by markhoroszowski -

Help Investors Believe you – show them Customer Quotes

[Updated] October 12, 2014

When my mentor asked me for specific quotes from “potential customers” to demonstrate demand in an investor presentation the next day, I was up S*&% creek.

We don’t want investors “guessing” whether or not there’s demand for our products, but we don’t have time to walk through every single experiment and interview we’ve done during a pitch.  What we can do though, is share the excitement, demand, and desperation for our product via real customer quotes:

“This is Super needed in the marketplace. We will pay you for this” – Impact Investor*

“Our members will position themselves for better jobs if they have skills-based volunteering experience” – Career site for impact professionals*

“Existing programs are way too expensive, and my frustration in trying to find a legitimate opportunity could cause me to do nothing.” – Professional interested in skills-based travel volunteering*

“We can’t find the volunteers we need in order to grow our social enterprise.” – Potential hosting enterprise in Turkey*

*Names excluded for this blog post. Permission was specific to being used in presentation decks.
Make sure to respect your customers (and potential ones).

Unfortunately, through all my early customer interviews I had failed to collect quality quotes (until now).  I know I heard some great quotes, and probably scratched some down on paper, but I did a terrible job at documenting them, and I never asked for permission to use them.

I needed new customers to interview, FAST, and I needed enough quotes from them to ensure that I had a pool of HIGH QUALITY quotes. Sure, I could have gone back to people I interviewed, but I decided to use this as an opportunity to reach more people and do more validation.

And as my new venture, MovingWorlds, is working to effectively scale international, skills-based volunteering, I needed quotes about professionals who, in their own words, expressed needs that our solution addresses.

Using Quora to Find Potential Customers and Validate Our Problem and Solution Hypotheses

I was blown away how easy it was to find people with the EXACT challenges we were trying to solve. I used Quora in 2 ways

  1. Find people with relevant questions, and react to their posts
  2. Asked for specific quotes about my product

Finding people was easy. I started typing in “Skills-based volunteering” and before I could finish Quora was suggesting a myriad of topics that were addressing both parts of my marketplace – people looking for opportunities, and enterprises looking for volunteers (as well as companies looking to promote skills-based volunteering:

I was hoping for 2 things from finding people on Quora: first, to get feedback directly in Quora, and also to direct some traffic to a survey.

After I looked through Quora for a few minutes to better understand that types of questions and answers people were giving about this skills-based volunteering topic, I went to SurveyMonkey and setup a survey to capture the data I needed. I was then able to leave comments on Quora, and in exchange, ask for people to take few moments to give me feedback on Quora, and in my survey.

NOTE: Be respectful about searching for feedback here. People come to Quora for answers, not for spammy trawlers.

Here is an example of how I responded to a question so that I was still offering valuable feedback, but also asking for the opportunity to get a survey response, and maybe even a phone interview:

In addition to survey responses and comments on Quora, I also received personal messages as follow-up.

In a  relatively short period of time I was able get useful quotes that I needed to use as anecdotes and proof points in my pitch deck, find new customers to interview, better understand customer needs, and find matches for the next phase: concierge MVP (I’ll write more on concierge testing, later).

Using Mechanical Turk to Get Customer Validation Quotes

I didn’t have the time or resources to setup extensive customer interviews through Mechanical Turk like Justin wrote about on a previous post, so instead, I setup a quick survey to do the following:

  • Only capture professionals willing to volunteer their time
  • Make sure respondents were from our target demographic (from the US, had a professional skill, and attained a college degree)
  • Get quotes about challenges and opportunities for finding skills-based volunteering opportunities abroad

Step 1: Setup survey

I used SurveyMonkey and added qualifier questions to ensure respondents weren’t faking it. Surveyors got bounced with a “reject” code  if they didn’t have the right education level or live in the right place. “Trick” questions like ‘age’ and ‘location’ and ‘date of birth’ were included to cross-check data in case people were trying to spam the system (e.g. ask for age on one page, and then ask for date of birth on another, if they don’t match, its most likely worthless data)

Step 2: Setup HITs in Mechanical Turk.

