
different segments and different places you're going to go
to find those customers my suggestion is make this a team
brainstorming process another advantage in having a
team instead of being just a one-person company
is you can get together and do some brainstorming figure out
where can you find prospective customers who you would
reasonably expect would be prospects for the kind of service
or product that you're going to be developing
one argument i would make is that if you're going to be successful
it's incredibly important that you do figure out how to go find customers
uh to talk to can't find customers to go talk to that does not
bode well for the success of your business so leverage your team
get creative figure out where to go to find the customers that you need
to talk to and in doing that the other thought is
you will need to get outside of your comfort zone uh you'll need to be a
little bit pushy a little bit aggressive to find
and and then ask these folks to uh to talk to you
it's not always easy and and you'll get a lot of no's
and you have to keep asking additional people to get
in front of enough customers to do the customer discovery the customer
interviews that you need to do so it does take
getting outside of your comfort zone a bit getting a bit
aggressive it will feel a little awkward but after
you do it a few times it'll get a lot more natural and
it won't really feel that strange at all so expect
that you'll need to get outside your comfort zone really get out there
and do what it takes to find the people that you need to talk to
so once you find them how do you convince them to talk to you
well so here are some ideas number one you need to make it really clear
to this prospective customer that you don't want to talk to them to give them
a sales pitch and that's important because it's really what
people are used to if you have a company approaching you asking for your time
you expect to hear a sales pitch you don't want to set that expectation you
want to make sure they realize that we're a startup we don't even have a
product yet we don't have anything to sell but we believe we've identified
a problem that's not being solved well today and we think
we can solve it better but before we invest the time effort money etc
in doing that we want to make sure that we really do understand
the problem why it's a problem and why it's important
right what's the pain involved and what's the gain that's that's being
missed out and we'd really appreciate your help
with just you know 20 or 30 minutes of time to ask you
some questions that's one possible template
you get to create your own template with whether whatever style works best for
you whatever you're comfortable with but you'll need to come up with a script
that you can work on and learn from of course learn what works
what doesn't work to get people to agree to that 20 or 30 minutes
of q a time the good news is a lot of people are willing to help
an entrepreneur who's working on a business idea
but not everybody will so you will get no's you have to just expect that
and again you have to persevere and and keep pushing
to find enough people to talk to so that covers
a number of things to think about as you're planning
for your customer interview process to prepare my suggestion is
first of all list out the hypotheses that you're going to be testing
in the value proposition in the customer relationship
in your channel strategy and in your revenue source
strategy all of those things that you can get feedback
a useful feedback from a customer list out those hypotheses
and create some starter questions about all of those different areas
so that you've got a place to start your interview decide on
who the teams are going to be and start finding those customers start developing
a list of prospective customers to go talk to and of course work on that
ask script that script that you'll use to
get in the door to really get them to uh to talk to you and then you'll be well
on your way to starting with your customer interviews
there are three more videos on the way the first one gives some
example questions starter questions for the round one
set of interviews the interviews that will focus primarily on the job to be
done the pain and the gain as well as some of
the channel questions and the revenue source questions and
then a second video on round two questions
things to think about as you're really trying to understand
does your product or service address the job to be done
the pain to pain to be avoided and the gain to be
realized and then finally a third video on
how to ask the right questions to get a better idea of
what will people be willing to pay what's the value that they'll associate
with your solution that's it for this discussion
of tactics to think about as you prepare for your customer interview process
if this was helpful please click the like and the share and leave a comment
if you haven't subscribed yet please click that button and click the bell so
you get notified of upcoming videos because there's more
coming on this customer interview topic and a link to a playlist of all the
videos in this series will be right below me here that's it
for now thank you very much for watching
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