How to talk to users

Talking to users and building your project are the two most important things that will push the growth of your idea forward. But how can we talk to users without being too forward, without trying to sell to them, and genuinely trying to help them? The following steps are somewhat of a "talk to your customers" bible that you should try to memorize and practice as much as you can. This process will yield the best results in understanding exactly what features to build next in order to get to Product-Market Fit, and ultimately a successful startup project.

Some general strategies:

• Avoid talking about your idea, and spend more time talking about the user's life.
• Spend less time talking, and more time listening and taking notes.
• Be specific, dive deeper, and ask "why" the user has done things the way they have.
• Start with users who might have this problem, and with time, try to narrow this list down into people who would be your best first customer (e.g. ideally it is a big problem for them, they tried to fix the problem themselves somehow, and are willing to spend money to solve this problem).
• Remember that in-person conversations > video chat > phone chat > email/text chat in terms of the value that you and your potential customer will get out of this.

Follow this conversation rubric and spend 20-30 minutes with each person you talk to:

1. What is the hardest part about doing X? (where X is the thing that you’re trying to solve).
2. Tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem.
3. Why was this hard?
4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?
5. What don’t you love about the solutions that you’ve already tried?
6. Ask any other questions that you may have in order to validate your main risks and hypotheses identified from above.

Tying it back together:

Talk to as many people as you can, and try to find common patterns between users that might solve their problem - find that and build that.