#problem interview

[custdev]

KISSinsights Customer Development Tactics from Cindy Alvarez

[currycloud]

Finding people to validate our awesome ideas (or our half baked assumptions)

What’s the difference between and an “ideas” person and an entrepreneur? In the eyes of the lean startup movement, the “ideas” person is a dreamer with lots of unvalidated assumptions of how customers will use and buy their product. An entrepreneur knows that the initial idea is based on one a many hypotheses and that this idea is only the start of a journey of discovery. She must then test and validate these assumptions as fast as possible without wasting too much resources. Most likely, what product/service results at the end of this journey will be very different from the initial spark.   The prerequisites The latest idea we have is called SnapCast. We’ve gone through at least two different problem/solution iterations for SnapCast and several drafts of the lean canvas

We worked with Max Cameron (@maxcameron) with his Dooo.sh/it lean startup workshop to refine our canvas. From there, we laid out 3 main hypotheses that we wanted to validate. We decided that we would use interviews and ask very open ended questions to test our hypotheses. But our first tasks was really to recruit potential prospects. From our lean canvas we had identified 3 target segments.   1. Active users of photo sharing networks such as Instagram 2. Flickr groups related to photo collages such as diptic 3. Designers and creative types who are part of photo sharing networks The start - getting out of the building As soon as we had drawn up some questions, we immediately got out of the office and walked to the nearest Starbucks to recruit someone to interview. If you’re not a natural hustler or a salesperson, there is certainly a psychological barrier to “getting out of the building”. You procrastinate or make excuses not to talk to people. You need to break that barrier by just doing it and getting it over with immediately. We ended up meeting an acquittance of Max’s who is an avid Instagram user and interviewed him for about 40 mins. It was great, we had talked to someone and there was some sense of relief and excitement. We tried doing the same thing the next day, and failed miserably. Timing, we realized, was important. It was early afternoon, and the people there were either students, moms and their kids or the kinds of guys you see doing crossword puzzles at the subway. One way of building trust in a cold call recruitment at the local frozen yogurt place is to bring your well behaved kid along with you. (I try to expose my daughter to entrepreneurship at an early age) I haven’t tried it with a cute dog,  but I reckon it would work too.

The obvious While the coffee shop approach afforded us with immediate interviews and a chance to get over our fears and practice our questioning tactics, we had to come up with a systemic way to recruit prospects who were qualified. We started with the obvious - we knew people within our personal and professional networks who fit the target segments. Alan runs 2 popular photo sharing websites (myfourththirds.com and dpaddict.com) and has a list of thousands of serious photographers we could tap. We also asked our friends to help us recruit by sending them emails and asking them to forward to people they thought fit the bill. The interesting I personally wanted to recruit prospects in the following categories: extreme users, potential early adopters, subject matter experts and  what I termed as the “Gladwell social types”. I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point and his observations on social epidemics. His “law of the few” states that “the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts." Gladwell called these people “connectors” (social butterflies), “mavens” (people you rely on for information) and “salesmen” (charismatic persuaders). My rationale was that if we could validate our hypotheses with people with these characteristics and later evolve them into early adopters, they could help us create our own tipping point for our product. Here are some examples of how I recruited for the following categories: Extreme user - I looked for a user with many posted photos and a very high rate of posting (>20/day). This person is literally posting a photo almost every hour. Potential early adopter - I looked for a popular user who had a twitter account and scanned his tweets to look for signs that would point to an early adoptoer. Connector - I looked for a user with the highest number of followers (keeping in mind the follower/following ratio should be > 1 as I discounted people who were following more people than they had followers) Mavens - I looked for users who were well respected in their community. In this case, I asked someone whom I personally admire and whose tweets/blogs I read. The process After we had identified who we wanted to ask, we simply contacted them and explained that we were doing research in the photo sharing space to validate a product idea and asked if they would like to help. I did a lot of “warm calls” - where even though I did not know a certain user, I would make sure I followed them, liked and commented on their photos and built some sort of rapport. I kept a spreadsheet of the users I wanted to contact and tracked them through the entire process. For example, on Instagram, I contacted 12 prospects, got about 7 replies and scheduled 3 interviews. A few who declined the interview were still ok to help, so I asked if they would prefer to do a survey instead. As part of this process, I had began to develop a network of prospective early adopters. Keeping it local We tried to get local prospects as far as possible. First, we preferred face to face interviews. Second, it was actually a lot easier to recruit people in the same city. Our acceptance rate was also way higher when we warm or cold call someone local. Next

We have a few interviews more to go through and we’ve also started to look at the data. Analyzing qualitative data is an interesting topic that I will deal with in detail in the next post.

Lessons learned

1. Get rid of your fears of talking to people immediately. It's like jumping into cold water. After the initial shock, you'll find it quite refreshing and liberating talking to people. 2. Start with your network, and ask for referrals. But try not to interview friends. You want to be sure you get objective responses. 3. Warm calls are more effective than cold calls. Build a rapport before asking for favors.  4. Identify local prospects - acceptance rates will mostly likely be higher and you'll get to meet prospects face to face.