customer development questions

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

How many customer development interviews did you run before you started building?

Please reply back with the number 🙂 

For those interested, voting on the product market fit question from last week was 25 x “Yes” and 5 x “No”. Thank you to everyone who sent me their votes, encouragement, and feedback.

The first company I started (a crm company in 2012 wasn’t my brightest move!) we did what I thought were tons of ‘customer interviews’ but in reality they were ‘tell me you like my idea’ interviews. The result? 50 people told me my idea sounded really clever, we built my ideas, and 0 people thought my clever idea was worth paying for.

I got out of the building but I forgot to bring my listening hat. I didn’t even ask great questions. The typical interview followed a similar pattern: share my positioning statement (I’m building X for Y who Z), share some mockups, and ask for feedback on what I shared. This focused the conversation on me and my ideas and not the potential customer and their problems. In hindsight, it’s not difficult to see where I went wrong.

After banging my head against a wall for 18 months I realized that I needed a different approach. I decided to stop trying to validate my ideas and go back to my sales roots, using questions to find pain. The difference in response was night and day. The improved outcome was mostly related to me pulling my head out of my ass and coming into the interviews with an open mind.

I shaped my new customer development interviews after my Discovery call process:

First - understand the context of their role (where are they in the org chart, what are they responsible for, what tools do they use already, etc…).

Next - look for unmet needs.

Last - get a feeling for the impact of those unmet needs on the organization.

Your context questions will vary based on the type of users you’re talking to and the type of product you’re building.

The “magic wand question” helps find the unmet needs and my favourite version of this is “if I could solve any problem for you related to X, what would it be?”. You may not need ‘related to X’ but sometimes it’s handy. It’s ok to loop through a few of these but it’s important to note which pains are top of mind. If you have to ask 5-10 times in order for them to list the problem you’re working on, that might be a sign.

I use two questions (shoutout to Dan Olsen for these) to quantify the user’s pain. First is, “on a scale of 1-10, how important is this problem?” and the second is, “on a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with how you’re currently solving it?”. What I look for is 10 / 10 importance and 1/10 satisfaction. This prevents you from getting sucked into getting excited about pains that nobody really cares about.

I could go on but I guess that’s what the book is for.

If you read this far, I’d love to hear from you. What are your go-to customer discovery questions?

Happy GTM,

Collin
—
cofounder & ceo
predictable revenue