Up Global (formerly Startup Weekend) recently asked for a hand retooling content for their Startup Weekend NEXT program. Honored to help an org doing such great work, I jumped at the chance and together we shot a series videos we fondly call, “Customer Discovery Hacks.”
How to Get out of the Building
Many entrepreneurs know it’s important to get out of the building – what we have trouble with, is figuring out how:
Which segment should you start with?
How do you ask for an interview?
What should you ask during an interview?
What do you do with their answers?
Our hope is the Customer Discovery Hacks series will inspire entrepreneurs with concrete examples, so they can get out of the building no matter what part of the world they’re attending Startup Weekend NEXT.
Customer Discovery Hack #1
Without further ado, here’s our first hack: Which customer segment should you start with?
If you’d like to do this hack in-person, with feedback from mentors and a cohort of other passionate entrepreneurs…definitely check out Startup Weekend NEXT.
What’s New about NEXT?
Started last year as a 5-week program dedicated to hands-on Customer Discovery training, Startup Weekend NEXT has listened to their customeres and shifted towards and an “accelerator prep” program.
The NEXT team has done a great job talking to impactful accelerators (Tech Stars, et al), understanding the skills that founders are missing when they apply to their programs (and subsequently get rejected). With that in mind, NEXT is designed to give founders:
An understanding of big vs small market opportunities
A primer on bootstraping vs angel vs VC funding
Pitch coaching
And marketing strategies
…in addition to the hands-on Customer Discovery mentoring they’re known for.
Of course NEXT is eating their own dog food, so there may be (should be!) changes as they continue to give the course, but I think it’s a solid program and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Customer Discovery by doing it.
You don’t learn customer development by reading about it…you learn by doing it @SWNext
Join the experiment – subscribe via Email or RSS. Our next post will be Customer Discovery Hack #2: Asking Customers for an Interview.
Warning: you only launch once. I don’t recommend generating press until you’ve validated your customer segment(s), their pain(s), and much of your solution. Here’s why:
That said, lets hack some press…
Getting press is daunting for just about every founder. Who do you talk to? How do you find them? What do you pitch them? All questions I spend hours thinking about…for…every…project.
But with a little creativity, and a little hacking, getting press is easier than I thought. Easy enough to get a recent product covered by…
Background
Some friends and I were launching ThingsWeStart, a “Crowdfunding Aggregator” – imagine all of the projects on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc. displayed on a map, so you could support projects near you.
Something this badass deserved a press push…
Step #1 – Find the Right Reporters
The first step was to find reporters who might cover us. That started with a Google News search for “Kickstarter”.
Hypothesis: reporters who have already written about Kickstater, or a Kickstarter project, are more likely to write about a map of Kickstarter projects.
This is a very different approach than listing all possible news outlets and submitting tips to them. Instead I was personally targeting individual reporters, who already demonstrated interest in our subject matter.
Want to follow along?Search Google News for articles related to your company’s value proposition.
Step #2 – Download their Articles
Now I had some articles, but what I really needed was the reporters’ contact info. Instead of searching through each story on my own, which would take forever, I wanted to created a spreadsheet of them so I could farm out the work.
Luckily, Google News has an API which makes that relatively easy – but there’s no sense in you reinventing the wheel. Please, use my code:
Click the pic, use the tool, and you’re halfway there!
Following along?Use this page to download a spreadsheet of articles by reporters you want to contact.
Step #3 – Collect their Contact Info
With the list of articles in hand, I wanted to collect the names and email addresses of each reporter – so I could personally tell them about our launch.
Thing is, I didn’t want to do that work myself – it’s boring. Instead, I asked the good folks on Mechanical Turk (mTurk) to do it for me…for $.03 per email address! If you’re not familiar with mTurk, I can’t recommend it enough.
Then I uploaded a CSV (the spreadsheet you downloaded in Step #2) to mTurk:
…and mTurk automatically combined the two to create a HIT for each article in the CSV:
Rather than investing two weeks digging for contact info for 700 articles, dozens of people delivered me results within a couple days.
I also recommend including tips for finding author’s emails addresses in your HITs. Example
Important: I suggest you turn off requiring Master Turkers. You’ll have to babysit the results, and block Turkers who aren’t giving you valid results, but you’ll likely find more people willing to help.
Following along? Create a new HIT on mTurk and use this HTML as the basis for your template.
