How To Talk To Users | Startup School

foreign

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my name is Gustav and I work here at y

combinator as a group partner I've been

here since 2017. before YC I was a

practically to Airbnb and actually a YC

founder back in 2007. today I'm going to

talk about how to talk to your users and

your future customers here's what I plan

to cover today why the best Founders

talk to the users throughout the

lifetime of the company two how to find

your users and how to talk to them three

what questions to ask them and what not

to ask them and four how to turn your

conclusions into an MVP most people in

the world have the idea on how new

startups to form completely wrong they

think ideas of new products is something

the financials come up with on a lazy

Sunday or a late night coding session

you probably know it doesn't work this

way this scene as you can see here here

is a scene from The Social Network movie

it's a great movie but they got a lot of

things wrong on how Facebook actually

got started this is Brian chesky Brian

is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb on

the left side of the photo is Amal Amal

was the very first guest on Airbnb they

actually spent a weekend together in San

Francisco when they'd be kind of watched

you notice the difference between this

photo and the previous photo well this

photo actually is a real photo it

includes a two-way conversation with a

real customer great Founders talk to

Future customers before they even have a

product in fact the very best Founders

in the world learn directly from their

users throughout the life of their

company but that's again if you have

correctly identified who your users are

you should learn from them throughout

the lifetime of your company why you

might ask

users and customers will keep you honest

they are the only stakeholders actually

paying you anything if anyone will tell

you the truth it will be them so my talk

today is about how to do this well so

let's talk about another m b story in

2010 um and I remember this uh myself

Brian chesky the CEO of Airbnb he'll

decide to launch an experiment he was

going to give up his apartment and live

in 50 different airbnbs over the next

couple of months you might ask yourself

why would anyone do that so much hassle

most people read the articles about this

experiment because he did announce it

they missed a point

um I, personally, remember, this, being, kind

of crazy by doing this Brian will

literally get a chance to talk to every

one of these 50 hosts each single day on

this trip and one incredible source of

honest feedback on your product without

the Airbnb hosts MB would not exist

exist today what Brian Joe and Nate did

so early is deeply understand the

motivations

um and the feedback from their hosts

still today Brian and Joe gets calls

from hosts on their personal cell phone

numbers I remember them telling me that

that on their first day of adworks at

Airbnb

why do they do that well it's the number

that they put on the website and share

with all of their hosts early on they

weren't hiding behind Anonymous email

they wanted to hear from the customers

at the time this seemed almost radical

most Founders would spend their time in

front of the computers trying to find

scalable growth channels like Google ads

unfortunately most Founders still don't

build personal connections with their

users today behind behind info at emails

or don't do not reply emails you don't

believe me you should just do a search

in your email for do not reply at and

see how many people don't want to talk

to their customers so let's start by

trying to figure out who I should talk

to it's always easy to interview people

that you know or people who are on your

network they're simply the most likely

to respond but perhaps can be less

honest in their answers to not offend

you don't be afraid of reaching out to

them and don't be afraid of rejection

the second group here is co-workers or

former co-workers they can be a really

great source they might know the topic

really well and if you're building

software for startups you can easily and

easily navigate yourself to someone

who's a potential User it's also very

common that the early users you speak to

are outside of your personal circuits or

your co-workers circles when asking YC

Founders how they found their early

users some of the most common answers

were LinkedIn red forms slack or Discord

communities and sometimes in-person

events so to illustrate this process

um a little better I'm going to start a

new mock startup this is not a real

company I'm just making it up but I'm

going to go through the process as I

would have if this was a real company

and first I want to understand if the

problem is real my hypothesis that I

have here or kind of like the idea space

that we sometimes call as NYC is that

companies want to reduce their carbon

emissions but for whatever reasons don't

do that so my plan is very simple I want

to first interview some potential

customers to learn about the problems

and motivations around carbon emissions

and three try to understand what an MVP

will look like MVP is a minimal viable

product to do this research I plan to

start by reaching out to Founders CEOs

CFOs at startups or bigger companies I'm

also going to be shocked to people on

LinkedIn that have titles like

carbon or climate or sustainability

basically Wars that gives me hint that

they might be relevant people to talk to

so what am I looking to learn well first

I'm trying to understand do the company

that they work for care about their

carbon emissions and two why do they

care and why do they not care if they

don't care and three who in that company

might be the one who cares the most

about this uh and why all right so so

here are two examples of Outreach

messages so the first one is a LinkedIn

message to a CFO who I used to work with

at Airbnb the message will go something

like this first I introduce myself I

mentioned something about our time at

Airbnb then I say I'm starting a new

project briefly describe it but not too

much in detail and I just asked for 20

minute phone call or video call that's

it and here's another example of a

message to someone I don't know it's

also on LinkedIn to the same group that

I mentioned earlier it's similar but

