Are you guys ACTUALLY doing user interviews to validate ideas? If no, why not?
So I made this post - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/people-who-do-user-interviews-surveys-often-now-i-want-to-interview-you-eed230dcf6
It got very little interest.
Of course I might be simply asking for too much, hence the low response.
But it got me thinking... Maybe the reason it got little response is simply that not a lot of people are ACTUALLY doing user interviews?
At first glance it seem like an advice everyone knows is good, but not many people really implement it in practice.
If that's you - a person how knows you should talk with your (current or prospective) users, but you don't actually do it - I want to meet you!
What stops you from interviewing people? Did you even try it? What roadblocks did you encounter?
This is a no judgement zone - I also started a project without talking to a single person - I am trying to change that right now. Let's learn how to do it together! :)
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I am! It's got to be the most rewarding activity I have done with my business. I have 20 interviews done and 50 more to go.
I have found out incredibly interesting stuff about my business, my clients, new feature ideas, connections and more. Not to mention that it's such a moral boost to hear them consistently thank me for a job well done with my product and how it is saving them X amount of time and money.
Do it! I have adjusted my list of questions 5-6 times and each call is different. My first calls were awkward, now I'm much more bold and am able to draw out much more info. It also helped me with my demos to non-clients.
Roadblocks are my discomfort in asking people to help me figure out how to help them. Besides that, maybe getting them on the phone?
Curious how do you find whom to interview, do you just check your client's emails and reach out to them? And do you offer them anything for the time (money, etc.)?
Each client that signed up I've had at least a 1 hr conversation with through the setup process, so they know me at least from that.
I just selected who I wanted to talk to and emailed them telling them I need their feedback for the future of VisualBonus.
This is B2B so they are much more willing to spend time improving their day to day activity with my app.
Philip, any chance you can share pointers for good interview questions? 🙏
Maybe we should make a thread with:
<your business description>
<questions you usually ask your users>
?
Sounds like you did the interviews after you already had something. Did you do them before you had a product?
Not really. I had some close friends that were insurance agents and went off their feedback. Not much of an interview, just asking questions about features here and there.
That being said, I assumed they would purchase VisualBonus after helping me so much, but they didn't for over 1 yr after I released the MVP. That was humbling.
lol. Herding cats... Thanks for sharing.
You're absolutely right, @mpodlasin. It can be hard to talk to strangers about your product idea before having a functional product to talk about. It's so easy to get volume information from tools like Keyword Planner and Answer the Public that I think people often use this info to justify not actually talking to people during their market research phase. This is all good info, but it's data-driven and not emotion-driven. Emotion sells - that's why there's such a strong emphasis on building products that solve pain points.
If I recall correctly, the $100 Startup (Chris Guillebeau) had market testing tips that recommended actually talking to people, too. A lot of the ideas were from Jonathan Fields, who described a process called social market testing where you validated your ideas ahead of time by having conversations with people in your target audience without them realizing they were even part of your market research.
@cohoist thank you for that comment, but it kind of exemplifies my frustration:
Everyone is speaking theoretically about talking to users.
No one is speaking about THEIR experiences with talking with users.
My conclusion? Most of us are just thinking / reading / talking about it, but not actually doing it. ;)
Absolutely - I'm agreeing with you
Which begs the question - maybe it's not THAT important?
Maybe as a founder you have such a solid grasp and vision of what you want to create, that you don't really need to converse with people.
Or maybe market research with the tools you described is enough.
Or maybe creating landing page is enough.
Conversing can lead to even more questions and you could disappear in the black hole of user interviews, without taking any action. :)
I think it’s CRUCIAL. To me the founders build a product, but the early adopters shape it.
It allows founders to find product-market fit much faster.
It makes their positioning and messaging tenfolds better.
It’s easy to spot startups that do interviews. Their landing page is instantly clear and you know what they’re doing and where they’re heading.
But it can be a very demoralizing job and that’s why people shy away from it. I like to tell people to look at the numbers.
You run an add and 3% of your target signs up. You go on a user interview tour and 50% will say they’re interested.
The second one is super demoralizing, but you know which one is more helpful here!
I think the answer is far simpler: it's super intimidating.
It's almost relaxing for me to disappear into my IDE. Talking to someone requires my presence and awareness of this other person... their time, their attention, their interest.
