First-time founders skip customer conversations.
Second-time founders prioritize them. Why?
Because talking to customers used to be an afterthought.
Now it’s a weekly practice.
At BuddiesHR, I try to talk to customers EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Here’s why:
1. Discover pain points from real conversations are critical to understanding the pain points of your ICP.
Every time I talk to a customer, I ask these questions:
↳ What is your biggest growth opportunity for the coming year?
↳ What are the main challenges to achieving this goal?
↳ What’s stopping you from realizing the full value of BuddiesHR?
↳ What would you like to do with BuddiesHR that you can’t do today?
2. Determine product-market fit
You cannot determine if you have PMF without talking to customers.
Sure, the data will tell you a lot...
But the raw emotion of a customer, their tone of voice, and their enthusiasm (or lack thereof) cannot be captured quantitatively.
If they light up when describing your product, you may be on the right track.
If they just don’t care, keep searching for PMF.
3. Learn what customers ACTUALLY want
Something crazy happens when you hear someone describe their pain tolerance about a product or feature.
I literally ask, “How upset would you be if we killed this feature tomorrow?”
The answers will surprise you.
Some of the features I thought were killer, customers had ZERO attachment to.
Others, shocked us with how passionate users were about it.
Without talking to customers, I would have NO IDEA what to build.
TAKEAWAY:
There’s no substitute for real conversations with customers.
Understanding their pain points is essential.
The deeper your understanding, the better you’ll be at building products they ACTUALLY want.
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