geared towards people I don't know so

the message will and the tone will be a

little bit different all right so once I

get on the phone or once again on the

video call let's talk about uh how to

actually interview potential customers

so first you want to make sure that

these interviews are over video calls

phone calls or in person you can learn a

lot more from a five minute video

interview than 500 or 5 000 sugar

responses

secondly you want to build some Report

with interviewee they're going to give

you answers to questions that maybe no

one have asked them before so you need

to make sure that they can trust you and

feel comfortable in this situation next

uh the most important thing here the

most most important thing here is to not

introduce your idea until maybe at the

end of the call or maybe not at all

doing this too early can bias them in

their answers your role here in this

interview is to listen not to talk

there are some great techniques to get

people to open up and talk about their

problems and one good one is to ask

follow-up questions that are open-ended

for example tell me about that if you're

not recording the interview you should

at least take notes as much as you can

you need to translate the recordings to

notes anyway so you might as well take

notes in the in the actual interview I'm

going to play an example video here on

uh how a potential customer for my

carbon emission company and how that

conversation will go like Hi how are you

um it's been a long time since we worked

together Airbnb

yeah great to see you

so I don't know if I told her this but

I'm thinking about starting another

company and I have a couple questions I

wanted to ask you about this era that

I'm interested in uh does your company

montevue Inc do you care about your

carbon emissions

we do actually care and we use a

consultant who creates these PDF reports

once a year

interesting uh what do you do with a

report

I mean right now I don't think we really

take much action on it unfortunately

well why not

it's just really hard to know what to do

with the information

um the information is really dense and

um uses words we don't really understand

tell me more about that

well we hired this consultant

um they asked us to fill out this word

doc with information but most of the

data that goes into it uh seems

inaccurate and I just feel like we need

another expert to figure out what to do

with the data

got it got it

um but why is it important for your

company at all to track carbon emission

well our

um and I think there's some regulations

coming up too

you notice here how I never introduced a

product or a solution I only ask

questions to learn about the problem

that Amy's having I don't even say what

I'm going to build

that's how you want to do it here are

some very specific questions that you

can use in your interviews one tell me

how you do X today by X of course I'm

referring to a specific problem a task

or goal that you are trying to solve two

what is the hardest thing you are doing

about x three why is it hard four how

often do you have to do x five why is it

important for your company to do X make

sure you dive deep into this question

like understanding that motivation is

going to be critical here and six what

do you do to solve this problem for

yourself today it's really important to

understand what they're doing

now if you can watch them do this that's

even better if they can screen share

during the video call or show you their

laptop as you're doing the interview and

show you how they actually get the PDF

report what they do with it

um how it looks like

that's the ideal State you want to

deeply understand their behavior not

just what they're saying but what

they're doing because changing the

behavior will be hard you can also ask

follow-up questions and please learn how

to make use of these ones it's very hard

to get someone to say everything in just

one answer to one question get

comfortable with asking questions like

what do you mean by that or can you tell

me more about that or why is that

important to you here are some questions

that you should not ask like there are

ways you can kind of derail this

interview will you use our product

they're probably going to say yes but

they're not going to mean anything to

you the answer

two which features would make product X

better

remember their job is to tell you about

the problem your job is to think about

what features to solve that problem so

asking them about your job isn't really

going to help you yes and no questions

it's not really that helpful for you you

want them to explain and give you as

many concrete and real examples as

possible so just simply asking yes no

questions is not ideal here and four

um how would would a better product X

look like to you how would a better

Carbon emission counting software look

like to you uh many of the people aren't

product developers they're not software

Engineers they're not designers they're

not product managers this is not their

job their job is to do a different job

and you are the one trying to understand

what is the challenging part about their

job

and finally

um asking, two, questions, at, the, same, time

that's going to confuse them it's going

to confuse your answers so this is when

you're eager to get um get answers it's

very easy to do this this thing but try

to avoid it but I want to highlight one

of the things I mentioned here there's

one big danger during interviews and

that is to focus on features instead of

problems

it's very natural for you to do that

your bra your brain is thinking through

all the ways you're going to solve this

problem

but really what you're here for during

this interview is to deeply understand

the problems not actually come up with

Solutions that's for for us for a

separate event so users generally have

good problems but also generally bad

Solutions so I'll give you two specific

examples so early days of Gmail users

were asking

um Paul Buchheit the founder of Gmail to

view both the Inbox and the actual email

that they were reading on the same

screen now why would they ask for that

well the reason was simply that Gmail is

too slow and people did not want to wait

to load each of the emails in the inbox

they want to see everything at the same

