? PAUL: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/PAUL_TIRBAN)
It’s Paul.
? FLORIN: (HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/FLORIN_MURESAN)
It’s Florin. What are we grinding today?
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Hey, Florin, back to our validation series. And for the listeners, if you just drop to this episode and you’re new to the series, to get more context, listen to our episode with interest validation. Continuing from there, Florian, now, if you remember, I had that list with 300 mothers which are interested in my idea of doing a medical app for getting advice for your kids. Now, I’m a software developer. I know that I need to talk with people. Everybody’s telling me, talk with your customers, with your possible customers. But I know to write code, that’s easy for me. Now, I know from your five phase validation method that in the next one, which is the current one that we are talking in the episode, I need to put questions to these.
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People. yeah. And I guess you’re asking, what should I ask?
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Yeah, because I’m not comfortable with asking and even more asking the right questions.
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Yeah, that’s the key here because you could ask any question that you want, but some of them will lead you to false positives. Some of them will lead you on a very dark path that you will never recover from. Some questions, if you ask them, you will get fun responses, fun replies. You will feel good about having a conversation, and then you go home and you’ve learned nothing. So the idea is how can you ask questions in such way that you will validate true intent of that certain customer and their true desires? And people, they can never tell you what they want or what they need. They can never say that. They can never place it into words because if they could do that, then you would be out of a job as a business developer or as an entrepreneur because if they could realize what they need, they would build it themselves. But you build it for them to serve them because you find better ways of helping them out with the problem that they have. They can’t do it themselves. That’s why they can never tell you, Well, you know what I would like?
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I would like this. And then you just go and build that and you’re super successful. Because if it were that easy, everybody would be super successful.
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I totally agree with this. So can you give me some specific example? What should I ask those person from my list?
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Yeah. So the people from your list, they signed up because they had a specific problem that they need solving, or they have a certain need that is currently unfulfilled. In your case, there’s a bunch of parents who don’t know exactly where they should find really solid advice related to how they raise their children or how they offer them any medical assistance in cases of fever or other or other problems that they might experience. Of course, everybody knows that they would go to the internet to look for advice, but you shouldn’t be so cocky about thinking that all of those mothers go to the internet to seek out advice because many mothers these days, they know that internet advice is crap and they don’t believe it anymore. So in order to get out of your own head and really start seeing what’s out there in the world and you already have 300 people that you could ask questions, these are the questions you should be asking. What do you think about problem? Now in your case.
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That would be, what do you think about the mothers which are not finding validated medical advice for their kids?
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Yeah. And if you think about it more, you could even formulate it in such way that, what do you think about getting medical advice for your children?
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Okay.
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What do you think about this? How often do you interact with this need of knowing how to get medical advice for your children? How often do you feel that you need this? Have you ever talked to other people about receiving medical advice for your children or helping them out or anything that’s related to this stuff? So this is usually why I just say have you talked to other people about problem? Because it all depends on the problem that you’ve identified and that they can relate to. Then there’s also, are you actively looking for a solution to bypass the problem? In this case, in getting medical advice, one of the solutions may be to look out to the internet to see blogs and forums and personal ideas. Or another way to bypass it, you could learn from the mothers, would be that instead of going to the doctor themselves, they would just rather ask a friend who’s also a mother and who recently went and sort out medical advice.
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Basically, I need to see what is their opinion about the problem, how often do they get the problem, if there are other mothers that they are talking about with this person about the problem, so other person, mothers or something like that. I f they have some a shortcut that helped them to currently solve with the codes, the problem that bypassing that you’re referring at.
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Yeah, because your clients will always be very creative, even if you believe that or not. They will always have different ideas that they have on how they can bypass the problem. Because as humans, this is what we tend to do. Instead of facing something that heads on when we can’t do that, we just think, What’s the shortest route to take? How can we bypass this? How can we skip around? How can we bend these rules to get to the certain thing that we need? And if you ask them, you will get so much great and valuable insight which can totally shape the next steps of you building your business.
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Let’s say I pull these questions. I have valuable feedback that I have it in notes written now.
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Are.
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There any other questions that you would advise me and also the listeners that they can ask?
