3 mistakes founders make when talking to potential customers
You have an idea for a startup and you're excited. This could be an opportunity to change your life, get control of your finances and live your dream. But before all this, you need to validate if your idea is solving a real problem that customers are willing to pay for. No customers = no business. You know that talking to customers is the first step for validating your idea and you have mustered up the courage to put yourself out there and start listening. Go you! Starting is always the hardest part, right? Wrong.
80% of new businesses fail. The number one reason for all this failure is that nobody wants what these companies are selling. It's rarely the case that the technology can't be built, that the founder can't find a good business partner or that finance is too scarce. These factors are just side effects of the initial problem; nobody wants your product.
Now that you know the importance of building something people want, you won't make the same mistake as everyone else, right? Wrong again! Validating an idea is actually really hard. I have been working on validation at OpinionX for close to a year now and here are the 3 mistakes I have made, learned from and have seen others make time and time again.
1) People lie to protect you
More often than not, founders walk away from customer conversations full of confidence that they have found their multi-million-dollar idea. The feedback from customers was great, they loved it! So why after spending several months building the product do they discover that nobody wants to buy what they built? Well, because people lie to protect you.
When you ask a question like "Do you like my idea?" you're just putting your ego on display. These customers can see the passion in your eyes and they don't want to break your little heart. They reply by saying things like "Sounds awesome!", "I can't believe no one else thought of this before" or "Good job taking the leap and working on your own idea." But what they might really mean is "It's nice to see that you're passionate about something", "maybe this could be useful for somebody else out there" or maybe even just "can you leave me alone now thanks". This is why the questions that you ask during these conversations are soooo important. Bad questions = bad answers.
The rule: Never talk about your idea.
If you don't talk about your idea then how are you supposed to validate it? The answer is to ask questions to customers around the topic of interest. Learn about their life, opinions and behaviour. By asking questions about these things and not revealing your idea, you can be sure that they are telling the truth. Let me give you an example:
Bad question: How much would you pay for an app that can help you divide a bill at the restaurant?
Good question: When you go to a restaurant with your friends, how do you usually pay?
Bad question: Do you think you and your friends would use this app?
Good question: Can you walk me through your process of paying the bill?
Dig into specific examples to learn about their real behaviour. Examples are the best way to separate what they'd like to think they would do and what they actually do. The 'Good questions' above are a great way to lead your interviewee towards objective examples that will help you learn about their true behaviour.
2) The Focusing Illusion
Another major mistake that founders make is that they suffer from the focusing illusion. The focusing illusion is when you talk to customers about a specific problem, the customer focuses on the problem that you're interested in and overlooks all the other problems they face. This focus means that they put a disproportionate emphasis on how important that problem is to them. They might even share your excitement in the moment for solving the problem as they are fixated on the annoyance it causes them.
Later, when they don't buy the solution you've built that solves the problem they told you about, you learn that this problem isn't actually a high priority right now. They have more urgent problems to contend with. In reality, this "hair on fire" problem they described turns out to be more of a mild inconvenience.
The rule: Ask customers to stack rank their problems
Stack ranking forces the customer to rank their problems by importance (ie. the problem you are solving versus various other problems they experience). Remember, you still don't want to reveal your idea to customers. The stack rank will tell you exactly how important your problem of interest really is relative to other problems they face. A high ranking problem is a good indicator that you are on the right track and that solving this problem will likely produce organic demand from customers. A low ranking problem likely means that you'll struggle to generate customer interest in your solutions and that you should look elsewhere. Rather than attempting this as a manual process over weeks of interviews, you can stack rank customer problems using our free Customer Problem Stack Ranking tool OpinionX.
3) False Commitments
"Let me know when you launch" and "I would definitely buy that", might sound like purchase commitments but they're often not. They're another variation of lies people tell to protect you. These conversations can leave you with a long list of people who you think are ready to buy from you, but in reality they never made a genuine commitment to convert to purchase.
You can diagnose false commitments by the number of times you walk away from a meeting saying "that went well" but without having arranged a follow-up meeting or secured a request to trial your prototype. Genuine commitments can be detected through questions from your interviewee like "what are the next steps?", "can we pre-order?" or "let me put you in touch with the rest of our team". If they aren't showing interest in getting their hands on what you're building, they're probably not that interested.
The rule: Ask for a genuine commitment
These customers conversations are not about selling, they're about learning. That being said, if someone says "I would definitely buy that," you have a duty to discover if this is true. One way to test the truth of a claim is to anchor the statement in reality. You can do this with a follow-up question asking for a commitment like "Great, should I put you down for a pre-order?" The mention of financial commitment is the quickest path to the truth. Don't be pushy, the objective is not really to make sales at this stage. Instead, you're giving them an opportunity to reject you so you can learn about the true level of purchase intent.
Kickstarting your idea validation
It's easy to spend months of customer discovery interviews and still feel like you haven't found a clear direction. Carrying out a Customer Problem Stack Rank before you jump into Zoom calls is a great way to identify the biggest problems your target customers face so that you can dig deeper into validated priorities during your interviews. A full Customer Problem Stack Ranking project can be as quick as a couple of hours. Check out our guide to Customer Problem Stack Ranking or create your stack rank for free on OpinionX.
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