Involvd is a big fan of the Lean Startup methodology as popularised by Eric Ries and Steve Blank (Eric’s doing a webinar later today if you’re interested) and we’ll be following the methodology for as long as it continues to drive the company in the right direction at the right speed (or until something even more amazing comes along).
I’m not going to go over all the detail that has been covered elsewhere as that would be a waste of everyones time but rather pick out bits from our experiences as we go through them that we have tweaked slightly to meet our needs better. Hopefully the will be useful for you too.
Little bit of background. We’re a web startup, will be a SaaS offering though not a subscription-based service to begin with (that doesn’t mean we will be Freemium either so please calm down biz dev bods!) and therefore have quite a bit in common with Ash Maurya’s CloudFire product.
Ash laid out his processes for the Customer Discovery and Customer Validation phases here and here and they are well worth a read if you’re just starting out and need a helping hand up (a true love for process-flow diagrams is a must).
I think the main reason I fell in love with the Lean model when I first read about it was when I saw that a key part of the process was to ‘get out of the building to validate the business model by talking to your customers’. Music to my ears as second only to a good process-flow is my passion for sitting down with people and talking about new business ideas. Now I had the best of both worlds, a process and an excuse to talk.
I’ve tweaked his “Problem Presentation” interview structure slightly which is what I’d like to share with you today. Point of process – don’t take notes but listen to, talk with and record the conversation using your nifty iPhone voice recording app. If you’re writing you’ll miss the all important key emotional cues that is the other half of the story.
Our process goes like this:
- Lay out laminated cards randomly on the table in front of the potential customer where each one has a ‘problem’ on them that the customer might currently be experiencing
- Ask them to pick their top 3 problems and discard the rest
- Ask them if they’d like to add any of their own in place of one or more of their top 3
- Ask them to rank the 3 they are left in first, second and third place (where first = biggest problem)
- Ask them how they currently solve these problems today
- Ask them how these solutions work for them right now (i.e. let’s hear how happy or pissed off they are with their current situation)
- Briefly describe our product (with a few wireframes if appropriate as sometimes it’s easier to show and talk rather than just talk)
- Ask whether our product would solve their top 3 problems better than their current situation
- Ask them whether they would pay $X/unit to use our product
- Ask them if there is anything else they want to add – Ideas? Criticisms? Feedback? Quotes?
- Ask them for referrals
The major difference between our process and Ash’s is at the very top with the stating of the problems. In mine I don’t state my view of the world first and let them build on top of that, I ask them to create their own using a suggested but not exclusive set of answers.
Asking them to build on mine is effectively leading the witness. That’s OK but you need to bear in mind that if you lead the witness there are only three types of responses you get in return and only one of them gives you what you are looking for. Let me introduce the personalities:
- The lazy people - The vast majority are those people that if given the opportunity to not think too hard about something then they will invariably take it. They might look like they are thinking hard and even fake the thinking process by talking about a couple of pieces of low-hanging fruit but if you delved into their mind at that moment in time it’s barely ticking over. They would just simply prefer to not work too hard and will most likely just agree with what you’ve come up with (no good)
- The bloody-minded people – If you are interviewing business leaders then these people may actually seem the majority to you. If you are interviewing Joe-public then you will see this a far smaller category compared to the ‘lazy people’. These people don’t like to be told how to think and will always flex their intellectual muscles to try and impress you by choosing completely different problems to your set (again, no good)
- The fair thinkers – These are the people you need as these are the ones that are going to give you their honest and well-thought-through opinion. It’s very difficult to find them though and even if you do you must catch them at the right time as there’s a chance they’ll slip into one of the above categories
Much better to take all of these characters out of the equation altogether and put them in a situation where they are forced to form a well-thought-through unbiased opinion. Using cards does just that.
