A simple interview script to learn more from your ideal customer

Below is the process and mindset I’ve taught to the founders and CEOs I’ve been coaching over the last years. It’s also the process I used at Buffer, my previous startup. As I’m building out Here, my new product, a community platform for mindful and meaningful connection, I’ve gone back into the process myself firsthand. And I thought I’d share it in full length.

There’re some general startup lessons I’ve recently talked about that lead up to this one.

Before you talk to them, my friend Hiten has often reminded me to begin with writing down 3-5 hypotheses. These hypotheses you carry in your back pocket. But you don’t ask them directly.

The hypothesis format follows “If…, then.., because…”, to pull some examples:

• If someone uses your product/service, then they have 4 extra hours a week to spend with their family, because they can do their accounting in half the usual time
• If someone uses your product/service, then their level of anxiety will decrease by a mark of 1-2 points out of 10, because their ruminating thoughts have been brought to paper
• If someone uses your product/service, then they will grow their business by 30-50%, because they can find contacts that matter to them faster.

In general, phrase hypotheses in a way that you can have a yes/no answer at the end.

The book that helped me the most to learn the right interviewing format and process is called “Lean Customer Development”, by Cindy Alvarez. She suggests taking notes as you’re into the interview around the following 4 points:

• Something that validates your hypotheses
• Something that invalidates your hypotheses
• Thoughts/sentences that take you by surprise
• Thoughts/sentences full of emotion

Cindy also devised an interview script for how to talk to customers and I’ve modified it a bit below. In general, questions are guideposts, you can tweak them and change them in the way that you feel that they will land the best with the customer. Good questions are those where there is no right/wrong answer. The best answers are those where the customer talks about past actions, not thoughts or ideas.

Example of a customer response to your question “How does mentorship fit into your life?”:

• Helpful answer: “Last week I had 2 calls with mentors of mine for 1 hour”
• Not so helpful answer: “I love getting mentored and offering mentorship to others!”

The reason the second one is much less helpful is that it is much less of a distinct predictor of future behavior, which is what we’re after.

The Interview Script

Questions to ask (you’ll see they evolve very little around the product and mainly around the problem):

Give me a bit of context about yourself – if you’re building a business product, you can ask “What is your name and role at your company? How do you fit into your company’s department structure? Overall in the company?

Tell me about how you run/do  ___X___ today…. (X is your general, broad area of focus, i.g.: “eat breakfast”, “have mentorship calls”, “run meetings”, etc.)

What [tools/products/apps/tricks] do you use to help you get ____X___ done?

If you could wave a magic wand and be able to do anything that you can’t do today, what would it be? Don’t worry about whether it’s possible, just anything.

Last time you did ____X____, what were you doing right before you got started? Once you finished, what did you do afterward?

Is there anything else about _________ that I should have asked?

(Dig deeper into their typical day on anything that sounds painful or expensive. (You can add some hyperbole here to get them to rant a bit by saying things like “that sounds inefficient…” or “that sounds expensive…”))

Summary

To summarize again, the most important part is the mindset. Enter these meetings with the sole wish to understand the customer as a human and then their problems better. Tune into their feelings, wishes, grievances. Together with their input and your own creativity and inventiveness you can build the most powerful and useful product.

I hope some of this has been helpful for you too as I’m distilling my own process in the middle of this new adventure. Let me know if I can help with anything.