Step-by-Step Instructions

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FOCUS Framework

In this exercise you’re going to set the foundation for getting out of the building and interviewing your customers.

Problems it Solves

• Reduce your anxiety

Almost all of us have some anxiety around talking to strangers, especially when they are your potential customers.

Imagine I told you to interview five random strangers on the street.  Imagine standing on a street corner with clipboard trying to convince people to stop and talk to you, as they rush by on their way somewhere more important. Imagine the rejection as person after person walks by, and how it only makes you more anxious to ask the next person.

This is what a lot of founders think they’ll have to do when it’s time to interview customers – I know I did.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Let’s change the scenario.  Imagine instead of interviewing five people on the street, all you had to do was interview five people at a local Senior Center. In this scenario, instead of people trying to ignore you when you approach them, they actively turned toward you, smiled, and said hello. In fact, they’re so eager to chat, they ask you the first question!

I promise you, when you find your early adopters, your interviews will feel much more like talking to a friend, than trying to convince a stranger to stop on the street corner.

This exercise will start the process of turning the interview process from anxious, to enjoyable.

Almost all of us feel anxious about talking to potential customers – but we don’t have to.

By coming up with over 50 potential ways to talk to your customers, you’re naturally going to find the places where you will feel the most comfortable, so anxiety doesn’t prevent you from “getting out of the building.”

The second way you’re going to reduce your anxiety is by focusing on interviewing only five people.

The first few interviews are the most nerve-racking.  By getting these out-of-the-way, you’ll see it’s not that scary – and, it’s much more rewarding for you and the interviewee (especially for the interviewee) than you might think.

Eventually, you will talk to many more people.  But for now, set your sights on just five to get the ball rolling.

• Find the fastest way to get feedback on your product

Through this exercise, you’re going to identify the fastest ways to get you out of the building and talking to people.  By casting a wide net and identifying so many ways to talk to people, you’re going to land on the ones that will be the fastest.

• Start identifying your best channels for marketing later on

This exercise will be the foundation for your marketing channels later on.  The list you are about to create of the fastest and easiest ways to talk to people, will help you identify the fastest and most effective ways to put your product in front of people later on.

Two Keys to Success

In this exercise, there are two keys that will make it successful:

#1 – There are no bad ideas: Quantity > Quality

This is a classic brainstorming exercise. I’ve done this exercise enough to know that the most important thing to do is just to get as many ideas down as possible.  The quality will come. Don’t hate any ideas that come to mind – just get as many things down as possible.

#2 – The ideas you come up with do not need to scale

In this exercise our goal is to find ways to get just five conversations with customers.  Any idea where you can scrape together 5 conversations with the people you are aiming to talk to is a good idea.

Don’t worry if you can’t get 1000 interviews from these channels, you just need five.

Leveraging the Design Process

One more thing before we move into this exercise.  In this process, we are borrowing heavily from Design Thinking.

This brainstorming method involves broadening your ideas, then focusing in, then broadening, and then focusing in again until you’ve iterated your way to an ideal solution.

Note that during this exercise, by opening your mind to any and all possibilities (remember, there are no bad ideas) some of what you write down may conflict with some of the characteristics of the Early Adopters you defined in the previous exercise. If that happens, that’s okay, it’s part of the process.

Once you’ve written down all of the potential possibilities, we’ll prioritize the possibilities so you’ll have an optimal solution.

Also note that we did this same “dump and sort” (i.e. dump a huge list of possibilities and then “sort” the dumped list to pick the best choices) kind of exercise during the Customer Storming (dumping) and SCALE (sorting) exercises.

Anytime in your entrepreneurship journey going forward you need to brainstorm solutions to an idea, considering using a dump and sort strategy to find the ideal path forward to arrive at a desired goal.  It is a proven process that will help you get exactly where you want to be.

Find Your 50 Ways

In the previous exercise, we used the SCALE worksheet to narrow our segments.  In my example, I narrowed in on “Lean Startup Founders”.  Now, this is who I want to find and interview.  This exercise will help me find them.

Break out the 50 Ways to Talk to 5 People worksheet.

Step 1

Write your segment into the first blank. In the second blank, write the problem you hypothesize they have.

In my example, I hypothesize that if a founder considers herself a “Lean Startup” founder, she struggles figuring out how to apply it.

Step 2

List out at least 10 different “channels” where you might find people potentially suffering from this problem.  Remember, there are no bad ideas.

You can see my initial set of ideas and that not all of them are good. For example “Accelerator Attendees” and “Clarity users” may or may not consider themselves “Lean Startup Founders.”

That’s okay, remember, there are no bad ideas – it’s all part of the “dump and sort” process. Write down whatever comes to mind and let that expand your thinking process.

Now, go back and circle any channels you’d feel confident asking just five people for conversations.

Remember, the channels don’t need to scale – you’re just going to start with five conversations.

For me, it’s easy to find five blog readers to have conversations with, and whenever I mentor at Founder’s Institute I meet 10 – 30 founders, so that’s another easy place to have or schedule five conversations.

Step 3

List out at least five different ways you could find your customers specifically through social media.  You may have some social media ideas on your original list, but now you’re going to flush out the entire social channel.

Here are some places to think about:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Google+
• LinkedIn

Now circle the channels you’d feel comfortable asking for just five conversations.

