YCSS19 How to talk to users Framework Welcome to THE PNG collection by Serge I'm Serge, entrepreneur, maker and futurist & this is my vault of knowledge from the books, blogs and videos I've read & watch. I consider many business books’ authors my mentors. And these are the building blocks of The PNG - The Personal Knowledge Graph. Also known as Business Genes or Memes. T call each one of those blocks “a Framework". People call me “Broadcastic* as Thelp spread valuable business memes across my networks. In order to access my Vault you have to give me your email address. We will be launching subscription service soon at http://www.WizeCrowd.com If you want to connect, ping me on LinkedIn http://www linkedin.com/in/broadcastic/ Check out my upcoming business books: * Crowdfunding (Fake) GOD ICO or Die + HYPErbolic ~ + Start(up) cooking! CRowd + 666 our Origin A Enjoy! et on Serge @ DO NOT CHANGE THE FONT! This font was chosen specifically to induce learning/ memorization on computer screen! “Comic Sans Serif” is here to slow the reader down so she/he can learn quickly. Research shows what slightly harder to read, non-familiar font type can slow down the screen reader and help her/him remember more. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework + Based on lecture given at ¥ Combinator Startup School 2019. The best founders maintain a direct connection to their users throughout the lifespan of their entire company. The best companies are the ones where the founders themselves maintain a direct connection to their users. If you are the CEO, it is your job, it is in your job description, to talk to customers. So, take the time to learn how to do it well. All founders need to participate in this process as well. You want to make sure that the founders and the core members of your company are the ones who develop the skills for talking to users so you do not have to hire someone like that to be your go-between. Two things to build a company: there are only two things that you must do in order to start your company. You need to code or build your product and talk ‘to users. Recommended book : “The Mom Test" ©common mistakes 1. Taking about our idea The first mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk ab idea, The goal of a great user interview is to SEE tee the person that you're talking to, to extract data that will help you improve the product or improve your marketing or improve your positioning. It is not to sell them on using your product. So at the core of a great user interview, you need to learn about their life. You need to talk about specifics around the problem area that you're trying to solve that the user may be going through. 2. Talking about hypotheticals Second mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about hypotheticals. We talk about what our product could be. We talk about features that we want to build. We ask questions like, if we built this feature, would you be interested in using it. interested in paying for it? This will give you stronger and better information in which to make product and company changing decisions. You also want to talk in general about the user's life. You don't want to just talk about the specific solution that you're presenting, qoYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework © common mistakes (cont.) Try to extract information about the users, the path that led them to encounter that problem. Ask them questions about their life in more broader ways to extract context around how they arrived at this problem. Learn about their motivations. 3. Talking too much In a user interview, try to restrain your interest in talking and really listen. Take notes and listen. In that span of time, the 10, 20, 30 minutes that you spend with the user, you're trying to extract as much information as possible so that when you returned to the office and when you returned to your cofounders, you're bringing hard data, real facts about users' lives to the table. questions to ask users 1. What is the hardest part about [doing the thing (that you're trying to solve)]? The perfect context for asking, you begin an open ended conversation, trying to extract information about how that person currently works on group projects together with friends. Hopefully, you'll learn about specific pain points that they have, like they log onto a shared computer, they have to get their files from somewhere. In general, the best startups are looking for problems that people face on a regular basis or that they're painful enough to warrant solving. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework Oquestions to ask users 2. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem... The goal of this question is actually to extract context around the circumstances in which the user encountered that problem. Try to extract as much information as you can about the context in which they began solving this problem so that as you develop your product, you'll be able to actually reference real-life examples of past problems that potential users have had, and you can overlay your solution on top of that to see if it would have helped in that particular circumstance. 3. Why was this hard? What were the specific things that they encountered that were difficult? The reason why you want to ask this question is because you'll hear many different things from different people. The benefit from asking this question is not just to identify the exact problem that you may begin to solve with your solution to this problem, but you'll also begin to understand how you market your product, how you explain to new potential users the value or the benefits of your solution. In general, customers don't buy what. They don't buy the what. They buy the why. Answers that you get from customers to this question of why. Why was this past problem that you encountered so hard may actually inform your marketing or your sales copy as you build out the rest of your product. 4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem? Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework Oquestions to ask users 4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the , for them to be even interested in your better solution to this product. Is the person who encounters this problem already trying to solve this? Try to figure out, what tools did they experiment with? What tools did they try to use to solve this in the past? You want to ask this question for two reasons. One is to figure out whether the problem that you're solving or you're working to solve is even really something that people are already looking for solutions to. The second one is, what are the other competition out there? What will your product be compared against as you end up rolling out your solution and offering it to end customers? 5. What don't you love about the solutions you've tried? This is the beginning of your potential feature set. This is how you ask the... This is how you begin understanding what the features are that you'll build out for your better solution to the problem. Users in general are not great at identifying the next features that they want in the product. This question specifically targets, what are the problems with the existing solutions that they've already tried? These are specifics and you can begin to kind of figure out what the differential between your new solution and the existing solutions already in the market will be. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework ©stages of early startup An early stage company - I would define that as a company that has not yet reached product market fit, in which talking to users would be extremely beneficial. 