Customer Interviews
This is the recommended number of people to interview per session for effective customer discovery.
What is one person at a time?
The book recommends staying this many degrees of separation away from yourself when recruiting interview subjects.
What is one degree of separation?
Every new business idea is built upon a stack of these, according to the book.
What are assumptions?
The book recommends this communication method as by far the best approach for customer interviews.
What is talking in person?
Being told your idea is this positive adjective is not useful validation according to the book.
What is cool?
According to the book, you should ask customers to tell you this instead of asking them to speculate about the future.
What is a story about their past behavior?
This approach involves asking people for advice rather than trying to sell them something during initial outreach.
What is the advice approach?
Steve Blank's insight is that it's better to challenge these risky beliefs right at the start.
What are assumptions?
The book suggests these three approaches: walking in customer's shoes, observing, and this third method.
What is talking directly to customers?
The book emphasizes looking for this type of evidence that validates customer willingness to buy rather than speculation.
What is behavior?
This type of question starting with 'would you' should be avoided because humans are bad at predicting their own behavior.
What are speculative questions?
These types of events bring people with shared interests together and can be great for recruiting interview subjects.
What are conferences and meetups?
The pillow entrepreneurs identified this as their biggest risk regarding new graduates as customers.
What is that new graduates don't spend money on quality pillows?
When taking notes during interviews, the book recommends bringing this type of person to help you stay focused on the conversation.
What is a note taker?
For expensive corporate products, you can try to get customers to do this in advance or sign a non-binding letter of intent.
What is buy or commit to purchase?
The book recommends doing this before showing customers your product mockups or prototypes.
What is asking about their behavior and challenges first?
Steve Blank used to call people and tell them this person said they were one of the smartest people in the industry.
Who is The person who referred him to the person he called
The book recommends prioritizing assumptions that are both highly important and this other characteristic
What is highly uncertain?
This technique involves repeating back what someone said to get clarification or a more sophisticated answer.
What is parroting back or misrepresenting to confirm?
The book recommends setting up this type of situation where subjects think they are actually purchasing something to test willingness to pay.
What is a real transaction scenario?
This famous quote attributed to Henry Ford illustrates why customers shouldn't design your product for you.
What is 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses'?
The book suggests creating this type of online content to attract interview subjects by positioning yourself as researching the problem space.
What is a blog or landing page? (PS Linkedin works fine)
One of the book's most critical questions: 'What assumptions do we have that, if proven wrong, would cause this business to do this?'
What is fail?
he researchers at Meetup.com use this metaphor to help interview subjects get into story mode: 'Imagine you are filming this of your life.'
What is the documentary?
According to the 'Truth Curve' in the book, you don't really know the absolute truth about your product until this happens.
What is it being live and people truly using it while you make real money?