Talking to users

At ContactOut we spoke to perhaps more than 300 users. Y Combinator stresses this as the most important part of building a startup,

Because you need to understand the user’s problems, their workflow, and if your business idea is a good solution to the user’s problems.

Do they even care?

So I would reach out to recruiters who are ContactOut’s target audience with an email like:

Hey, we’re building ContactOut.

It’s a sourcing tool that provides contact data and uses AI to help you write and personalize emails.

I’ll be grateful for your mentorship and feedback on our product

Happy to offer you a 50 Amazon voucher to get some feedback.

We’d also interview existing users of contact out to get their feedback on different aspects of our tool that they have used.

We would record all these calls and we would share it across the whole product team.

During the user interview, I’d like to ask the following questions:

I’ll start by understanding the user’s workflow and what their day-to-day looks like

The main problems that they’re trying to solve. What are their biggest pain points?

The tools and software that they currently use during their workflow, what they like about the software, what they don’t like.

What do they care about, what does success look like to them?

Then I’ll go into what do they think of my business idea.

Will they pay? Do they like it? Dislike it?

How does it compare to the current existing solutions?

What features or solutions would they want if they could just wave a magic wand?

Finally, where do the users hang out? Are there publications that they read? Are they on Twitter?

How can we market to them and reach them during a sales process?

The book Mum Test provides a good framework for interview questions to ask.

After you’ve done all that research, you’ll become an expert and you’ll be in a good position to:

create a product that is 10 times better than what is current available

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