I used the following project (screen shot below) to get people for the survey. I found that adding qualifiers in the ask produced better results. In this case, I had two main qualifiers:

  1. Must be a resident of the U.S.A. and have at least a Bachelor’s degree. I then confirmed these facts in the survey with specific questions (e.g. where do you live and what is your highest level of education achieved)
  2. Adding a line “Important: Be sure to read each question carefully. Randomly answering questions will be detected and will result in rejection of the HIT” also helped improve results

You can view the survey by following this link if you want to see the exact questions. Here is a screen shot of the project request on Mechanical Turk:

Here is the code for Mechanical Turk  project request that created the field above:

<h3>Answer a &lt;5 min survey about international travel and volunteering</h3>
<div class=”highlight-box”>

We are conducting a survey to better understand international travel and volunteering habits of people living in the US. We need to understand your opinion about professionals who want to travel and/or donate their expertise to make the world a better place. Select the link below to complete the survey.&nbsp; At the end of the survey, you will receive a code to paste into the box below to receive credit for taking our survey.
<p>In order to qualify for this survey, you <i><b>must </b></i>be from and/or living in the United States, <i><b>and </b></i>have achieved at least a Bachelor’s degree.</p>
</div>
<p>Survey link: <a href=”https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VolunteeringAbroad” target=”_blank”>https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VolunteeringAbroad</a></p>

IMPORTANT: Be sure to read each question carefully. Randomly answering quesitons will be detected and will result in rejection of the HIT.
<p>Provide the survey code here:</p>
<p><input type=”text” size=”10″ id=”Q2age” name=”Q2age” /></p>
<p><style type=”text/css”>
<!–
.highlight-box { border:solid 0px #98BE10; background:#FCF9CE; color:#222222; padding:4px; text-align:left; font-size: smaller;}
–>
</style></p>
<p>&nbsp;Watch the video on our home page to learn more:&nbsp;<a href=”http://www.movingworlds.org” target=”_blank”>http://www.movingworlds.org</a></p>

In the survey, in addition to asking for people to provide a quote if they were interested in skills-based volunteering, I also asked for email addresses if I could follow-up to schedule an interview. I got nearly a 50% response rate – within 1 day – from qualified leads to schedule an interview:

I have not yet had the time to follow-up with all my survey responders, but I have gotten some useful feedback and a great list of qualified people to interview and get quotes from.

Extra Credit Tip:

Don’t make the same mistake I did and not have powerful quotes and anecdotes ready to go when potential partners are asking for them :)

For all of you early on in the interview process, make sure to collect quality quotes (and get permission to share them) from the people you interview. To help organize this, my team and I setup a Google Form that made it easy to capture quotes. We could either submit ourselves, or invite others to leave us a quote through a Google Form. Key fields: Quote, Date, First Name, Last Name, Permission to Publish (Yes, No, maybe – get confirmation for each use), Email, OK to follow-up for more quotes (Yes, No). Looks like this:

Join the experiment – want more ideas on validating your business model and sharing that validation with others? Subscribe via Email or RSS for our next update: How to Interview Complete Strangers.

Customer Development Made Easy…

by Justin Wilcox -

How to Pick your Customer Segment

[Updated] January 3, 2017

We all know, “everyone” isn’t a customer segment.  But what do you we do when we’ve got a bunch of potential customer segments?

It’s an issue we all face at one point or another, in fact, as we previously noted, Bounce has a pile of potential customers:

For Real Estate agents, sales people, event planners, founders, general contractors, etc…
We could offer appointment reminders plus Salesforce integration!
For florists, caterers, utility installers/repairers, plumbers, electricians, etc…
We could provide on-time metrics for each employee! 
For long distance commuters, van pools, people who commute over a bridge, etc…
We could make an alarm that lets you sleep in or wakes you up early based on how bad traffic is!
For single people who are dating, busy parents, the “chronically late”….
We could gamify punctuality so they’re late less often!
For fusiness travelers, people who have just moved to an area.
We could offer additional information about sporting events, concerts, etc. that could be causing worse than normal traffic congestion.

If we target all of these customers, not only will it take forever to build this product, it’ll be a complete mess. So which group of customers are our ideal targets?

We could interview 20 of each group, but I think there’s a more efficient way.