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Yeah. Now, these are also very important and some of them might be even more important than the other ones because two of these questions will validate the magnitude of the problem. Does it keep you up at night?
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What does it mean if it keeps you up at night?
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Do you always find yourself thinking that you need faster, greater, or cheaper, or maybe on the spot, like, if I need this right now, I need to get this right now. Do you often find yourself thinking about it? So as a mother, if you have certain issues, something scares you about your child’s health, how do you relate to that? So let’s say that your child has a fever right now. Can you really sleep that night? What would you like to happen? Just listen to the answers. You don’t have to imply any answer, but maybe the answers that you will hear is like, No, I really can’t sleep at night. Because in this case, it might actually be this. It might be literally that they can’t sleep at night thinking about how they can get the medical advice. So that’s why in some countries there are hot lines on which you can call to solve this problem. And you should know if it keeps them up at night. And if it does, and they usually find themselves thinking about solving this problem, then you’ve got a very clear market. And now there’s another one that’s important.
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Is it one of your top three problems right now?
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Okay, so if the problem is now in the top of priorities that I need to solve. Yeah.
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And for you, it might make sense because your target customer has recently just become a mother and that completely changed her life. It changed, especially if it’s for the first time, it completely changed her life and disrupted her day to day life and everything like that. So you might have a really huge chance of being in her top three problems.
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Right now. If each of the problem is not in the top three problems that my user are having, should I found the top three? Basically, what are the problems more important than the one that I’m trying to solve in order to get the entire context?
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Especially if you know that this is the target market that you need to serve, then maybe you will not work on your 10th idea, the idea that’s ranking only on the 10th position in their heads. Maybe you can find a third or a second problem that they always have, and maybe you can focus on finding solutions to that other problem which is in the top three.
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Actually, it’s interesting because with this question, I might focus on the problem that I’m trying to solve, which is a small problem for them, but seeing that the majority of the users that I’m trying to serve are actually having another problem that I didn’t know about, but just asking them what are their top three problems right now that they’re trying to solve and I actually found a better problem to solve.
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This.
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Might be very good for you. If you ever go and find this type of information, you are working on something that’s ranked only on the 10th position, but you’ve also stumbled on something that’s one of their top three problems right now, maybe you should build what’s in the top three problems because you already have 300 people interested for which you will solve a really interesting thing and that might lead you to a much faster route to you receiving money in your bank account.
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Interesting. Does it matter for me if anyone else tried to solve that problem? Should I ask this?
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Yes. This will yield a lot of valuable data, so it will not necessarily tell you if there’s a direct competitor, but there are many direct competitors and you should totally look out for indirect competitors. Even if the only piece of information you will get is, Yeah, so the way I’m solving this right now is through an Excel file because it’s usually Excel files. But there may be some other thing that you have never thought about which will give you so much valuable information into your market and how they think and how they relate to the problem that it will totally help you build a better business and a better product for those customers. And the question is, to ask them is, is there anyone out there trying to solve this for you right now? And trust me, if there is, your customers will know about them. So when you pitch to investors, you will always say, No, we have no competition. We have never had competitors. There are no competitors. We are the only smart guys in this room. Only we thought about doing this.
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And outside of this room, not only the smart guys in this room.
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Yeah. Your customers will know them. And if your customers don’t know them, that’s even better for you. And that’s something that you could totally brag about to your investors because then you would clearly show them that your customers are unaware of any other solutions, which is a really great point to be at because… Let’s see, for example, we went into the social media space with my company because we’ve realized that nobody knew what the buffer was or what the hood suite was. And we were like, Is that even possible? Because those guys have been around for as long as the internet has been around and there are still people who don’t know about them. And that creates a very interesting opportunity. So our user base, they never knew what the buffer was, what the hood suite was, they never knew about Meet Edgar or a lot of the platforms that we know about. They were completely blind to all of those solutions. And when we came with our solution, it was a first for them.
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Okay, that’s really nice because actually they had the problem, but they didn’t know that someone already solved it for them because they didn’t reach them. So the opportunity for you there was to reach them faster and actually.
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Be.
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The first.
