Customer Interviews Matter—You May Simply Be Asking the Wrong Questions

Many people say customer interviews are unnecessary, based on a plausible-sounding but superficial idea: “Customers do not know what they want.” Those who say talking to customers is pointless often quote Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” But that statement contains a customer problem. When customers say “faster horses,” they are asking for something faster than their existing solution. A horse simply happens to be the existing solution they know. In the right setting, customers can clearly describe the problems they face. Your job is to uncover the real problem and propose a solution. As Jobs said, “It is not the customer’s job to know what they want.” #精益創業實戰 (Lean Startup Practice, descriptive title) --- Customer interviews uncover things you do not know you do not know. --- Paul Graham considers understanding customers the founding team’s first task. You must stay very close to them; ideally, you are a user of the product yourself. --- Robin: “Even if Henry Ford and Steven Jobs have similar well-known sayings, you still need different ways to understand customers. Face-to-face, direct conversations with open-ended questions are among the most direct approaches. Asking questions is not unimportant—you simply have not asked the right questions.” ---- Henry Ford: “If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would surely have told me, ‘A faster horse.’” Steven Jobs: “Customers do not know what they want until we show them the product.” Customers would not say they wanted an iPhone, but a phone that would not break when dropped. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For a startup team, does listening to customers actually matter? The basic recommendations remain: 1. Establish who your customers are. 2. Ask how much time you have spent with them. Surprisingly, many startups spend very little time with customers. They may have briefly spoken with people they imagine to be target customers, but the vast majority have spent little time understanding customer needs. If one thing holds back most startups’ business development, it is the lack of customer involvement and communication from the outset. Your team must leave the office and go to customers. Most engineers prefer to focus on their projects without interruption and may not initiate conversations even when their work puts them face-to-face with customers. Customers are a startup team’s best source of information. Unless you identify needs they have not clearly expressed and needs that remain unmet at the outset, you cannot design or build something they like and will pay for. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Back to the original question: if Ford and Jobs said these things so presciently, why listen to customers and try to understand needs they do not understand themselves? #AskTheRightQuestions When customers are still riding horses, how can they imagine wanting a car? When they use feature phones, how can they imagine wanting an iPhone smartphone? Customers generally cannot imagine what is possible or what the best solution might be. Often, listening to customers is not what produces the wrong product. The problem is that you never asked the right questions. Ask what they want, and they tend to describe what they know rather than imagine an entirely different product. Their focus will therefore be additions or improvements to existing solutions. Startup teams should design outcome-based customer interviews. Ask what results customers want, not what solutions they want. If an answer points toward a solution, keep asking why they want it and what it would do for them. Organize the desired outcomes identified in the interviews, then ask customers to rate them for satisfaction and importance and group the results. Once you understand the outcomes customers really want, design alternative product solutions and assess whether each could meet their needs. Asking customers what they want usually yields only incremental improvements to an existing product. Your team must understand their actual needs deeply, including latent needs that often cannot be clearly articulated at first. The deeper your communication and the greater customers’ involvement, the better you understand them. Ways to meet their real needs then begin to emerge clearly. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Beyond asking the right questions, whom you ask matters: you need the right people. Many companies first interview industry experts or lead users. Their expertise gives them a relatively comprehensive understanding of the product, but their feedback often differs substantially from that of the vast majority of customers or users. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ask the right people the right questions. Developing in isolation rarely produces good products and services. An R&D department cut off from the world around us will never find the answers you want. -------------------------------------------------------------------- #讓大象飛 (Let Elephants Fly, descriptive title) ---- One more example: do not start a business on assumptions or simply because you think you are wonderful. In the early days, use laborious methods that do not scale. Do some “foolish” things early on. The smartest founders never entirely abandon the painstaking but personal work of crafting products by hand. Airbnb lets people rent spare rooms or sofa beds to strangers. Brian Chesky needed to convince Paul Graham that the business had a promising future to win admission to YC. Graham did not believe in the idea, but he liked the young founders. Chesky recalls their conversation: Paul Graham: “So…where is your business?” Brian Chesky: “What do you mean?” Paul Graham: “I mean, where are your users?” Brian Chesky, timidly: “Well…we do not have many.” Paul Graham: “But people must be using it.” Brian Chesky: “Well, a few people in New York use it.” Paul Graham: “So your users are in New York.” Brian Chesky: “Yes.” Paul Graham: “And you are still in Mountain View?” Brian Chesky: … Paul Graham: “What are you still doing here?” Brian Chesky: “What do you mean?” Paul Graham: “Go to your users. Talk to them, one by one. Do not miss anyone.” Brian Chesky: “I do not think that will help much. If the business gets big, we could have millions of customers. We cannot satisfy everyone.” Paul Graham: “That is why you should do it now.” For Graham, forecasts, data, and grand marketing plans were not what mattered most. The priority was to build something a small group of users loved and gradually improve it. If they loved it, millions of others would probably love it too. People spontaneously share things they genuinely like. That is the best marketing for your product or service: something money cannot buy, and something that keeps growing. Graham’s view was that to build something Airbnb’s core users genuinely loved, Chesky needed to meet them where they lived, talk and listen to them, observe them, and try to understand their needs. As Graham told Chesky, now was the time to seize the opportunity. “This is the only time,” he said. “You will never again be able to meet all your customers, learn their likes and dislikes, and serve them directly.” In 2013, Graham put this advice into his well-known essay Do Things That Don’t Scale. It is also the sixth counterintuitive rule in Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling. #高成長思維 (High-Growth Thinking, descriptive title) --- Robin: “Stop imagining and forecasting. Get out of the room now and have in-depth conversations and interviews with users.” As a side note, I recall that Mark Zuckerberg, a homebody engineer, continued writing code for quite some time after founding Facebook.