Talking to Humans: Success starts with understanding your customers

First, I want you to walk a day in your customer’s shoes and actually go out and buy a pillow. Second, I want you to observe people in the process of buying a pillow. And third, I want you to talk directly to them.”

The first step in trying to learn from the market is having an opinion about who your market actually is. I recommend thinking about a few categories: The typical customer you envision if you get traction with your idea Your early adopter, i.e. the people who will take a chance on your product before anyone else Critical partners for distribution,

Finally, when I asked them why they were buying a pillow, the folks over 40 seemed to be in replacement mode, while the folks under 40 seemed to be reacting to a life change. Two people were moving to a bigger house

entrepreneurs have a tendency to over-obsess about their product to the neglect of other business risks. They also tend to stay inside their heads for far too long. I urge you to be brave, get out of the building, and go talk to real human beings.

Your job is to think through the kinds of people who have the problem you are interested in solving. Sometimes they have a particular job, or a state of mind, live in a particular part of the world, or belong to a certain age group. Standard demographics might be useful, or they might be irrelevant. What are the commonalities across your customer b

Sometimes observation is as powerful as interviews

You need to begin with a core set of questions: Who do you want to learn from? What do you want to learn? How will you get to them? How can you ensure an effective session? How do you make sense of what you learn?

How does your customer buy? When do they buy? Why do they buy? Where do they buy?

Founders commonly obsess about product at the expense of understanding the customer or the business model. You need to work on it all, and you have to challenge your thinking. Behind your startup is a belief system about how your business will work. Some of your assumptions will be right, but the ones that are wrong could crater your business.

At this stage, don’t take any of your statistics too literally and don’t let any single number dominate your strategic thinking. Just as we’re not looking for statistical significance at this point, we also don’t want to start treating our results as if they are indisputable facts.