Gut Check Prioritization

Lowest priority customers
Lowest priority customers

Let’s just gut check prioritize the segments we know about:

  1. First, add each customer group as a column in Excel
  2. Assign each group a value of 1-3 (1 = low, 3 = high) for the following criteria:
    1. Market Size – how “many” of this type of customer exist
    2. Pay for value – how much we think they’ll pay for this value
    3. Accessibility – how easy is it to find, contact and sell customers in this segment
  3. Multiply the scores together and sort them from highest score to lowest
  4. Start testing hypotheses with the highest scoring segment, and work your way down until you’ve got something people are dying to pay you for
Highest priority customer groups
Highest priority customer groups

Why I love this process

  1. It’s fast. Takes < 10 minutes.
  2. It’s okay that we don’t know the real values, we’re going to test our guesses anyway. This is just a way to prioritize our customers so we don’t get stuck in Lean Startup Paralysis, or start building a product that does everything for everyone.
  3. We don’t need to interview everybody. If our first couple rounds of  testing reveal a lot of interest from our top “gut check” customer segments, but in reality “VP of Sales” were the ones most willing to pay for a product, I hypothesize they’ll make themselves known once the product is launched.  No need to stress out testing all of our potential revenue sources – find one that meets our minimum success criteria and go with it.
  4. I was wrong. Before I did this process I had thought initially thought “VPs of Sales”, the “Chronically Late” and “Regular Commuters” would all be ideal customer segments.  This quick process hinted otherwise.

What’s Next?

This is Part 1 of our series of on Interviewing Customers:

  1. Which Customers Should you Interview (The SPA Treatment)
  2. How to Find Customers to Interview
  3. Getting Customer Interviews with Cold Emails
  4. How I Interview Customers
  5. You’ve Interviewed Customers. Now what?

Join the experiment – follow along via Email or RSS for updates on our next post: Help Investors Believe you – show them Customer Quotes.

Customer Development Made Easy…

by Justin Wilcox -

Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours)

[Updated] May 29, 2015

This has to be one of my favorite customer development tips: using Mechanical Turk to do customer interviews.

Nick Soman, Founder of LikeBright, and I discuss how he used Mechanical Turk to interview 100 customers in 4 hours, and how that got him into TechStars Seattle.

If you haven’t heard of Mechanical Turk (mTurk), here’s what you need to know:

  • it’s a website were lots of people, do small amounts of work, for small amounts of money
  • Who does work on mTurk? Although a bit stale, these stats indicate a fairly representative cross-section of the population.
  • Why would they do work for such little $? Something to do during free time. It’s a replacement for solitaire, not a replacement for a job.

Since Nick and I talked, I’ve done a couple dozen interviews this way and the results have been fantastic. Nothing like “getting out of the building” at home, at midnight, with an ice cream sandwich in hand.

[Update – 5/29/2015]

There’s an easier and faster way to do everything listed here. Our friends at Customer Discovery Ninja have automated this entire workflow below and made it easy for folks outside the US to access Turkers.

Feel free to familiarize yourself with the steps below if you like, but the fastest way to talk to customers is going to be Customer Discovery Ninja.

Sample interview and instructions:

1. Write the interview script

To make sure I accurately test my hypothesis, and so I don’t forget any questions, I always write up my interview script ahead of time.  Coming up with good interview questions is another post on its own, but here’s the intro I use:

Hi there, my name is Justin.  Can I get your first name please? *

Great, thanks ______.  Like I said, my name is Justin and I’m here in Seattle doing a little research.  I’m happy to tell you about the project I’m working on, but so that I don’t accidently bias any of your answers, I’ll wait until we finish the survey.  Is that alright?

Great.  So that I don’t have to slow us down to take notes while we’re chatting, is it okay if I record this call?  Great, here we go.

*Note: about half the time, people hang up after my first line. My assumption is that the hangups were expecting an automated phone survey, as opposed to a personal interview.

2. Get a (new?) Google Voice number

You’re going to post this number on mTurk, and strangers are going to call it so if you’re not down with that, create a new Google Voice account and grab a new number.  I’ve been using my actual Google Voice number and haven’t had any negative affects so far, but do what makes sense for you.

Outside the US/Canada: Google Voice is restricted to US/Canada so if you’re not there, here’s a great blog post on how to borrow a Google Voice number. (Note: may be against Google’s TOS. Use your judgement.)

3. (Optional) Forward Incoming Google Voice calls to your Gmail

I like answering my interview calls via GTalk within Gmail for a couple reasons:

  1. The gmail interface makes it easy to record the call
  2. It’s easier for me to talk hands-free with my computer

Instructions on forwarding Google Voice calls to your gmail are here: http://support.google.com/chat/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187936.

