Customer discovery via user stories

The keep-it-simple approach

As a startup founder, you need to prepare the questions for the customer discovery interview. The way you formulate the questions influences the way customer provides the answers, giving you either data points or pipe dreams.

User stories

To improve the signal-to-noise ratio, you can formulate questions as “user stories”. The format is so versatile that I’ve taken the liberty to describe the process itself via user story:

Founder writes a user story, which represents a hypothesis about customer behavior. Founder presents the user story to potential customer, asking one simple question: “Did you go through this scenario in the past year?” If potential customer answers “Yes” to previous question, founder asks: “How many times?” to quantify the customer pain.

Example

Hypothesis

Customer invested in a crypto hedge fund at least once in the past year.

Story

Alice decides to make money in crypto. Alice decides that she wants somebody to manage her money, because she doesn’t want to learn trading. Alice builds a list crypto hedge funds using Google search. Alice chooses a crypto hedge fund based on personal criteria. Alice invests in a crypto hedge fund.

Question: “Did you go through this scenario in the past year? If yes — how many times?”

Notes

Story starts with a simple intro that sets the context.

Story probes Alice for her reasons to invest in a hedge fund: she may note while answering that she invested in a fund not because she doesn’t want to learn trading, but because she already tried it and lost money.

Story probes Alice for initial marketing channel that she used to express her need (in our case: Google search).

Story probes Alice for selection criteria, which she must specify herself.

Improvements

Founder should ask additional questions about the root causes, marketing channels & selection criteria if the customer doesn’t mention anything specific.

Founder should match the customer name in the story to ensure that the customer relates to it.

Conclusion

Asking the customer to validate the “user story” makes it easier for them to provide information. Also, the customer has the opportunity to correct or expand the story, mentioning specific channels & criteria that he used to make a buying decision.

Next steps

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