And I happen to be fairly sociable!
Imagine how it must be for someone with intense social anxiety, or who's trying to do it in another language.
As someone who's built a lot of things before determining that someone wants them, I've come to the conclusion that it's verrrry important to do the ground work first.
Well, I am not an English native and I do run business in English, so... ;)
You are braver than most, @mpodlasin :)
Nah, I am just raised on US tv shows.
I literally learned understanding spoken English by watching LOST and Breaking Bad. :D
Roadblocks:
Overall, I'd prefer proven tactics over testing these things out on my own so as not to alienate potential customers/mentors.
That's funny I literally just made a post regarding that:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-2-practical-tips-so-far-for-conducting-user-interviews-6085e9e8b2
But take this advice with a grain of salt. I just started interviewing people.
Thanks. Would love to see some examples. Also are the rules different for people who are your current customers?
Yes this. Getting them to agree to the call is really hard.
Hello world, n00b here :)
So we're currently doing user interviews for a yet-to-be-launched product. These are primarily on Google forms, but for a select number of prospective users, we're doing live calls.
The interviews have proven to be super insightful...I wouldn't skip out on this part of the process.
Reading the responses here, it's clear folks aren't sure WHAT to ask, which is probably why talking to users seems so intimidating. I'd be happy to contribute to posts giving pointers on good user interview questions, I'm sure there'd be a lot there for me to learn as well.
-Lil
I once tried via Google Forms, sent cold requests to random in the field people (most found via LinkedIn), didn't work at all. Got 3 responses.
But the truth is, I do not do it because I don't know how to do it.
I sometimes see random surveys on LinkedIn, so maybe this approach works for some people?
The only place where I think I could post a survey would be reddit, but I am not sure mods would allow it there.
No.
People don't know what they want
People don't do what they say.
The best way to validate ideas is to launch and see how many people are willing to take action.
Well, obviously I don't mean some naive "do you like my idea for an app" approach, but rather more sophisticated methods, like The Mom Test or some similar methods used in UX research, where people are literally not even told about the app ever during the interview.
I also agree that making MVP or some prototype and rolling with it is the ultimate test. :)
This is a great question, and it really made me think of the approach I've taken. To set the scene, I'm a Sales Engineer who had a pain point in our technical response process to customers, and the same issues arised at the previous 3 companies that I worked for. Members across these sales teams felt the same so I built a product so solve that issue. See, to me, the experience that my previous and existing colleagues and I have had seems to have been enough for me to validate my idea -- or at least I've convinced myself so.
I've spent the last 3 months bouncing ideas around a few of these people which has helped me shape the MVP. Going forwards, I'm hoping to work with my beta testers to further validate the full product.
This post has made me think that I should start speaking with more people.
At the beginning I was a bit like you - I want the product that I am building for myself.
But I am not sure how skewed I am, because on the other hand there are similar products to mine and I don't use them too much.
So now the question is - am I laying to myself in some way, or maybe the other solutions are indeed suboptimal and my idea really is worth something?
I don't know, hence I want to do some research. :)
I have done interviews in the past for one of my products. But I don't really think it is foolproof.
So back in 2014, I had an idea for a product called LeadJoint. The idea seemed brilliant to me : I will routinely crawl Google search results for various keywords and track the websites that are seeing a sudden drop in rankings. These are websites that are potential SEO leads because they are looking for help to fix their rankings.
I emailed several SEO agencies with my idea and a few of them got back to me with positive responses.
I then set about building the product. I do not code - so spent a few thousand dollars getting the product ready.
Once the product was ready, I emailed them back - and a few of them did sign up. But here's the thing - the concept itself was flawed and my product wouldn't be helping agencies.
Over time, many of them unsubscribed because they failed to see results. Now, I was stuck with a product that I had already sunk my money in. But the people who were positive about the product weren't buying anymore.
I think the takeaway here is that an interview alone is not going to help you. You are going to see false positives that you must account for, and probably use other ways to validate the idea.
I definitely don't plan to make interviews and then spend 2 years building mega uber solution.
I was thinking more like: initial interviews, month of coding, feedback / more interviews, another month of coding etc. to minimize the eventual damage.
My project (https://mockoon.com) is open source. So I get lots of bug or features requests on GitHub. I always try to start a conversation from there, in order to see how people are using the app, if there is any pain point, things they would like to change or don't understand. This has been invaluable information. I think open sourced it helped, and users are coming to me :)
I love this.