4. Create a HIT on mTurk

Create a new HIT on http://requester.mturk.com

Select "other" template
Select “other” template

Describe the HIT

Describe the HIT
Describe the HIT

Super Important:

You must turn off “Master Turkers.” Master Turkers are a pre-screened, and very small, subset of the MTurk population. We want any folks on MTurk to be able to contact us, as long as they meet our qualifications. Here’s how to do that:

Pick a Price

Pick a price
Pick a price

Write up the HIT

Write up the HIT
Write up the HIT

Feel free to copy and paste this HTML:

<p><span style=”font-family: Arial;”>If you are a parent who picks your kids at day care at least once/week, please call us for a 5-10 minute phone survey.</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-family: Arial;”>Please dial the following number:</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span style=”font-family: Arial;”>*67&nbsp; [your google voice number]</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style=”font-family: Arial;”>Note: dialing *67 before the actual phone number will protect the privacy of your phone number. &nbsp;</span><span style=”font-family: Arial;”>If you reach voicemail again, please wait 10 minutes.</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-family: Arial;”>&nbsp;<b>Required after Calling</b>&nbsp;- after we finish the survey, we will give you a password to confirm you successfully completed it. Please enter it below:</span></p>
<p><span style=”font-family: Arial;”><b>Password:</b>&nbsp;<textarea rows=”1″ cols=”80″ name=”answer”></textarea></span></p>
<p><span style=”font-family: Arial;”>Thank you very much! &nbsp;We really appreciate your help! &nbsp;</span></p>

*Note: the “password” is a word you tell your interviewee to type in once the interview is complete.  You’ll see what they type in before you approve the HIT (i.e. pay them) so you can ensure only the people who successfully completed the interview get paid.

Outside the US – mTurk needs a US address to sign up.  I’ve heard of people using any US address to create their accounts if they’re outside the US. Again, may be against TOS. Use your judgement.

5. Publish the HITs

Create a new batch
HIT it!

6. Get an ice cream sandwich

Now it’s time to wait for your first call. When it comes, answer it with your intro and once you have permission, record the call so you can share it with your team or review it later.

Incoming call
Incoming call
Record call
Record call

When you’re done, you can review the calls on Google Voice

Review recording
Review recording

Video Walkthrough

Using mTurk for the first time can be a bit confusing, so here’s a video walkthrough of the mTurk steps above:

Conclusion

If your target customers are on mTurk, which is likely if you’re building a B2C company, this is an awesome way to get lots of interviews in a short amount of time.

Thoughts, questions, or other suggestions for quick customer interviews? We’d love to hear ’em.

Big thanks again to Nick Soman from LikeBright for sharing this tip, Andy Sack for making him do it, and Dan Shapiro for teaching all of us the power of mTurk for customer development.

Outside the US? Or Don’t want to Mess with Mechanical Turk?

There’s an easier and faster way to do everything listed above. The guys at Customer Discovery Ninja have automated this entire workflow, which also makes it easy for folks outside the US to access US Turkers.

What’s Next?

Join the experiment – follow along via Email or RSS for updates on our next post: Prioritizing Customer Segments with Excel.

Customer Development Made Easy…

by Justin Wilcox -

Threatening Puppies (kinda) Works

[Updated] October 12, 2014

The results from our email interview experiment are in and, thank goodness, our customers saved the puppies.

* I didn’t get a chance to send follow-up emails for either of these emails.

Note these results include two new emails that weren’t detailed in the original blog post.  The “French Vanilla” email was the result of a friend telling me I had done everything wrong and that he could do a much better job:

French Vanilla

The Why? Email was inspired by my friend Adam Loving at Linksy who sent out an email to his customers asking for 2-3 words about their online marketing challenges:

Why?

