Y Combinator Eric Migicovsky - How To Talk To Users - by Jae Duk Seo - The Startup - Medium

18/07/2022, 13:33 Y Combinator Eric Migicovsky — How to Talk to Users | by Jae Duk Seo | The Startup | Medium
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Y Combinator Eric Migicovsky — How to Talk to

Users
Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users
He is the creator of Pebble the smartwatch, and he is telling us the below statement.
https://medium.com/swlh/y-combinator-eric-migicovsky-how-to-talk-to-users-c9ac31a1ca8f 1/9

Javed Khatri
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They maintain a direct connection since they want to gather all of the information at
different stages. Founders themselves should make the direct connection, if you are a
CEO it's in your job description. (btw just because you do tech, does not mean you
should not learn these skills as well)
This talk was inspired by the book as shown above, “The mom test” are three common
errors we make while conducting user interviews.
1. Talk about our idea and our life — During a user interview that ain’t the time. The
idea is to extract data from them to improve your product.
2. Talk specifics, not hypotheticals — We talk about how our product could be, or
should be, etc… Ask questions like, if we built this feature, would you be
interested? That is the wrong way to do things. Talk about the specifics that have
already occurred in the user's life. That will give you better information, they just
might give you how they have arrived at that problem in the first place.
3. Listen, don’t talk — Just shut up and listen, you are collecting data,
Open in Get
app from started
them.
Javed Khatri
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So what are the five great questions everyone can ask in their early stages of user
interviews?
1. What is the hardest part about this [problem]?
Dropbox, the problem was how to share files, what is the hardest part about
working on a group project on a school computer? This begins an open-ending
conversation, and you can learn specific pain points, such as file-sharing or access
management. Just like this, it has to be a real pain point.
2. Tell me about the last time when you encountered that problem….
The goal is to extract context around the circumstances when the users have faced
that problem. For the Dropbox example, which class was it? How many students
were involved? You want to accurately picture the scenario. Remember real-life
past problems.
3. Why was this hard?
Why was the file-sharing hard? You’ll hear many different things from different
peoples and all of those can be improvements that can be made. Maybe emailing
the files with each other created duplicates, how can we prevent them? In general,
customers don’t buy what they buy the why.
18/07/2022, 13:33
y Y Combinator Eric
y Migicovsky
y — Howyto Talk to Users | by Jae Duk Seo | The Startup | Medium

4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem?
If the customers are not exploring potential solutions to their problem, it's possible
the problem that you are trying to solve is Javed
not a Khatri
serious problem for your
customers. Is the person who has this problem, already trying to solve this? What
tools did they use? And what other possible solutions were there? This will give you
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a reference to what will your product be compared against.
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5. What don’t you love about the solutions you’ve tried?
This is the beginning of your understanding, what the features are for your better
solutions. But note the question is not whate are the features you want? that is
hypothetical. Again, by knowing this we can win that comparison.
So when should I talk to one of my users? Answer: any time. But there are three stages
that are more critical compare to any other. BTW a general tip for any stage is to take
notes.
1. Idea Stage
2. Prototype Stage
3. Iterating towards product-market fit Stage

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We need to find those first people, which are sometimes hard to find. Staring with your-
self is a good place, the next step is to talk to friends and co-workers. It doesn’t have to
be thousands of people, the aim is to get an unbiased opinion about the real-world
problem. Some possible hacks are just dropping by, just showing up to your customer's
place, such as the police station. (if your clients are policeman) Just show up.
Remember at the end of the day, if you are actually solving the problem for your
customers, you are doing them a favour by making their life easier.
This is critical, since if you chose the wrong kind of first customers, your reference
point changes. You need to know who will be the best customers. So we are actually
being picky with customers at this stage.

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We need to get some hard numerical factors, from them. How much does it cost them
to solve this problem. How much are they willing to solve, or already solving day by
day. And how often do they face this problem? More frequent the better.
The best first customers are the ones who exist in the center of the diagram. And for
example, if your product is a blender and below table displays the statistics of your
customers.

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This data can be used to prioritize certain customs first, need to consider the details
regarding each client, their budget, etc… So in the above case, Mcdonald's could be
your best first customer, even though the return on investments is low. They have the
budget and infrastructure.
When you know you have a product-market fit? That's not an easy question to answer.
Rather a better approach is to ask a set of questions to your clients on a weekly basis,
questions like the one seen below.

Measure the distribution of each group and when over 40% of them say “Very
disappointed”, that actually can be the metric.Javed Khatri
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Some final tips are to collect the user's number for direct communication, do not design
by committee, you cannot ask your user to select the features that will be implemented.
And finally, discard bad data, such as general compliments or fluff some hypothetical
product or features.
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18/07/2022, 13:33 Y Combinator Eric Migicovsky — How to Talk to Users | by Jae Duk Seo | The Startup | Medium

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Published in The Startup

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Feb 20, 2021 · 5 min read · Listen