I was thinking about open sourcing my stuff as well, since I was specifically asked about it by people.
I think you just gave me the final "push" to do it. :)
I must say it has huge benefits. For me as a developer/maker, I work in the public, so I feel somehow accountable to keep the quality high, communicate well, etc
It also builds trust with some of the more loyal users and leaves an history of why/how features were added or not.
And you can still build a business upon open source software.
I am not doing user interview in true sense. I have worked with startups previously who did extensive User Interview and focus group sessions before launching the product. But conducting user interviews and focus group sessions are expensive. The result is often been skewed because questions are itself biased.
Rather I prefer connecting with people who will potentially use the product, get them on Zoom or Skype call, show them the demo of features are working. Ask them to give feedback, and ask them if in future they want another demo is certain feature is completed. So far, on an average I managed 1.6 demos per user.
That's an interesting twist on traditional "user interview".
I think my current plan is to start with general questions but at the end also show the product / mvp / prototype and talk specifics as well.
It depends. User interviews take time to do. If I have the luxury to do it and if I can not verify my assumptions faster way, then I'm doing it.
Some ideas can be verified from forums or observation. But if you have time to do a proper user interview, you definitely should do it.
Yes I actually do user interviews. We did 3 today, have 2 scheduled tomorrow for a new feature for Grow.com.
I didn't see your first post, I definitely want to do that!
earlier this week I created a list of people would be interested in my product and I'm writing a short pitch so start reaching out to them.
To your point, I think interviewing customers is so crucial but it's also pushes you out of your comfort zone to talk to strangers and feel guilty like you are trying to sell them something which is totally the wrong way to look at it. I used to think this way and just recently a friend managed to change my mind. So I'm afraid there are a lot of founders still thing the same way I used to
This is an interesting an honest observation, isn't it? Truth be told, I do as many user interviews as my users will agree to BUT they're almost always AFTER they are users/customers.
Having said that, when performing major pivots in the past we've used a more qualitative approach (i.e. A/B tests, landing pages, surveys and Amplitude data). This is actually making me think, though.. maybe we're subconsciously afraid of the rejection OR we're too attached to our idea that we need to at least see it thought to MVP.
I definitely have problem where I get so excited about my MVP it is just unimaginable to me that someone else might not care for it.
But then you launch and the reality hits you... ;)
Hahaha yes!
I tried once for a project without having build anything first. It felt like pulling on a thread that never ended...
The time it has worked is for my day job company. We had one customer we got really close with and basically built the product of their dreams. They've been a customer now for close to 5 years.
I'm trying. I've been trying to write emails since I don't have a huge network or audience in my space. There are competitors in my space, so that helps validate the idea. But I'd have much more peace of mind if I could have more video or face time with my market. So far, I've mostly been communicating via email with them. I probably shouldn't complain because the response rate is pretty good for how few emails I've managed to get out. That's another problem. I'd like to dedicate days to cold outreach, but it gets exhausting around the tenth handcrafted email. It's hard. Weird thing is, of the video chats I have scheduled, I often consider cancelling because I'm dreading the interaction, only to have a really great conversation and get (re-) acquainted with them. Also, a lot of the time, I get email replies, but I can't bridge the gap to video chat. Because calendar and email woes, I've been sinking a bit more time into my landing page as a result. Maybe too much. No product yet though.
I know this one only too well ha ha. Just want to hide in my cave writing code, but when you talk to people it's super rewarding.
It's hard when you are trying to keep the product a secret but it can be helpful to ask people what features they might like. Survey Monkey is a good resource.
You don’t need to broadcast your survey. Early on, that can actually be a bad thing since you might get too many different opinions.
You should pick a batch of 10/15 users and reach out to them. Also, I’ve found that mailing people one by one and trying to connect with them worked much better that sending a survey.
The Mom Test covers this very well. I highly recommend.
Great post @mpodlasin. I never saw the original. Let's talk. I couldn't see an email on your account. You can get me at gordonfrayne1@gmail.com
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Do you feel that conversations already brought you some value, or not yet?
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I think I am in similar situation because I know my market very deeply (and I plan to use my own product), but I still want some kind of confirmation that my efforts will be worth it. :)
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