Step #4 – Progress Monitoring
When I did this, I saw a large number of HITs completed within the first few days. After that, results started to drop off. I think my HITs eventually got pushed to the bottom of the stack.
To counter that, every couple days I would cancel my incomplete HITs, and relaunch any articles I didn’t have contact information for.
Within a week, I had contact information for 350 reporters who had written articles about Kickstarter.
Step #5 – Build a Press Kit
The most important rule I’ve found when working with reporters is:
The more you help reporters, the more they’ll help you.
These poor folks are under crazy deadlines, have to produce multiple stories per day, and are inundated with requests for coverage. The more we can help them out by writing our story for them, the better off we’ll both be. Win-win.
Here’s the press kit we prepared for our launch. It includes:
With contact information in hand, and a killer press kit, it was time to reach out to the reporters. 5 days before launch, I gave them a heads up we were coming, but no access to our press kit:
It’s important to tell reporters that your content is “embargoed” until you officially launch, which means they’re not allowed to write about you until your launch date. If you don’t mention this, one of these folks is going to jump the gun and publish your story early. That in turn, will make other reporters less interested in covering you, since it’ll be old news by then.
We didn’t include an embargo, but we should have…
Some news outlets/reporters hate embargoes. If you really want their press, only tell them about your launch the day before you go live.
Step #7 – Watch the Ink Roll In!
Once we launched we simply setup some Google Alerts and Twitter searches, and watched the press roll in.
Hack Metrics
Hours spent: 40 (includes time coming up with the hack, writing the code, etc. Should take you less.)
Money spent: 350 email addresses x $0.03/address = $10.50
Traffic generated: ??? Remember when GoDaddy’s DNS service went down? That was the day we launched :)
Following along? I’d love to hear if you’ve tried this, or other press hacks!
Final Tips:
Play around with pricing. If you’re in a hurry, you’ll probably want to pay more than $.03/article
Block turkers who submit obviously fraudulent contact info (you won’t have to pay for those)
I’m stoked, quite a few people are finding this article useful! Unfortunately, that means there probably lots of HITs on MTurk right now trying to get contact info for journalists. That means, you may need to either pay more, or wait a little while before trying it yourself.
TL; DR
The Google News API and Mechanical Turk can be combined to get lots of press for your launch.
The hackers’s guide to getting press
What’s Next?
Want help getting press? Schedule a 1-on-1 mentoring call.
Subscribe via Email or RSS for more hacks and in-depth discussions on getting press, validating marketing channels, and reaching your customers.
This post is brought to you in part by this week’s Startup Edition question: How do you get a job in startups?
I am Not a Recruiter
I was playing ping pong with a friend recently when he tried to distract himself from the beating he was receiving…
Friend: I need to hire 15 people this quarter. Do you want to help? Me: Of course not…I’m a dev, not a recruiter. Don’t be rude just because you’re losing.* 17 serving 3.
* Engineers typically despise recruiters.
But he got me thinking – companies are so hard up for senior dev talent, they’re paying recruiters an extra 20% – 25% of a new employee’s 1st year’s salary (e.g. for a $100k/year hire, they’re shelling out an extra $20k to $25k to the recruiter who found her).
Note: Non-tech roles are easier to fill – typically by friends-of-friends. Looking for a startup job but don’t have the right friends? Get some.
Curiosity piqued, I wondered…what would it take to solve this problem? And how would I test it?
Except when I’m Testing
Recruiting is a classic 2-sided market. You’ve got candidates and employers – neither of which will talk to you if you don’t have buy-in from the other (e.g. Craigslist is useless w/o buyers and sellers, Groupon is useless w/o companies and consumers, etc.)
When I mentor startups in 2-sided markets, the question is always, “Which side do I test first?” To which I answer, “The harder one.”
In this case, finding great developers is harder than finding people who want to hire them, so…
Hypothesis: I can find great startup devs traditional recruiters can’t.
Of course, that begs the question, “How do you test one side of the market, without the other on board?” In other words, how can I get great candidates (e.g. amazing devs who currently have jobs) to talk with me, if I’m not working with great companies they want to work for? The answer…
Forecasting
To crack the chicken & egg problem of 2-sided markets, we’re going to “forecast” to one side of the market that the other side is on board. Let me be clear, I make a big distinction between Forecasting, Predicting and outright Lying:
Forecasting = Statements made with > 90% certainty Predicting = Statements made with < 90% certainty Lying = Statements made with < 50% certainty
You can see what I mean with a screenshot from my MVP:
Predicting would have been including logos of friends’ companies on this page, without talking to them first. It’s likely they would have been on board, but since I wasn’t > 90% sure, I didn’t include them.
