2. My product journey
• 2008 - started studies in Scotland
• 2009 - launched an online drum shop
• 2011 - created a student social network
• 2012 - pivoted into event recommendations
• 2014 - doing product stuff at Kotikan
23. Signs you did well
• Permission to contact again
• Clear next meeting
• Introduction to decision-maker
• Commitment to run a trial
• Pre-purchase
• NOT compliments
Today I’m going to talk about how you can use data to make sure that you’re building the right product.
I will start out with a little summary of my professional life and then dive right into the presentation.
In 2008 I flew out to Scotland for university studies.
Shortly afterwards I combined my passion for drums with desperation for money and started an online store selling drums. I didn’t know much about business at this point but it was fascinating to easy was to sell branded products when you price them right.
I was wondering whether I could create my own product and make money that way. Since barriers to entry seemed lowest in software I started developing a social network for students with a couple of friends in 2011.
Our focus was connecting new students with many events and societies that exist on the university campus. We have managed to get most societies on to our system but still had the classic chicken & egg problem of getting enough content to attract enough users.
In 2012 we discovered that we could solve this by importing events from other services via APIs so we pivoted into a broader event recommendation and aggregation service.
We have made some good progress and even received awards but it was a hard road ahead with some strong competitors and after 2 year we gave up on the idea, partly because we weren’t ready for the classic funded startup route and partly because we wanted to finish our university studies.
In 2014 I was looking for a good company where I could do similar stuff but where I would be surrounded by awesome people I could learn from. I then joined Kotikan.
Kotikan is Scotland’s largest mobile app development agency
We focus on building and supporting high end apps and we’re working with growing startups like Skyscanner, corporations like Standard Life and public bodies like Scotrail.
I’m working on an internal product team where we’re looking at the opportunity to streamline the coordination of shift-based workers.
we’re taking a Lean startup approach where we experiment with various ideas by validating and invalidating our assumptions by running various experiments
In all my product work, I discovered that any business idea or product feature involves creating a solution for a specific problem of a specific customer segment.
We typically have an idea of a customer and their problem such as a cookie monster who is hungry.
What startup founders typically do and dive into code and after a few months come up with a solution based on their own assumptions. In this case a startup has delivered a fruit salad to the cookie monster.
Please raise your hand if you think it’s the right solution.
After a few sales attempts they realise that their solution is not the right solution. Cookie monster does not like our salad.
Any guesses what he wants?
A cookie monster wants a cookie. That’s why he’s called a cookie monster. It’s easy to deliver a cookie to a cookie monster when we know what he wants. However, in real life it’s rarely this simple.
Lean startup philosophy promotes an iterative product development development process.
You start with a vision or an idea and build the Minimum Viable Product based on your understanding of the customer problem.
You then test it with real customers and measure their response.
You use this data to learn of how to build a better product.
You incrementally invest in product development as you get validation for your ideas and the faster you do it the quicker you will get to realising your vision.
This approach is helpful as it allows entrepreneurs to maximise value deliver to the customer by minimising cost and essentially waste.
We used this approach in our projects to create great products.
The lean startup approach ties in beautifully with the Customer Development framework designed by Steve Blank because it follows the same iterative development philosophy.
Two distinct stages in customer development are Search phase where you’re trying to find a sustainable and scalable business model and Execution phase where you raise a gazillion dollar and open the marketing tap to get as many customers as possible to skyrocket growth.
Today I will focus on Customer Discovery and validation stages as I think it’s vital to get these right. Otherwise there is no point in heavily marketing something that won’t scale. Aurelija mentioned that you’ve already discussed MVPs at this meetup so I will focus on customer interviews which are a goldmine for market insight.
Customers won’t tell you what product to build, because it’s not that simple.
You are the expert of your product.
They are however, experts in their own problems so you ought to listen to what they have to say.
Can I see a show of hands of people who love doing customer interviews?
