The 15min Customer Discovery Call

When you’re first thinking about starting a business, there are many things to consider.

How will I make money? Who will build the website for me? When can I quit my job? Will I have to post cringey TikToks to get rich? What will my mom think?

All are worthy of ~some~ thought. But the most important thing to ask is who will actually pay me if I build this? Is their problem really painful enough to be worth paying me money if I can solve it?

Many forget to ask.

Some make it past building the website, quitting the job, posting the cringey TikToks, and telling mom before really thinking about it (that was me in my first startup). It’s hard to make money that way.

The most important thing to do early on is to deeply, deeply understand your target customer and the problem(s) they’re trying to solve. Ideally understand them better than anyone else on the planet. Better than they understand themselves.

How does one even begin to do this? By doing customer discovery interviews. Many of them. Here’s how:

What is a Customer Discovery Interview?

A customer discovery interview is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a structured conversation with a potential target customer to try and understand their needs, paint points, and behaviors.

Your ultimate goal in conducting these is to validate your assumptions about the problem and its potential solutions before actually developing a product or solution. Otherwise you run the cumbersome risk of building something no one really needs… and that’s how businesses die.

Specifically, your goal should be to find as many people in your target audience as possible (5 at the minimum, ideally closer to 20, more is better) and achieve the following thru these interviews:

• Identify Problems: Understand the challenges customers face and whether these problems are significant enough to warrant solving.

• Validate Assumptions: Test your hypotheses about the target market, customer personas, and product-market fit.

• Gather Insights: Learn about customers' workflows, existing solutions they use, and their willingness to adopt new ones.

• Reduce Risk: Avoid building products that lack market demand by basing decisions on real-world feedback.

What to Ask In A 15-min Customer Interview?

When you’re interviewing a potential customer, the questions really depend on how much time you have — obviously if you have an hour to talk, then you can go super in-depth. But the longer the interview, the less likely you’ll be able to convince someone to take the call, most people simply don’t have the time.

That’s why I like to start with a super short list of 4 questions that can be answered in 15 min or less, then use them to dig deeper.

The 4-question, 5-minute discovery interview:

I’ve found this to be the fewest possible questions you can ask to gain sufficient insight. It’s concise enough to avoid muddying the waters and leave most of the talking to them.

Often times I’ve found if your questions are too specific you can lead the interviewee into giving you answers you want to hear. The goal again is to mitigate risk, and the best way to do this is to be as objective as possible. This framework helps me do that.

The ideal format here for me is a 15min interview.

Ideally over Zoom, but a phone call will suffice. 15min is short enough that most people can’t say no, long enough to at least get a bit of insight. And if you can’t do that it’s short enough to send via email and ask for async answers if you have to.

Other Customer Interview Tips & Tools

Now an interview this brief won’t give you all the deep, specific answers to questions around your product. But it will give you a starting point.

It will show you who your customer is, how they spend their time, outline their top priority problems, and give clues as to what they think would be worth paying for to solve them.

When we pivoted Uptrends we probably did 25 interviews just like this. You do enough of them with your suspected target market and you start to hear the same things.

We ultimately came up with 10-12 new business ideas from this process that were different from our original hypothesis, and ruled out all but one of them — I wrote quite a bit about that here and here.

So I guess outside the interview itself there are some other things to think about:

• How do I find people to interview for my startup

• Once I’ve done 10, 20, 30 interviews, what do I do with the data?

• How do I know when to pivot vs. proceed?

• What about subsequent, deeper, longer-form interviews?

These are all great questions, and I intend to write about each of them and come back and hyperlink them here eventually. For now, here are some great books and resources for learning more about customer discovery interviews in more depth:

• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick (personal fav)

• Dont Make Me Think by Steve Krug (another fav, more on UX)

• Talking to Humans by Giff Constable

• ILT’s Lean Startup Course for Midwest founders

If you glean anything from this post, I hope it’s that you should start by finding out if what you’re building is worth money, before you build it. To do that, you need to talk to people, and you need to ask them the right questions, but not take up so much of their time that they won’t meet you in the first place. Hope this helps.

Peace
Ramsey