Customer Development & Interviews

Lean Startup Machine AccraMay 16-18

Lenny Ayensu-Simmons@lennykweku

Business is an exchange of your product and your customer’s value (cash, batter)

Your customer is the one who is willing and has the ability to use your solution to meet his or her need.

Customers goes through a series of process before making purchase

Customer discovery

Customer Validation

Customer Creation

Company building

Problem Solution Fit

Proposed MVP

Proposed Funnel

Product Market Fit

Business Model

Sales and Marketing roadmap

Scale Execution

Scale Organization

Scale Operations

Customer Development Model

Creating a detailed customer profile will help in problem validation

Using the customer interview Process to validate customer’s problem (need)

Purpose

Person

Place

Customer Interview checklist

Customer intelligence is derived in data recording and storage

• Always qualify the person you’re talking to and make sure it fits your customer hypothesis

• The best question to start is always, “Tell me the story of the time you did…”

• Never ask a question that starts with the word “would,” ie. “Would you do X?” or

• “Would you pay for this?” These are hypothetical questions that produce inaccurate data

• Avoid Confirmation Bias by asking your team, “Could anyone disagree with this question?” The answer must always be yes.

• Avoid Observer Bias by with-holding the facts of what you’re testing or building (otherwise customers will reverse engineer the questions).

• Even better is if customers don’t even know it’s an interview.

7 Bonus Tips for Customer Development Interviews

Competitive analysis can be done once problem is validated

Tweak solution to meet customers need after problem is validated and competitors studied

THANK YOU

Lenny Ayensu-Simmons@lennykweku