Interesting stuff:

  1. Follow-up emails produced the most interviews.  Each person who didn’t reply to my first email got another email a couple days later repeating my request for their time.  Doing that more than doubled the number of interviews I got to do. Highly recommend FollowUpThen.
  2. Overall, the interview conversion rate was low.  7% on average, with the “winning” email converting at 12%.
  3. Sample size was probably too small to claim anything scientific, but “Rocky Road” generated “3x” the interviews “Vanilla” did.
  4. The “Why?” email performed well, but didn’t really let me dive as deep as I would have liked into my customer’s pain.
  5. Our readers are smarter than I am.  I thought “Chocolate” would win, but ya’ll were right:

”Results

Looks like this experiment provides two takeaways:

  1. Be sure to follow-up on requests for interviews.
  2. Being humorous/unique/edgy helps. Not a lot, but it helps.

Join the experiment – follow along via Email or RSS for updates on our next post: Customer Interviews using Mechanical Turk.

Customer Development Made Easy…

by Justin Wilcox -

Not Going to Lean Startup Machine is a Waste of Time

[Updated] May 20, 2014

Lean startup machine logoI went to Lean Startup Machine Seattle and it was, without a doubt, worth it. When LSM comes to your city, I highly recommend going.

There are a couple reasons I typically don’t participate in workshops/conferences:

  1. I don’t trust that the people talking know what they’re talking about
  2. I can learn what they’re teaching somewhere else (e.g. book, blog, etc.)
  3. I’m cheap and I don’t think it’ll be worth the money

Here’s how LSM mitigates those risks.

For Founders, by Founders

The guys running LSM are founders. They know what it’s like to start a company, and they know what it’s like to see it fail.

They’ve used those failures to figure out why they failed. They’ve consumed Blank, Reis, and Maurya’s ideas, distilled them, and produced a process that teaches the most fundamental principle of lean – how to identify our riskiest assumption and test it with an experiment.

This isn’t junk, it’s not bs, it’s not some guy talking to hear his own voice.  It’s stuff I think every founder should learn, provided by other founders.

LSM is an Experience – you can’t read it

The goal of the weekend is to change the way we think.  Instead of being execution focused, lean startups need to be testing & learning focused – but after years of hearing “first to market advantage”, and “those that ship win”, it takes more than reading books and blogs to rewire our brains.  We have to learn by doing.

LSM is learn by doing.

We probably spent less than an hour being “taught” how to walk through the LSM Canvas (different than the business model canvas).  The rest of the time, we were identifying our assumptions, prioritizing them, and testing them…over, and over, and over again, until our brains started to rewire themselves.

You can’t “read” an experience, you have to do it.

Not Going is a Waste of Time

If we agree that doing is a more effective way to learn than simply reading, we’ve got two choices re “doing:”

  1. Applying the lean startup techniques we read about to our own startups and over the course of months/years, we’ll have this stuff down cold
  2. Learn it in a weekend

It’s really that simple.  LSM is specifically designed to teach the essence of Lean in 54 hours.  Our startups on the other hand are designed to be businesses, not teaching tools.  Using them as such is possible, it’s just not an efficient use of time.

In terms of the amount of time and energy the weekend saved me, I’d say I’d pay $500 for it.  It doesn’t cost that much, but they could charge it and I’d still recommend it to people.

Conclusion

If you’re reading this, I highly recommend you go to an LSM.

Justin

PS – Suggestions for the Future

While the weekend was absolutely worth it, there were a couple things that could be improved:

  1. The “mentors” didn’t know lean.  While a couple did, there were certainly a few people walking around and giving advice that really didn’t know process we were trying to learn.  It would be great to require the mentors take a crash course in the techniques beforehand.

  2. Cut the speakers.  There were a handful of speeches throughout the weekend, but I wasn’t really sure why.  They killed our momentum and they didn’t have anything to do with Lean – they were just startup oriented talks.  Imo, we can get that stuff elsewhere, make the speeches lean-oriented or cut them.

  3. The “pitch” competition at the end wasn’t a good use of time.  Not only did it emphasize the wrong thing (results, as opposed to learning), the judges didn’t have a clue what it really meant to be Lean.

    I’d suggest doing something like a “Lean Tournament” as a finale instead.  Two teams at a time are pitted against one another and given a customer hypothesis, a problem hypothesis, and a solution hypothesis.  The two teams have 1 minute to identify the riskiest assumption and design a test for it.  Lean-educated judges pick the winner and it continues bracket-style until there’s a winner.  A high energy way to end the weekend that emphasizes learning, not execution.

Btw, don’t let these suggestions dissuade you, they comprise maybe 5% of the weekend.  I’m including them for completeness sake.

Join the Experiment – Want to save more time learning lean? Follow along with us via Email or RSS.