Step-by-Step Instructions

You can find this spreadsheet in the FOCUS Spreadsheets Excel workbook

In this exercise you’re going to narrow the interview channels you brainstormed in the 50 Ways to Talk to 5 Customers exercise, down to the one, fastest, most efficient way for you to reach your customers.

Problems it Solves

• Find the fastest way to talk to your Early Adopters

In the last exercise you broadened your view to identify 50 different ways to talk to just five of your customers.  Then you narrowed in on the channels you felt most comfortable starting with.

Now you’re going to continue that narrowing process to find the one channel that will lead you to your customer interviews the fastest.

• Find the most efficient channel so you can move forward with confidence

Not only do you want this channel to be a fast way to get to get your interviews, you want it to yield valuable data.  In this exercise, you will find the fastest channel that will also give you the best data for the problem you would like to solve.

At the end of this exercise, you will be confident that your next step is the best step.

• It will help you set expectations about the actual time and energy it will take to get your interviews.

Most people think it will take maybe an hour or so to get an interview done, but there’s actually a lot that goes into it.  To get just one interview, you have to:

• Find the person
• Contact them
• Wait for them to get back to you
• Coordinate schedules
• Then, finally, do the actual interview

Setting realistic expectations about how long this first set of interviews will take, will ensure you don’t get overwhelmed by the process.

Finally, this exercise will...

• Provide a built-in backup plan.

I want you to be prepared if it turns out your first channel is a bust.

All the work you’re doing “inside the building” is based on assumptions. In this exercise we will also prioritize all of your channels so that if one doesn’t work out, you know exactly where to turn to next.

Let’s dive in!

Finding Your Most Efficient Interviewing Channel

Break out the Interview Channel Costing worksheet.

Step 1

Enter in your early adopter description and the hypothesized problem in the blanks provided.

Step 2

Now, list down the channels you circled during the 50 Ways to Talk to 5 People exercise.

Step 3

Next, you are going to fill in the number of calendar days it will take you to…

• Request 30 interviews from each interview channel
• Schedule 10 interviews and
• Conduct 5 interviews

Let’s look at each of these one at a time.

Request 30 Interviews

When you reach out to your potential customers, a 50% response rate is great and a 25% response rate is solid.  In my experience, you might expect about a third of people to get back to you and be open to scheduling an interview.

Let’s look at a couple of my channels.  My blog readers are pretty easy for me to reach out to since I already have a number of their email addresses; that’ll only take me a day.

On the other hand, for me to ask for 30 interviews from current Founder Institute members, I’ll need to wait until the next time I mentor at one, or possibly two different sessions. That’ll take a couple of weeks to happen.

For Facebook and LinkedIn groups it will take me a little longer to find contact information for everyone than it would to contact my blog subscribers, but only a couple of days.

Step 4

Schedule 10 Interviews

Out of the 30 folks you contact, hopefully 10 will agree to schedule an interview, but from experience, it’s likely half of these will not work out – either because they flake out, or because they aren’t able to schedule within your timeline.

Considering your audience for each channel, estimate how many additional days it would take to schedule 10 interviews after you’ve made the initial interview request.

In other words, how long will it take for 10 people in this channel to agree to an interview and for you to coordinate calendars with them?

In my case, I imagine it’ll take five days or for my blog readers to get back to me, where as Founder Institute members I meet in person, they may take a week to finalize a schedule.

Taking a look at the bottom of my list, folks who speak at conferences like FailCon, may be even trickier to schedule time with, so I’ve got them down at 10 days.

Step 5

Conduct 5 Interviews

• We are looking for the fastest way to get five interviews done. You can expect about a third of people to agree to an interview, but only half of those that agree will actually follow through, but that’s okay, because you’re only trying to talk with five customers!

Now, how long after you’ve actually scheduled the interview will you actually be able to talk to them all?

If you meet someone for an interview in person, like at a meetup, you’ll be done instantly! If on the other hand you’re trying to talk to a C-Level executive for a large company, you could be waiting a month or more even after you get on their calendar.