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It’s really good to find a market where there isn’t any Uber yet because this is the thing. And the ride sharing thing, you have Uber and blah, blah, blah and others and you will not necessarily want to compete because everybody knows them and it’s hard. But if you go to a market where actually the customers, they don’t know who else is trying to solve this for them, that’s a huge opportunity for you to grab all of those customers because you can be a lot faster than they are.
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Interesting. Any other ideas of what should I ask the people from my list?
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Yeah. Is this the problem, getting medical advice in this case? Is it something that you started thinking about every waking hour, or every day, or every week, or every month, or every year? And according to this answer, you might have an idea on how your retention will look like. Because if this is something that they think about in every waking hour, then you’ll have huge retention. If it’s something like an app that reminds you to make certain checks to your car which only occur once a year, then that app will not have a lot of retention unless you have a huge fleet of cars.
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Interesting. Actually, the answer to this question will impact also the product.
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Yeah, it.
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Will definitely impact the product. Because, for example, in this example that they will do the check up every year, it might be a solution to just create a reminder for them that they will pay to be reminded every year that they need to do that check up.
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Exactly. And the only ones who will pay for this are those who have this problem every year at different dates for different assets.
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Yeah, because if I’m trying for this person to build an app that try to get them every hour to check this, they won’t do it because it’s not something that they’re thinking about hourly.
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Yeah.
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Interesting.
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Now that you will have answers for all of these questions that you’ve just asked.
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I was just thinking now that I might be in the position which I have basically a lot of answers, but it’s blurry. I’m thinking a little bit like, okay, I need to process all this feedback in order to see if the problem is more clear for me or if it’s actually getting more confusing.
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And trust me on this, it can actually become a lot more confusing. So you usually, it becomes much clearer. But we’ve recently stumbled upon a case building one of our products where it actually became a lot more confusing after getting all the answers because instead of getting one problem that we needed to solve, according to different use cases and types of customers that we’ve interviewed, we actually stumbled upon about four different products. So instead of building a product, we could now build four different products and all of them would work, hypothetically.
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How would I know that the problem is well defined and I can move on? Is there something that I can check? Can I?
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Yeah. It’s actually what we’ve also used in the confusing case to define different problems, different types of customers, and different possible solutions is like for each group, let’s say that in your case is just one group to simplify the discussion. Let’s say there is just one group. The idea is do all of them feel it? Do all of them feel that problem, feel that need? And do they feel completely different things about the problem? Because maybe all of them feel the need or the problem, but all of them think completely differently about all of the other aspects that you’ve just asked. So if all of them feel like they need medical advice, but all of them are telling you completely different things, then maybe it’s not very clear for you at the moment. It could be clearer, maybe it could be clearer, but maybe it will also be confusing. So you really need to think about that and keep it in mind whenever you’re thinking about building the solution. Because if everybody relates to the problem in the same way, that’s like your golden ticket. Because then it’s easy. Otherwise, you might have a really solid problem that you should fix, but maybe the solution will not be one solution.
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Maybe there will be five solutions, or maybe the solution will have to be presented in very different ways to very different people.
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Let’s assume that for this specific group, the problem is clear for all of them. They feel the same. What would you advise me to do?
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I would advise you to move on to the next phase.
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Okay. So the next phase will be really thinking about coming up with a solution. But we can still discuss about one more thing here. You could even ask them if there’s one thing you could change about the way you, in your case, get medical advice, especially if some of them already get medical advice in some form or another. If there’s one thing you could change about the way you get medical advice, what would it be? And this is the best question to ask in an already defined market or in a crowded market because the answer to this will give you insight into the solution that you should build.
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It’s interesting because we started in the first phase with the interest, we validated that. Then with all these questions that you were telling me about, I defined more clear the problem. But now also you’re helping me how to ask the users so that they give me valuable feedback that will actually transform in features that I might not have even thought about them.
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Exactly.
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Yeah. I’m using my future customers to help me build the solution for them and not me trying to guess the features that they would need.
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Exactly. Now, about the solution, I think we will discuss in another episode in which we’ll move to the next phase also. But if you think there are some ideas that we should share with the people because I’m thinking, for example, that we were saying that we should ask them, we should discuss with them. And probably since we’re doing the startup Express podcast, it would be nice when you discuss with them to buy them a coffee.