Lying would have been including logos of companies I had no relationships with.
The flier above is an example of forecasting. I haven’t nailed down everything 100%, but if the candidates come, I’m > 90% sure I can deliver what’s written.
Note: this is a lesson I learned the hard way! If you want to see what happens when you “lie” instead of “forecast”, take a look at this. Please, learn from my mistakes :)
MVP Time
Using Unbounce, I whipped up an MVP and posted it on Hacker News. 8 hours later, I had 200+ candidates:
Next I spent 3 weeks researching and interviewing each of the candidates to confirm these folks were high quality. Sounds tedious but I had a couple tricks up my sleeve:
I used to be a hiring manager for a large software company – that made screening faster.
It’s actually fun. Nothing better than 1-on-1 conversations with smart people who I can help take the next step on their path. It’s proving to be a privilege.
Within a month, I had validated problem market fit for the “hard” side of my 2-sided market.
Validating the “Less Hard” Side
Once I knew I had solid candidates, it was time to validate I had opportunities to place them in. Of course I had friends who were hiring, but I wanted to see if there was a more scalable way to make connections:
Since my customers are my friends, Facebook did the trick and got me 4 intros to recruiters – 3 of which wanted to collaborate (i.e. I would source candidates, they would source open positions, and we’d share referral fees).
Note: when 3 out of 4 customers are willing to give you money, despite the fact you have no clue what you’re doing, you’re solving a hair-on-fire problem.
As a meta-cruiter(?) I now have access to a couple dozen open positions.
Problem Market Fit isn’t Product Market Fit
At this point, I’ve validated Problem Market Fit for both sides of the market, but it remains to be seen whether or not I’ll successfully place folks. If I can do that with consistency, we’ll know we’ll have achieved Product Market Fit as well.
One of the challenges of interviewing customers, is analyzing the results. I’m typically left with a pile of terse notes, and a handful of questions:
What were the most common pains?
If my assumption was invalidated, what do I do next?
Were there any major themes that I missed?
My solution? Post-It Notes. Video walk-through below.
Example
The Lean Startup Conference recently asked me to run a workshop on the Science of Pricing. As I started to write the workshop’s description I realized I knew what I wanted to teach, but had no clue what entrepreneurs wanted to learn.
So I got out of the building and I interviewed a handful of founders about the difficulties they had pricing their products.
Here’s how I use Post Its to organize the mess of interview results:
Step 1: Find the Nuggets
The first thing I do is go through my notes and bold the salient points.
Step 2: Create One Post It per Nugget
Then I write up an (online) Post It note for each of the nuggets in one of my interviews.
Step 3: Repeat, with a Different Color
Then I repeat the process for another interview using different colored Post Its (you’ll see why later). This is why I use electronic Post Its – I don’t have enough real-life Post It note colors.
Step 4: Group Notes as you Go
As I create the Post Its, I group common themes together.
Step 5: Keep Only Groups of Post Its
Once I’m finished creating the Post Its, I usually have quite a mess. To clean that up, I get rid of any Post It that was only mentioned by one customer and keep everything that was mentioned twice+.
Step 6: Sort by Popularity
Next I prioritize the groups of Post Its based on how many customers mentioned those concepts. This is where the different colored Post Its come in handy.
Step 7: Harvest your Learnings
Finally, I create a summary with the core concepts and screen shots of the Post Its. Now I have an easy to read report of the findings, in order of importance, complete with real customer quotes!
This is the shit. If you create one of these, whenever you have a question about what problem you’re solving, “features” you should add to solve it, order to do things in, etc., you can turn to this report and instantly recall your customer’s needs. Bonus: you can easily share it with team members, advisers and potential investors.
For me, all that was left, was to combine what I learned into a description.
What’s Next?
Want help understanding your interviews? Schedule a 1-on-1 mentoring call.
This is Part 5 of our series of on Interviewing Customers:
Using clever survey questions to quickly test the memorability, spellability and emotional response of potential domain names. Glad we did – almost picked a lousy one.
Problem: Domain Squatters
I’ve found what should be the joyous process of naming a company, quickly devolves into in argument over which of the abysmal choices of available domain names suck the least.
