Lean Customer Development (Hardcover version)

Chapter 4. What Should I Be Learning?

The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out.

—Paul Graham, Founder and Partner of Y Combinator

Spend time understanding all aspects of the customer value proposition. Ask yourself: why should your customer buy your product? How does your product fit into the rest of his world? What influences his opinion of the product’s value? What is your product displacing—all products displace something—and why your customer should risk making that switch?

—Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk

When I first started doing customer development interviews, I spent hours coming up with a long list of perfect questions that were specific to my audience and product. I wrote down far more questions than I thought I could cover in a 30-minute interview in order to be prepared for any direction the conversation might take.

It didn’t take long to realize that the pages of notes from a single interview came from the first few basic questions.

After all, your biggest risk comes from one of two common errors: that you failed to solve a problem that your customer has, or that you failed to make the solution attractive enough for your customer to choose it.

This chapter starts with the basic questions that I use in almost every interview. These work across a variety of customer and industry types.

We’ll also cover:

• Why customers don’t know what they want

• What you should be listening and prompting for

• Getting subjective answers from objective ...