Interviews are hard, sometimes awkward and many founders don’t like doing them. Technical founders especially prefer to stick to coding and avoid talking to customers as much as possible. With this attitude, it’s very easy to get stuck in the state where product decisions are made based on anecdotal evidence.
Talking to customers is essential and when done well can give vital insight into what product needs to be built.
I know this well as I haven’t been doing as much customer development myself as I should have in my own startup and as a result built some shitty features.
Getting access to customers and Getting to the “truth” are too major obstacles. I will give you some tips that will hopefully help you make better use of customer research.
Depending on your target segment, getting access to your customers might range from easy to super hard.
If you’re building a piece of software for defence industry you’re not just going pop by the military base to ask a few questions.
- (Also if you’re under 26 they might not let you go :) )
You will need to scan your network and get intros.
Basically you will need to find a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy. You’ll be surprised how far you can get by just leveraging your network. Also, nowadays you have LinkedIn which has neatly mapped out your 2nd and 3rd degree connections.
Once you identify your target, try to get a warm introduction by someone your target customer knows well.
Most of the time there is no value for the potential customer in speaking to you as you have nothing concrete to offer.
In early stages your product is either non-existent or very buggy and ill fitting for the job.
Depending on your potential customer they will either be interested in monetary incentives or higher level incentives such as appeal to their importance or summary of your research findings.
However, be careful not to over incentivise your interviewees as they will want to do a good job and will start giving you undue compliments I will talk about why compliments are bad in a sec.
In most cases, you will be targeting a customer that is much easier to reach than a key decision-maker in defence.
If you’re looking for people to get thoughts on your new mobile drinks menu app, simply pop in and start an informal chat with a lonely patron next to you.
In most cases, to get the information you need, you don't even need a meeting. Keeping it informal allows your interviewee relax and open up. When you set up an informal meeting, people start giving you compliments because they want to do a good job and help you by being overly positive.
Avoid “pitch mode”. Often times entrepreneurs start interviews by pitching their idea and then asking for an opinion. Instead to get to the truth, ask about specifics in the past.
For example, if you’re trying to uncover if someone would try your solution,
- ask about how they are dealing with it right now.
- ask if they have looked for a solution online.
What are the chances that this customer will use your product if they haven’t even spent 5 seconds to Google it.
Ask about specifics in the past e.g. “Talk me through the last time you…”.
Never talk hyphotetical questions about the future. People are naturally optimistic about the future and will give you all sorts of fake answers.
For example if you ask how much would a customer be willing to pay for your product, they might give you a larger number just because they don’t want to look cheap.
Instead ask how much they are paying to solve the problem right now.
Although they are nice to hear, compliments are a stalling tactic and do you no good.
If someone says that they love your product, deflect this compliment by asking for a commitment like an introduction to a decision maker or a pre-order.
If they aren’t keen to commit, ask why not to get to the truth.
If someone is willing to keep conversing with you, you know that they are interested enough to sacrifice their time to meet with you again. This is a good sign.
Introductions are even better because they show that they trust your idea so much that they are willing to put their reputation at risk.
Commitment to run a trial is great as they must have a pretty big problem if they are willing to use your buggy product to solve it.
Better yet is pre-purchase. Money solves everything and is the best way of saying how much someone loves your product.
If all you have is compliments at the end of the meeting, sorry but that was a shit meeting. They have stalled to make any sort of investment whether time or money.
The negative outcome to the meeting is better than fake compliments because you save time by not building the wrong product. You have saved time which is great because time is money.
You can use the negative feedback to Learn and use this data to build a better suiting product.
If you are interested in learning more lean startup, customer development and doing effective interviews these 3 books are amazing resources to start with. I have added links to the books in my slides which I will later share.
Thank you for having me today. I look forward to hearing the next presentation and talking to you afterwards.
Hit me up on Twitter if you want to talk more about this sort of stuff.
And deliver the cookies!
