Every founder, including CTO, needs to talk to users directly.
What is needed to create a startup?
The mom test
Do not rely on friends and family as a good source of information.
Talk about their life, not your idea
We’re founders, we love to pitch the idea, but it’s not the time to be pitching a product. You need to extract data from users to improve your product, marketing or positioning.
Talk specifics, not hypotheticals
We talk about what our product could be or features we might add. This is wrong. Instead, talk about specifics, the specific general issue of a user. Do not talk about the specific solution you are giving. Ask them questions broadly, to understand context why they got into the problem in the first place.
Listen, don’t talk
Spend most of the time extracting data, not sharing on what you’re doing
Five great questions you can as in every user interview
What is the hardest part about [doing this thing]?
Example: Dropbox. Imagine you wanna learn how people are sharing files to understand whether there are potential users there or there is a problem you can help solve.
So you ask: What is the hardest part about working on a group project with school computers?
This a good open-ended question about how they currently work on group project with friends. You will learn specific issues they have.
In general, best startups are working on problems people face on a regular basis or they are painful enough they are worth solving.
Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem…
The goal of this question is to extract context in which circumstances user encountered the problem.
With whom they’re working on, when it was, what they exactly were doing…
Why was this hard?
You’ll hear many different things from different people. So it’s better to ask that to understand the specific issue for them.
You’ll understand how you market your product and explain the benefits of the solution. Customers don’t buy the What, they buy the Why.
Example: Dropbox. They may not be excited about this file syncing tool (What) but this will help with this exact problem that they just had 2 weeks ago when I was working with students trying to share files (Why).
You need to discuss that with your marketing team.
What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?
If potential customers are not already exploring the potential solutions to their problem, it’s possible that the problem is not burning enough for them to be interested in your solution.
What tools they experiment with? What tools did they tried to use?
What don’t you love about the solutions you’ve tried?
This is the most tactical question. This is how you begin understanding that you’ll build out for you better solution to the problem. Do not discuss theoretically as what features to add but how they fail to solve their problem.
Users are not great at identifying the next features that they want in the product.
What are the problems with existing solutions?
