Conducting customer interviews to find your first customers for your envisioned product
When defining a solution or creating a new product, one challenge is to identify which customers your product/solution are targeted towards. There are different techniques for discovering your customers, but a common one is customer interviews.
What is a customer interview?
As it sounds, this is a technique where you interview potential customers to understand their problems and pain points. This is then done in 1:1 conversations, not via surveys, emails, or user-testing.
How to conduct customer interviews?
Identify individual(s) you want to interview.
Schedule a 45 min - 1 hour phone call, video chat, or in-person.
Create an interview guide for yourself.
After completing the interview, write down 5 most important takeaways.
Principles for identifying individuals to interview
Create a hypothetical, ideal customer persona and start there
Interview at least 5 individuals per each customer persona before drawing conclusions
More interviews are better than fewer.
Principles for scheduling interviews
If you can’t hold in-person interviews, video chats are better than phone calls because you can also observe body language.
Do not schedule back to back interviews. Hold at least a 15 minute break between interviews to write your 5 most important takeaways and take a mental or washroom break.
Principles during the interview
Build a relationship with the interviewer before diving into questions. One method after introducing yourself and your background, is to ask some demographic or personal questions (e.g., “How’s your day been so far?”)
Use the interview guide as a guide, not as a list of questions to ask. After you complete 2 - 3 interviews, you’ll become more comfortable and naturally start diving into tangent lines of questioning.
Ask one question at a time. Don’t use multi-part or multi-phrase questions, but rather break them down to individual questions.
Become comfortable with silence or the phrase, “Tell me more about that.”
Additional Resources: The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve G. Blanks