Your goal is to get interviews in the fastest, and most efficient way possible.

For most of my segments, I’d expect I can get the interviews finished within a week of scheduling them. For some segments though, like Founder Institute members, or Startup Next attendees, since they’re already involved in after-work programs, it might take longer to get on their calendars.

Step 6

Total

In this column, you can see roughly how many calendar days it’s going to take you to finish five interviews, per channel.

These numbers are helpful to me, and most founders, because we’re generally bad at estimating how long it will take to get interviews – either we think we can get them all done in a couple of days, or we expect them to take several weeks.

Ideally, your fastest channels will fall somewhere in the middle.

Step 7

“Paying” to solve the problem

In this column, you’re trying to capture how relevant these interviews will be for you.  Rate each channel for how likely the people you’d reach out to via that channel, are currently “paying” to solve the problem.

If you recall, in the previous exercise you came up with as many ideas for ways to talk to customers as possible, even if they weren’t very good, so that you could explore all of the possibilities. Now you’ll get the chance to prioritize the channels that are most likely to lead to your Early Adopters.

Give each channel the following scores:

• 1 = it’s likely the people in this channel are already “paying” to solve the problem you hypothesized
• 3 = the people in this channel are possibly “paying” to solve the problem
• 5 = the people in this channel are not likely to be “paying” to solve the problem now.

In my case, anyone who is already reading my blog is “paying” me in their attention, so that counts as a 1, and anyone who is going to a Lean Startup Machine, a paid event, is paying to solve the problem; that’s a 1 as well.

Most all the other channels I mark as “possibly” paying to solve the problem with 3’s, since I don’t have a lot of data either way. On the other hand speakers at conferences like FailCon probably aren’t paying to solve the problem – since they’re speaking, I’ll assume they will already have solved the problem.

Step 8

Sort your channels by their cost to identify your highest ROI channels. While the “Channel Cost” numbers themselves don’t mean anything by themselves, they’re extremely useful to prioritize the channels you should pursue.

In my case it’s clear I should start with my blog readers. It’s also clear that I should not start with the FailCon speakers.

Step 9

Backup Channel

The cool thing about this spreadsheet is that you know exactly what your backup channel will be if you have trouble getting five interviews from your “best” channel.

In my case, if I can’t get interviews from my blog readers, I can just as easily contact the Lean Startup Machine Facebook group members.  After that, there are Lean Startup groups on LinkedIn and then the Lean Startup Circle on Google Groups.

Step 10

Secondary Channels

Another way this spreadsheet is helpful is that it helps you plan for addressing multiple groups at once.

In my example, since I know it can take a while for my blog readers to respond to my interview requests, I could simultaneously reach out to members of the Lean Startup LinkedIn groups, or the Lean Startup Circle Google Groups to get the interview ball rolling there.

Note: if you begin requesting interviews via a specific channel, you’re looking for at least 5 interviews within that channel – you don’t get to combine 3 interviews from one channel with 2 interviews from another channel. If you do that, you’ll skew your interview results, and they won’t be valuable going forward.

What’s Next?

You are now armed with multiple, prioritized ways, to find your first 5 customers to interview!

Let’s recap why you did this:

First, you have identified the fastest and most efficient way to find and interview your Early Adopters.  Getting out of the building is an intimidating first step, but now you can move forward with the confidence that you are talking to the right people at the right time.

You’ve also done the preparation work to set your expectations of how long this process will actually take for you.  That way you can prioritize your tasks and avoid the frustration that frazzles many founders.

Of course, by now you know that any conclusion we come to from inside the building is an assumption.  So now you have a backup plan just in case one of your channels turns out to not be what you expected.

Finally, you eliminated all excuses for getting outside the building. You picked the channels you want to work with, and now we just prioritized them so you know exactly why you are talking to whom.

Congrats!  You found the most effective way to talk to your customers.  Next up, you’ll make a plan to do just that!