The 9 customer interview questions we use at Driftly
Please upvote if you find this post helpful!
This post evolved from my comment on Customer interviews: 4 mindset traps, posted by @EkaterinaHoward.
Shout out to a couple other people who made this post possible.
- @coreyhaines for motivating some of the best customer interviews I've ever done (keep reading for links to his stuff).
- @RobertoDigital for being the best customer a small company could ask for and doing killer customer interviews for us.
So @jacobbeckerman and I have started Driftly together and as we get things rolling, we've been taking our customer interviews really seriously.
We want to nail down positioning and messaging before we get heavy handed with our first marketing channels.
This post isn't an A > Z on how to do customer interviews. You can probably figure out how to get in touch with your customers and set up a call yourself.
But once you're on the call, here are the questions to ask. This is what we go through in every call, leaving room to explore as needed!
All this and much more is available in this webinar by Corey Haines: How to Get Your First $1k, $10k, & $100k MRR. He gets all the credit. I just swiped them, as one does at Swipe Files (which you should totally become a member of).
- How would you feel if you could no longer use Driftly? [Product market fit / is this customer in our target market]
- If you couldn’t use Driftly, what would you use instead? [Competitors, competitor research]
- What type of people do you think would most benefit from using Driftly? [Targeting information]
- What is the main benefit you receive from using Driftly? [Copywriting, value proposition, messaging, sales conversations]
- How can we improve Driftly for you? [Product roadmap]
- What was going on in your world when you started looking for something like Driftly? [Triggers to influence channels]
- What are your favorite blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or websites to keep up with? [Channel strategy]
- Who do you look to for inspiration or advice? [Channel strategy]
- Which events, online communities or forums do you spend time in? [Channel strategy]
Maybe most importantly, we treat our customers like we would friends in a call. They're giving up their time so it's important to enjoy the call together and not take it too seriously! You'll be surprised at how much your customers will open up to you when the atmosphere is chill and they don't feel like their answers are being judged and analyzed right then and there
And...if you have a product of your own and are thinking about integrating product tours, let's talk! Come livechat with Jacob or I over at driftly.app and we'll get you hooked upppppp.
Onward and upward, IHers!
P.S. What other questions have you found super helpful to ask your customers? Let's collect them in the comments below! 👇🏽
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Thanks for sharing this with us @joehhoward. Asking the right questions in customer interviews puts us way ahead in our startup journey :)
Also during the early stage, I often ask the question "What would be the reason, you'd not want to pay for the product?" to understand more about pricing and value prop.
In my last company, the way I pushed the team is to learn from
Both books are incredible.
Disclaimer: I've no connection with the authors or publishers of those books.
Read Mom's test. It gives you a fresh perspective. Should try out the other book you suggested :)
Let me know how it helped you :)
Yes, love questions around pricing are great. You can get a real feel for how people feel about your pricing.
Important to note when asking pricing questions that people may say something different than they feel. Although I guess this is true for any question haha. I guess what I mean is...saying you would/wouldn't pay a price for something is different than swiping/not swiping your credit card.
Also important to try to really answer the question if the person you're interviewing is an ideal buyer for you (maybe right now, maybe generally). Not all customers are. If they are not, they could say something negative about pricing when your ideal buyers would actually pay 2x your current price.
Anyway, it's all good information!
Haha you're right Joe. Navigating the trap in customer interviews is quite an art. Mom's test comes in handy!
You guys are building something awesome, congrats!
Thanks, Roberto! Doing our best here.
I particularly appreciate the focus on understanding the customer's world and their needs, rather than just focusing on the product itself. The question about what was happening in their world when they started looking for a solution like Driftly is a great way to understand the triggers that lead to a need for your product.
One question I've found helpful in my own customer interviews is: 'What is the biggest challenge you face in your role and how does our product help you overcome it?' This helps to understand the pain points and how our product fits into the solution.
Great post Joe!
In the past I was asking too many closed or very hypothetical questions when doing user interviews, so I was not getting the most out of these conversations.
We're now using discussion guides, a technique from the UX Research world, to conduct all our user interviews and it's helping us uncover some really interesting things during these calls.
You don't have to be a UX Research to use a discussion guide (I'm not a UX Researcher) so I recommend all founders to adopt this technique. For anyone interested in discussion guides I wrote a blog post about it here: https://www.envsion.io/blog/how-to-write-a-discussion-guide-for-impactful-user-interviews
Nice, Eddie! Open-ended questions ftw.
Thanks for sharing these!
I've been asking, "What type of people do you think would most benefit from using X?" recently, too. Love that one. We're still validating the best audience for our product at Nitric, and this question helps us with that as well as understanding how they've perceived our product so far.
Similar to #2, it can be helpful to ask what other products are part of their workflow, so you can understand how they perceive you in the ecosystem.
And my key follow-up to most of these questions is to ask "Why?" and dig in deeper.
You're so welcome, Elisse!
Love this question. So you can see why they use your tool in the context of their entire tech stack, process. Just, yes.
Absolutely. Maybe the best follow up question of all time haha!