time similarly in early Airbnb a lot of

guests want to have the phone numbers of

the host so they can call them we're

like why do you need that it just turned

out that they didn't fully trust the

platform like we had not displayed

enough trust in Airbnb so they needed to

feel comfortable uh with getting to know

the host before it actually

um making the booking secondly

um users don't

have incentive to say no to really any

additional features if you ask for this

feature or this feature this feature

they'll probably say yes to everything

right you however are in charge of the

projectations and you have a lot more

incentives than they have to figure out

which are the most important of the

features so let's talk about next steps

so you've done your um five or ten of

these user interviews you've written

down your notes let's let's talk about

what you do then one you want to make

sure you have notes from all each of the

interviews you can use sticky notes or

some similar software to organize these

learnings you can bucket them in

different buckets that kind of describes

different problems and see which one is

actually the thing that matters the most

and then you want to write down your

conclusions what are you learning from

all of this you want to use all of this

information to create a hypothesis or

what the solution to this problem might

be don't over intellectualize this

process really you just want to start

assigning MVP as fast as you can but you

want to make sure you have accurate

information when you decide the MEP and

then you'll want to test it with the

same users it's also important to know

if the problem you're solving is

actually valuable what I mean by this is

that people will value the solution to

the problem enough to pay for it or the

problem itself solving the problem is

valuable so here's some good tips to

determine if it is one are people paying

money for other Solutions in the space

today are the people that make the PDF

reports for carbon emissions accounting

are they getting paid well if they are

getting paid that's a good sign that

this is probably a valuable thing do

people already have solutions to this

problem they are very happy with even

though it might appear Basics to you for

example like Excel or Google

spreadsheets is actually competitors to

many many many hundreds of startups

actually quite a formidable one to move

someone off Excel a Google spreadsheet

you need to make the experience of your

solution dramatically better they're not

going to pay you hundreds of dollars a

month for something they can almost as

easily do in Google spreadsheet or Excel

and three you want to evaluate how easy

it is to sell to this audience and this

is one thing that I like to do a lot

with the companies I work with for

example selling to Plumbers or

contractors is notoriously difficult

compared to selling to startups the

first two groups just don't change their

tools or the software very often versus

startups are open to trying new things

all the time so if you are solving a

problem is valuable you still have to

think about whether it's going to be

easy to sell this particular audience

once you have an MVP prototype you can

start by showing it to users even if

it's just a design prototype in Envision

or something like that you can just

click through we used to do this at MB

all the time we would go downstairs in

our in our office and we would find some

people that were waiting for an

interview or waiting for getting a

coffee or something and we just show

them the latest version of the app this

would be a Envision prototype on our

phone it would be Spike hand them our

phone and and show it to them this is

stuff that we haven't even built yet the

key thing but if you're doing this

tactic is to not tell them what to do do

not tell them what to do just watch them

play around with it you can tell them a

specific goal like try to make a book in

Airbnb or try to do a search with dates

and even b or something like that but do

not tell them exactly how to solve each

screen remember if this was a real

product you wouldn't you wouldn't be

standing there next to them to give them

advice another good trick when you're

doing this either when you're listening

or having them or recording them is to

have them speak their mind while they're

doing it have them describe exactly what

they're thinking on each of the steps

maybe the words that they're reading

maybe that will give you hints of what

words that they understand and which

words they don't understand or maybe

what specific screen means or what

purpose is and after you've done a bunch

of these interviews and then maybe MVP

protest sessions it's a great idea to

keep these interviewees involved

throughout the process

one common idea that a lot of wasting

companies are using is to create a slack

instance or a WhatsApp group for with

their customers now you want to make

them feel special right you want to make

them feel like they have exclusive

active access to the Future world

changing product so think about how

you're wording or or how you communicate

this WhatsApp group that you adding them

to it's a great idea to keep showing

them your product as they are

progressing like kind of give them this

exclusive feeling that I'm the first one

to see this product assets progressing

and also as you are

reacting to things that they're saying

you can ship a new a new screen with a

new version of the product

um and that builds trust with it with

them they now know that you react to

their feedback very fast finally some of

them will love connecting with other

people doing the same thing as they are

they don't get to do this very often and

um you, are, the, one, enabling, that, if, you

do all these steps you will collect the

right information

um from your future users you will keep

them involved and transfer the

information uh and that allow you to

transfer the information into your first

prototype and MVP so to summarize here's

what I covered today why the best

Founders talk to their users throughout

the lifetime of the company

how to find your users and how to talk

to them

what questions to ask them and what not

to ask them and finally how to turn some

of those conclusions into an MVP thank

you everyone

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