For me, it’s easy to ask members of a Facebook or LinkedIn group to have a quick chat. They may not take me up on it, but it’s easy for me to ask so I’ve circled all the Facebook and LinkedIn group channels.

Step 4

Now list at least 5 ways that you could find people through forums or group pages.  In this step, you are thinking about content specific sites with content specific to the type of problem you’d like to solve.

Here are some examples to consider:

• LinkedIn groups that are centered on your problem
• Yahoo and Google have groups, mailing lists, and listserves that may be related to your problem
• Quora can help you find the people who are asking questions related to your problem
• Stack Overflow is best for problems related to technical or programming type problems
• ProductHunt has community members who are submitting products or commenting on products that may be related to your problem
• Facebook has groups related to specific issues and search tools to find people who have “liked” a product related to your idea; you can also see who has been commenting on these groups or products
• Craigslist will have folks who are looking for help with something or want a certain service
• HackerNews gives you access to developers and engineers
• Reddit will help you find young people who are on the internet a lot
• Support communities for various apps or products will often help you find people who are voicing their opinions and voting up features or providing content

Circle any channels you’d feel comfortable asking for five interviews. In my case, like Facebook groups, it’s easy for me to send a quick note to a member of a Google group or someone asking a question on Quora.

Step 5

In this step, list 5 ways you can use influencers to find your early adopters.

Influencers are simply people with an audience and influence over their opinions. The idea here is that the influencers may be able to help you talk to members of their audience (i.e. your customers).

For example, you may want to think about:

• Bloggers
• YouTube channels
• People who do speaking or workshops,
• People who are reviewing software or apps that are related to your problem
• Professors or teachers
• People who are highly recommended on a specific skill on LinkedIn.

In my case I can contact people who are leaving comments on other influencer’s blogs, or YouTube channels.

Again, circle the ones that feel comfortable contacting for just five interviews.

In my case, I feel comfortable contacting people who have left comment’s on Steve’s blog.

Step 6

In this step you are going to leverage similar services to find your 5 people.  This could mean straight up competitors or complimentary services.  Write in at least 5.

For this section, think about investigating:

• Competitors’ app reviews: if a person is using a competitor’s product but leaving negative reviews, they are likely to be very willing to have a conversation with you
• Complimentary services: if a person is invested in a service related to yours, you have a good chance of engaging them
• ProductHunt now lists similar services, so take a look on there and see if you can find a product that is solving a similar problem to the one you’re trying to solve

Again, circle the ones that feel comfortable contacting for just five interviews.

In my case, The Foundation tries to solve a similar problem to the one I’m tackling – albeit they use different language and modalities. In the same way, Startup Next also solves related problems. I can contact five people with experience in either program, no problem.

Step 7

Now think of five ways to use meet-ups or conferences to find these early adopters.

In this section, consider:

• Self-organized conferences
• Accountability groups
• Conferences for a professional organization or group
• Meet-ups both locally and virtually
• Even host your own meet-ups by creating a group around a problem: if you can get just five people to attend, you’ve met your criteria

Time to circle the channels you’re game to contact five people. For me, I haven’t been to any Customer Development meetups or Lean Virtual Conferences, but if they exist, they both sound fun!

Step 8

In this step, write five more ways you can use cold contacts to find early adopters.

For example:

• Web searches
• LinkedIn
• Data scrapers
• Yelp

Your job is to find the people you want to talk to and cold contact them, by phone or email.  It’s only five, so it’s not that hard.

For me, I had completely forgotten about FailCon (a series of startup conferences that highlight startup failures and often espouses Lean Startup techniques) until I got to this section. That’s precisely what the exercise is designed to do.

By pushing your brainstorming capabilities to their limits, you’ll discover new ideas that would have never come to mind otherwise!

As always, circle the ones you like the best out of your list.

In my case, I immediately circled those two channels because that’s easy hunting for my customer segment.

Step 9

Last one!  In this step, list at least 5 ways to use old school channels.

Old school channels are precisely what they sound like – techniques you would have used before the internet to reach people, for example:

• Mailers
• Fliers
• Standing outside with a sandwich board
• Going to festivals
• Door to door

In this step consider anything that is not online, that is in-person, face-to-face, shaking hands, kissing babies…that sort of stuff.

In my case, while I brainstormed a few ideas, in the end none were interesting to me so I did not circle any.  Your results may vary, but definitely complete this section – you’ll be surprised how many good “online” ideas will come to mind while you’re searching for “offline” ones.

What’s Next?

In this exercise you generated well over 50 ways to talk to five people!

Of these ideas, there should be a good number that you’ve circled as ideas that would work for you, where you would feel comfortable talking to folks through that channel.

For me, I’ve circled well over 15 ways – or channels – to access my customers.  And, I could get most of these done within a day or so.

You have also just laid the foundation for future channels so you know exactly where to start marketing your solution once you’ve begun development.

Your interview channels of today, will be your marketing channels of tomorrow.

In this exercise you’ve done three important things:

• Reduced your anxiety about talking to customers by finding multiple places where you could feel comfortable finding 5 people to interview
• Found the fastest way for you to get the customer development process started. By only targeting 5 conversations, we’re going to crack the nut of having those first interviews so you can see how easy and comfortable it can be.
• Started to identify your best channels. Keep this worksheet handy, you’ll need it later to pick the best channel for you, which is coming up next!