Business-Customer Development - First Try

Last week we had our first interviews with business customers. This article briefly illustrates how we approached this topic and covers creating personas, contacting customers and holding the interviews.

The intend of this whole process is to learn more and more about the problem hypothesis we created. So instead of simply believing the stuff we came up with, we go out of the building and talk to people to verify it.

One of our solutions is a two sided platform and of course we decided to tackle the riskier part first and concentrated on the business side. The side where the actual money would come from.

 

So first we started by creating personas, each representing a certain type of company. By doing so you are able to identify the early adopters and know which of them to approach during the early stages.

After that we had to decide how to contact them. We chose good old e-mail and set up a template including:

Problem Statement - what are we trying to solve?

Solution Summary -  what we want to do about it.

Interview Proposal

5 Short Questions

In case they were not interested in an interview, we included some short questions, so we could get at least some information. The e-mail was sent to 14 different companies and two of them replied within two hours. Both were interested in answering our questions personally and so we made an appointment.

The interviews lasted 30 to 45 minutes and were based on five key questions, which are built around our problem-hypotheses. The prospects were really kind and even forwarded us the contact information of five new companies.

We de-briefed at the same day, which is about walking through the interviews and updating our personas and the problem hypothesis.

All in all it was a good start. However, we will try another approach for contacting future prospects, as three out of 14 is by far not an optimum. Furthermore having only three to five interviews within one week is actually too slow (Speed, Focus, Learning).

Here you can find further information:

leanstartup.pbworks.com

Ash Maurya