<aside> ⌛ Suggested Time: Total Hours: 30-40 hours Full Time Founders: 2 to 4 weeks Part Time Founders: 4 to 5 weeks
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To create something people actually want and need, we need first to understand them: who are they, what are their pain points and goals, what drives them? By going outside and talking to the people who you're hoping to serve, you will learn whether you're solving a real problem as opposed to one you've inferred. You will also gain insight for inspiration on different types of solutions beyond what you've thought of so far.
We've worked with many founders who changed their solutions from their initial ideas through the process of customer discovery interviews:
Rachel wanted to start a salon to serve black women who want to wear their hair naturally. However, she realized her customer's pain point could also be solved with a better hair product for natural hair as many of her interviewees do not currently visit salons that frequently.
Joanna & Kim want make real estate investing more accessible through co-ownership but discovered along the way that most people did not need that product and that they were not as interested in solving that problem anymore. They did a pivot to helping families prepare for disasters.
Shalini wanted to help companies create more onsite childcare options for smaller companies. During her discovery, she realized that smaller companies did not have those resources, and she instead joined another startup focusing on near-site childcare.
Raquel wanted to help parents who want to vacation with their children by starting a new line of family-friendly boutique hotels. During her discovery, she instead decided to focus on creating a service for existing hotels to make them more family-friendly.
While there are many ways to understand your customers, we consider interviews to be the best, purest, most accessible form. Successful founders will continue to do customer interviews even as their company grows, and product matures to stay grounded to their customers, discover new products, and stay attuned to changing trends.
A must-read for everyone is the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick (video). We cannot emphasize enough how useful reading the Mom Test has been for many of our founders. An additional resource is Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez (video). While we will go through many of the central themes of both books, we still highly recommend you read them yourself.
I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that's how you grow. When there's that moment of 'Wow, I'm not really sure I can do this,' and you push through those moments, that's when you have a breakthrough.- Marissa Meyer
Keep in mind, the goal of talking to customers is to find our early adopter - or in other words, customer/problem fit. You'll go back and forth between revising your customer and the problem as you learn from interviews. The process will be very non-linear! You'll also re-segment your customer several times as you gain more insight on them throughout the process of company building. And you may end up with quite different customers and problems than when you started.