Some friends and I who were building a crowdfunding aggregator wanted to avoid all that, so we came up with a way to test our company/domain names with customer data. Here’s how…
Step 1: Crowdsource Ideas
SquadHelp is 99Designs for domain names. That means you pay a couple bucks and SquadHelp users will find you some 500+ domain names, all of which are currently available. And if you don’t like any of them, you don’t pay anything.
Note: 99% of the suggestions are going to bad, but I always find that are good ones are worth the money, and they provide inspiration to come up with my own names.
Looking over the list of possible names for our crowdfunding aggregator, we chose our top 3:
altFunder.com
ChangeFunding.com
ThingsWeStart.com
altFunder.com was our favorite name going in to the experiment, the next step of which was deciding…
Step 2: What to Measure?
After reading up on what makes for a good company name, we decided to measure the following characteristics of each name:
Memorability – If users can’t remember your name, they can’t tell their friends about it.
Spellability & Hearability – If users can’t spell your domain, they could become someone else’s.
Associations
Emotional associations – what feelings do these names evoke? For more on why this is important see Selling the Why
Image associations – Names people automatically associate images with are more memorable.
Competitor associations – The internet told us you want to avoid a name that gives your competition more clout. Seemed like reasonable advice.
Next up…
Step 3: Design the Experiment
Here’s a video tour of the survey we designed (i.e. why you’re reading this post):
If you don’t want to watch the video, here are the key questions we asked:
To test hear/spellability (try it):
1. Play this audio clip only once and type in the name of the website you hear:
What website did you hear? [input box goes here]
To test memorability:
After speaking & showing the domain names, we’d ask them a bunch of “busy work” questions (e.g. demographic questions, trivial math questions, etc.) to help them forgot the less memorable names:
12. What is the 9th word of the 1st paragraph on this page?
eat
faster
rubber
printing
With their minds distracted for a bit, we’d then ask:
Testing domain name memorability
To test Associations:
For each of the associations (e.g. emotional, image, and competitor) we asked them simple questions like:
What images come to mind when you hear this time?
How do you feel when you hear this name?
What organizations come to mind when you hear this name?
Btw, we used nsurvey for this – an open source survey tool that gave us the power & flexibility we needed. With the survey designed, it was time to…
Step 4: Run the Experiment
Pssst: If you like this blog post so far, you should subscribe (email or RSS)! The next one will be an in-depth look at Steve Blank’s new collaboration with Startup Weekend.
The site was B2C, so we decided to throw our survey up on Mechanical Turk. We paid $0.10 for each respondent and we stopped after we got 50 (all told $5).
mTurk naming survey HIT with bonus fraud detection
Fraud Detection: we had quality assurance questions built into the survey (e.g. what’s the 9th word in the second paragraph, what’s 16 + 32, etc.) to detect cheaters. We gave cheaters a different password than people who took the time to fill out the survey thoroughly.
Step 5: Evaluating the Results
Once the survey results were in, I threw them in a spreadsheet and scored each of the questions like so:
Hearability/Spellability: +2 points for a name each time it was spelled properly
Here are the Hear/Spellability results for our names:
Domain name hearability/spellability results
Memorability: +2 points each time the name was properly recalled
Domain name memorability results
Image associations: scored subjectively by me (actual responses below)
Then we weighted the score of people who we thought were most like our targeted users (e.g. responses from Facebook and Kickstarter users got bumps) and added them all up:
We were wrong! We were leaning towards altFunder.com because it was short & edgy (and thus we assumed more memorable).
Turns out, ThingsWeStart.com was not only more memorable, it was also easier to hear/spell and it had much more positive associations.
For a couple bucks and a couple hours, we saved ourselves thousands of $’s by not picking the crappy name and having to change it later, or trying to buy one from a squatter.
Takeaway:
Don’t waste time debating product names…test them.
Tips & Tricks
– Before you post a survey about your domain names, be sure to purchase them all. Don’t want one of your clever respondents to snipe them from you.
– Most domain registrars offer a return policy. We bought all 3 domains we were testing, ran our test, and then got a refund for the 2 we didn’t use!
– Another great test would be to measure CTR on ads, or A/B test on a landing page. We didn’t have time for that, but I’d love to hear if you’ve run an experiment like that.
As always, comments and questions are appreciated!
If you liked this – consider sharing it so your friends don’t buy shitty domain names. You may also want to subscribe for new posts via Email or RSS. Our next article will be detailed explanation of Steve Blank & Startup Weekend’s Customer Development collaboration – SWNext – and how we think it fits into the greater startup ecosystem.
