Three Life Lessons I Learned from Customer Interviews
Accept– Reflect– Apply
As an entrepreneur, we need to keep talking to our potential or existing customers to validate our ideas or products.
- Like me, you might be doing customer interviews for the first time.
- Like me, you would have read many books and articles on conducting good customer interviews.
- Like me, your favorite book on this is “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick.
I got this book reference from two entrepreneurs, which gave me enough data that this book is popular. Hence, I stated earlier that this must be your favorite book, too.
This book has so many valuable nuggets for doing a good customer interview. I have read and reread this book many times, but still, I am guilty of not following the advice in the book and sabotaging some of my customer interviews terribly.
I don’t feel too bad about it as I think this is part of my learning process, so eventually, one day, I will get there and be able to do a perfect customer interview following all the nuggets given in the book.
You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and by falling over. — Richard Branson
In this article, I will share three instances where I asked questions classified as bad questions or approaches in the book “The Mom Test”.
I think I got carried away in my conversations and asked some leading questions, which gave me false or useless information in return.
In the first instance, I was interviewing a teacher.
He worked in a not-for-profit organization, teaching spoken English to students from rural backgrounds. I asked him about the key areas of teaching spoken English. He mentioned the student’s inability to form sentences in English.
I should have asked follow-up questions related to his response and gotten his thoughts on problems with pronunciation (which is my product area). Instead, I introduced my product and asked his opinion about the issues due to mispronunciations in speaking good English
I quickly realized my mistake after 10 seconds, but the damage was already done now. I got the answer as expected. He told me all the good things about my product and agreed that pronunciation is a big problem in Spoken English.
In the book “The Mom Test”, there is a list of bad and good questions for a customer interview.
The First question in the list is:
“Do you think it’s a good idea?”: Awful question.
You will only hear their opinions.
In the second instance, again, I was talking to a teacher.
After a few minutes, I saw she did not fit my target customer profile. I should have wrapped up the conversation. But again, in my enthusiasm to do the product pitch, I shared further information about the product and the target customers.
After this, all the responses from the teacher’s side came back with the same information that I accidentally revealed a few minutes before. She kept giving the answers that were in sync with my information.
According to the book “The Mom Test”, It was all Bad Data.
There are three types of bad data:
1. Compliments
2. Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future)
3. IdeasIf you’ve mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings.
The interview was not going in a good direction as the person was not falling into my ideal customer profile. On top of that, I turned that bad interview into worse by sharing my product details.
The third instance happened in a networking meeting.
I was talking to another entrepreneur. We were sharing each other’s product ideas and doing some brainstorming.
After listening to my product pitch, he started asking some follow-up questions.
Instead of encouraging him to ask more questions about my product, I just interrupted him and deflected the conversation to his product.
It was an abrupt stop from my side, partly because of the time limit for our meeting. I wanted to give him a chance to speak about his product, too.
It could be due to my discomfort in hearing criticism about my product.
That day, I missed a golden opportunity to get feedback about my product.
According to the book “The Mom Test”, we need to learn to love bad news.
It’s solid learning and is getting us closer to the truth.
It will take me many more interviews before I can thoroughly learn the art of asking good customer interview questions. But I am optimistic that I will get there eventually. All these blunders are part of my learning process.
These three instances have taught me three essential life lessons
Accept– Reflect– Apply
- Accept your mistakes.
- Reflect on your mistakes.
- Apply the learnings from your mistakes.
