Interviewing customers is a bit of art and a bit of science. And so we're gonna examine this in the context of value innovation. And think about how you can use what you know about value innovation to interview customers to either validate some ideas or turn you on to new ideas. We're gonna step through a seven step process of interviewing customers for the purpose of new venture creation and the premise is that you should think like a journalist. We want you to go down the path of seeking to learn, to seeking to gain a better understanding of the customer and the outcome of that is a much more refined understanding of your customer profile and their needs and wants and how your product or service may match those. It starts with a customer profile, of really understanding the jobs, the pains, the gains of the customers that you are trying to serve. We also want to get some insights and some relative ranking within each of those elements. What are the big jobs and the less compelling jobs. What are the major pains, and the less major pains. And what are the primary gains, and the ones that are secondary. We want from there to create an interview outline that we know as the entrepreneur, the ones doing the interviews, of what do you want to learn? We want to derive some of these interview questions from the customer profile, so we want to leverage the secondary research that we've already done. We wanna go through and include some of what we already believe we know about the market, and about the customer that we have already analyzed. We want to go in and understand the most important parts of each of these three elements as we're examining customers view of the interview. To conduct the interview, we want to focus on the structure process and not veer too far away from that. So we want to keep within this mantra of the jobs, the pains, and the gains. We want to capture outlets. We want to map out what we're hearing from customers, and begin with an empty profile so not trying to bias them in any given area. So again, somewhat of an open ended interview. We want to capture model learnings. And we want to write down these insights. So taking a lot of notes along the way and asking why questions as we go. We want to review the interviews after each one. Are we doing a proper level of reviewing what we're hearing and based on that, based on what we are hearing from customers, are we getting the type of information that's valuable. If not, we might need to revise some of our questions. We might need to probe a bit deeper, or add new questions or if we're spending time on questions that aren't really generating any real value, we'l remove them and spend our time asking questions that do matter. We also wanna know did we learn what we intended to learn as we were doing our interviews. And then we interview more customers. We advise to begin with a minimum of ten that you run this cycle of being able to go out and based on the interview outline that you've developed, influenced by your customer analysis, you conduct those interviews you capture that information. You see are there take aways based on your review that you can really incorporate into your product or service and ultimate business. And if yes, you continue down that path to search for deeper patterns. Once you've gathered all ten of these interviews, what's similar? What's different? What's surprising? Are there specific contexts or categories, that everyone of a certain gender says this? That people of a certain age category say this? People of a certain income say the other. So are there pockets or segments within the segments that we can learn from and see some similarities that might help us further refine the customers that we would want to target? We want to work to synthesize that information, we wanna think about customer segments as I mentioned or their commonalities amongst separate groups of people that we are interviewing. We want to write down these assets, write down these insights. And we, again, want to think like a journalist. So we're able to go through and repeat this process. Now the matter of ten is simply a starting point. Some experts, including the National Science Foundation, when they're challenging their researchers to go out and explore the commercial potential of products, require or suggest a hundred face to face interviews. So when we say ten, or when we say 100, these are not surveys that you are administering online. These are not email based surveys. These are not phone calls. These are in-person, face to face interviews within your target customer base. The element again of how many, and my mind is based more so on what, when do patterns emerge. If you talk with 20 people and they believe that your price is too high, and your feature set is too minimal, and they all believe that, I would probably believe that, and begin to rethink my price point and rethink my feature set, rather than asking another 20 people the exact same thing if I believe I already have good customer input on what that answer is. Also realize that this isn't a one shot element. You may interview customers, you may run the cycle, you then may refine your product offering, your product features, your price points, and then interview a new set of individuals. So in that way you continue to do this until you get some element of synthesis and understanding of the market and what their perception is of your product or service.