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Buy them a coffee, definitely. Like you said, you could even go ahead and buy us a coffee. If you go to our website, you can see the Buy Me a Coffee link and you could also buy me a coffee for doing all of these great episodes for you, free of cost.
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Yeah, but remember, it’s important to talk with your future customers and in these interactions to be sincere with them in order to try to solve their problem and not sell them something that won’t help them.
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Yeah. And actually, in one of my presentations, I didn’t even touch upon this aspect, but now that you’ve started mentioning the importance of being honest and really getting to meet the people, meet them for coffee or tea. As I always say, never alcohol, never anything to do with alcohol, or otherwise you will ruin all of the results that you get from this test. But if you do get them to a nice cafe or tea place or tea house, sit down with the people, be honest, ask your questions. Don’t try to get them to buy into your idea. This is not the place for that. This is not the face for it. And most definitely, since you have a one on one interaction, try to see their body language, try to pick up their interest by thinking about it, and try to see the look in their eyes when you ask them different questions. Try to see how passionate they are about giving you their answers. Try to see if they’re like, I don’t know. I’m in medical advice, man. You ask me if I try to talk to anybody about it, I mean, why would I?
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It’s not that interesting. You know what I mean? If you already get this, you should write this down. You should keep a note that even though the person did reply to this question, they weren’t very interested in replying to this question. They were bored. Or maybe if I ask a certain question like, Does it keep you up at night and you see a huge glow in the eyes? Oh, my God. It really keeps me up at night. I can’t stop thinking about anything else. This is what I need.
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So unspoken feedback.
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Yeah, unspoken feedback. You need to look at different queues like body language. Even from their posture, you can see if they’re interested in the discussion that you’re having, or if they’re just laid back and don’t care, then maybe they don’t care about you solving the problem either, or maybe they’re just tired. So sometimes you can also have that. But if they’re really passionate about the problem and this need and they really want a solution, you will learn that from their body language, from eye contact, from other things. And because you need eye contact and you need the body language, you should also try to inspire as much honesty as you can and not be like one of those shady salesman who try to get you to buy something that you don’t need. So you really need to make them feel very confident in talking about this to you, I mean with you. But to do this, the best way to do it is through honesty.
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What I also saw in the interaction that I had with my customers in the previous startup was that it’s important to follow up and to thank them. Just saying them, your feedback was very valuable and that feedback actually got to this part of the product. Thank you for that. Because in this way you will be loyalty with them and you will get them as customers for a longer period of time.
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Exactly. And even if you don’t have anything built yet, sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. But if you don’t, then you can tell them that you’ve just gained valuable insight from this interaction and you’re super happy and hope that if it’s the case in the future, that you can definitely talk to them about this again. And they will usually say yes, of course. And then you have their permission to contact them later on when you have your wire frames and your product. And these people will keep talking to you about this problem because you’ve shown genuine interest in their problems, in their need, and in their lives. And if you’re not sure about any of this, just read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s one of the best books to read and it will definitely change your life, especially if you’re trying to pursue a life business. That’s what you need to know to inspire honesty, to get honest feedback and to be honest with people and really understand how you can win people to your side. And it’s not very hard to do. Just letting people know that you’ve gained valuable insight in their time was very valuable to you.
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That will make them super excited, super happy. And next time you will call them, they will answer and they can’t wait to meet up with you again.
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And I think with all these valuable feedback that I got with your help, we can in a next episode to move to the next phase since you are talking about product and wire frames. So e are now in a position in which I think we can move to the next phase that we will discuss in the next episode. But until there, if it’s something that you would still like to mention, or if not, we can continue the discussion on our Facebook group, Startup Express. So drop there your ideas about how you think about these questions. If there are other questions which work great for you.
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We can actually do maybe many episodes, but at least one episode where I can mention a book or two on asking questions because I’ve actually found an amazing book on how to ask questions to get the answers that we’ve just talked about in this episode. And that’s one of the best books. If I were ever to write a book, I would have written that book. But if I would have written it, it wouldn’t be that good. So the author made a terrific job at writing the best book on how you can ask questions that will be helpful for customer development. I’ve never read anything like it.
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That sounds great. We should do an episode.
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Yeah.
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Totally. Okay. Talk to you next.
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Time, guys. Until the.
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