Customer/Problem Fit

It's time to generate and synthesize learnings from your interviews. Remember, the goal of this interview process is to find a customer and problem. You'll likely go back and forth in revising and honing both sides of that equation as you learn in the customer discovery process.

Below is an outline of the steps that we recommend you take after a round of interviews. Aim for around five for each series of analyses. We'll be analyzing the results for each customer segment separately:

1. Note how many people have you spoken to
2. Gather all of your notes from the interviews.
3. Start by categorizing things you have heard repeatedly from different interviews.
4. What did you learn about your three riskiest assumptions?
5. Update your customer persona with what you have learned (cross out, add, circle, etc.)

Interpreting the Results

How do we know, after talking to multiple people, whether or not we've found the right customer segment to begin designing? The objective for customer discovery is to find a customer with our problem who meets all of our early adopter criteria.

Early adopter criteria:

• Has the problem
• Aware they have a problem
• Looking for a solution
• Hacking a solution
• Willing to pay for a solution

As you go through each successive item, you will filter out more potential early adopter candidates. You're looking for people who are willing to pay for a solution because their current solution isn't working. The easiest way to confirm that they will pay in the future is to confirm that they have paid for a solution in the past to solve this problem. People's behaviors rarely change. If they have never paid to solve a problem like this in the past, you will be fighting an uphill battle to get them to pay for your solution (even if it's a much better one) tomorrow. For people you aren't entirely sure about and want to confirm their willingness to pay, you can do a Pitch Test (Pitch Test).

Next Steps Based on Results

Below are several generalized learnings that you might have after each round of interviews (~5) and our recommended courses of action.

• If you don't feel like you have enough information on this customer persona > Do another round of interviews with this customer segment.
• This customer persona does not represent an early adopter (see Early Adopters) > Try a different customer segment.
• You make small tweaks to the customer persona or problem, resulting in a strong customer/problem fit > Do another round of interviews, and then, if this is still true, move on to validating your solution in the Pitch Test.
• Other customer segments have come up that you think might have a more severe or frequent pain point > Create customer personas for these customer segments and do interviews to learn more.