Customer interviews is a skill you must master. The app experiment — 03
Introduction
What’s one of the most powerful ways to keep persevering? For me, it’s to have someone observe your work.
Last week I was wondering whether there is any point in writing these updates altogether. As far as I could see there weren’t many readers here according to my stats and nobody seems to be really interested in what I’m doing. I decided that I need to get a little bit of exposure to get myself motivated. I wrote a post in the Flutter Dev channel on Reddit. To my great surprise — there were quite a few responses.
To be honest, I didn’t expect the responses to be that positive, but folks on Reddit seem to be really good guys :) I also asked for the advice that they could give to me.
Evening-Peanut8997 recommended for me to slow down and actually understand what I’m doing:
Why should you talk to anyone?
The above-mentioned comment got me thinking. I reached out to Evening Peanut and he/she advised me to interview some of the potential customers before I invest any more effort into actually building some solution. I, as well as many coders, am susceptible to getting to the coding segment as fast as I can. Coding is our comfort zone and it makes sense that we want to get to this part to feel like we’re doing something. However, this can also be a grave danger, because we might build something that is not needed at all. So this “wake-up call” was definitely something that I needed.
I’m not going to repeat the ideas that Eric Ries talks about in his talk, but he gives many examples as to how certain mistakes could be avoided if we just talk to the customer before we build anything.
Looking for interviewees
My approach for finding the people to interview was simple. Many of the competitor’s apps have their own social media following. I decided that I would look for clues as to who’s actually using the app by looking for praising or negative comments below their posts. This would usually look something like this:
So, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to assume that you can contact these people for potential interviews. Also, an added bonus of skimming through these comments is that sometimes you can already see what people love about the app — like in the example above.
As you might have guessed, finding people that are using the app is the easy part. The hard part is getting any useful information out of them.
Here’s how I would “slide into DMs” of people:
And, to my surprise, a lot of people actually replied! God bless them:)
Of course, after this, I had no idea what to do next…
Gathering the questions
The initial google search resulted in a few articles as to how you should proceed with these interviews. I drew my inspiration for the questions here, here, and here. The last article, I think, is particularly useful and has a lot of examples.
It’s hard to say that my interviews are interviews as is, they were more of a questionnaire. To be honest, I haven’t tried to actually conduct a “personal” interview. I thought that this is too much hassle and nobody would agree to this.
So I quickly built my first questionnaire in Google Forms and started sending it out to people. Around 90% of the people replied to my messages and around 30–40% of those who replied actually completed the form. This is great, if you ask me, considering these are just people who are volunteering to help.
Here’s what a part of my questionnaire looked like
My interview tips
There is a lot of great advice in the articles I’ve mentioned above. As for me — I’ve learned that the following tips are the best:
- Your questions should be open-ended and not biased. This is imperative. You won’t get too many helpful replies if you’re going to tell people you interview what to answer. This seems obvious, but I wrote some multiple-choice questions myself which resulted only in more questions and more confusion.
- Try to have interviews personal if you can. I know that this contradicts what I did. As I previously wrote, I didn’t conduct the interviews personally and I think that’s bad. If you send out forms to fill out as I did, you will probably get a lot of answers similar to these:
Now, this is in no way the fault of the people that were answering the form. As they say — the quality of the answers depends on the quality of your questions. In a personal interview, you would have the opportunity to expand on such answers by asking additional questions.
Conclusion
I have to admit that even two weeks ago I was skeptical in regard to doing interviews. I was hesitant to reach to people mostly because I thought nobody would be interested in helping out. Boy, was I wrong.
I changed my mind as to the value of conducting interviews as well. I believe they provide tremendous insight. Hearing out even a few of your potential customers will yield significant value in decisions pertaining to product development. I’m already gathering a list of people that I will contact further and I plan on continuously improving my interviewing tools and skills.
Last but not least, there is one more benefit to this process. While you are interviewing people you will establish relationships with participants whether you want it or not. These relationships can have a significant impact on the development, improvement, and growth of your product in the early stages of your launch. To me, such relationships are precious.