1. Idea stage At the idea stage, you may have the back of a napkin idea, you may have a thought, you may be commercializing some technology that you've been dreaming of, but you don't yet have any first users. So, you need to begin finding the first people that will be interested in either providing information about the problem that they've encountered or potentially signing up to be your first users. Some of the best companies are products or services that are built for the founders themselves. So start with yourself. Test your user interview strategy on yourself. Try to walk through a situation where you've encountered that problem. The next step after that is to talk to friends, is to talk to coworkers, to get warm introductions. You don't have to talk to thousands of people. Every good user research strategy begins with just one or two people. The critical feature here is executing a unbiased and detailed customer/user interview strategy rather than just trying to pitch your idea to them. a) Just show up and do 10 min interview on the spot b) Industry events (first 5-10 user interviews dramatically improve you idea) c) Be cognizant of the other person's time. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework ©stages of early startup 2. Prototype stage The prototype stage, where you have the first kind of rough beginnings of your product, but you haven't really gotten in the hands of any paying customers or any users yet. Best First Customers for Prototype Stage Framework Ask questions that extract numerical answers to three facts about the customer that you're working with: 1. PAIN/COST: How much does this problem cost them today? And I like to get a hard number, either in terms of how much revenue do they stand to earn if they solve this problem or how much expense do they currently spend trying to solve this problem? How much money is wasted today as they try to solve this problem. 2. FREQUENCY: How frequently do they encounter this problem? Do they encounter it on an hourly basis, a daily basis, quarterly basis, yearly basis? The best problems that startups can target are ones that are encountered more frequently. This is usually beneficial for two reasons. One is, they encounter a problem on a more regular basis. It means that the customer's feeling the pain of that problem on a more regular basis, and they'll be much more receptive to a potential solution. The second reason why you want to tackle a problem that people encounter ona more frequent basis is, you'll get more chances to know whether your product is actually solving a problem. The best first customers are ones that have this problem very frequently. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework ©stages of early startup Best First Customers for Prototype Stage Framework 3: BUDGET/AUTHORITY: How large is their budget for solving this problem? Make sure that you're asking questions about whether they actually have the ability to solve the problem, given the choice. Visualize answers to these three sets of customer questions as overlapping Venn diagrams, with best first customer being at the center of the Venn diagram where they have the highest numerical answers to the three questions. Severity of Pain| (ROI, Savings) Frequency (Daily, Monthly) Prototype Stage Ability to Fix? (Budget, Authority) You create a spreadsheet that simply has three columns with the answers to the questions that you've extracted through your user interviews. This data can actually be used in prioritizing which customer you begin to sell your product to first. 1 Customer ROI FrequencyBudget Budget 2 3 Frech Laundry sss 50/week S 4 Google Café 0 1000/week § rt Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework ©stages of early startup You learn through the initial customer interviews that McDonald's is actually the best potential first customer for your product. While even though the cost of a new smoothie at McDonald's may not bring in a large dollar amount per transaction, they have a ton of stores and each of those stores services a ton of people. On top of that, you happen to get a warm introduction to the chief food officer of McDonald's, which I'm not even sure they have, but that person actually controls a multibillion dollar budget. And if they wanted to solve this problem, they would have the authority and they would have the budget to do so. So you put that information in your spreadsheet, and you actually do a simple stack rank that just pulls the best answers to those questions up to the top. You can use this framework for pulling together all of the information that you get from various user surveys to find the best customers. 3. Product-Market Fit (PMF)/Launched Stage After you've launched and you're iterating towards product market fit, how do you guide that journey? a Se eeaaaaaiaiaaaaiaaaa + Very disappointed RI + Somewhat disappointed + Not disappointed. If 40% or more of your user base reports that they would be very disappointed if your product went away on a weekly basis. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework ©stages of early startup 1. How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman? B) Somewhat disappointed C) Not disappointed measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.” 3. Product-Market Fit (PMF)/Launched Stage After you've launched and you're iterating towards product market fit, how do you guide that journey? + Somewhat disappointed + Not disappointed. If 40% or more of your user base reports that they would be very disappointed if your product | went away ona weekly b . This can be an immensely useful thing for quantitatively determining whether the features that you worked on in the previous week were actually benefiting or adding to your product market fit or potentially detracting from it as well. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.comYCSS19 How to talk to users Framework ©stages of early startup Other tips at this stage: 1. Get users PHONE Number Ask your users for the phone number during signup because oftentimes you'll be looking at the data and you'll be wondering, why is the data showing this particular kind of learning about our customers? Sometimes it helps to just get on the phone and talk to one person who is encountering this problem. So I always encourage founders to put contact information, including phone number, which is a direct connection to customers, pretty high up in the user signup flow. 2. Don't design by committee. You can't simply ask your users what features they want. You have to begin to understand whether those features are truly going to help make your product more sticky and more useful. Instead of asking, will users be interested in using this new product or this new feature, instead say,"Here's an upgrade flow. If you want this new product, put your credit card, or if you want this new feature, put your credit card information or pay more." Even before you actually built out the feature, this could help give you information about whether the feature that you're working on is actually something that the users are gonna use. 3. Discard bad data. Some of the kind of worst bad data that you may encounter is compliments. The second main type of bad data that you may encounter is fluff. These are hypotheticals/generics. Whenever you're in the middle of a user interview and you start getting onto this hypothetical, oh, here's what the product may look like in the future, try to steer it back to specifics. Frameworks Collection by Serge ‘itp://wwv, WizeCrowd.com