Guiding Decisions Based On Customer Interviews

I’ve been a bit delayed. We acquired a new biz (which I should be able to talk about in a week or two) and it’s a big one for us. I’ve been swamped. But I found some time to jot down some progress over the past two weeks.

TLDR;

• Customer interviews are a PITA to do, but are helpful

• What to do with info from your customer interviews isn’t always clear

• Trying to charge for a product still seems like the only real way to validate

I’ve done 22 meetings now for Demo Monster. Doesn’t really matter what the product is (a tool to create product demos), I’m just trying to show how I’m going from 0 to 1 in real time.

Current state of the union:

The goal at this stage is to reduce uncertainty. There are currently 15 signups, zero paying customers, and zero people have shared a demo. Humble.

“Cohort 1” as I’ll call it was ~20 people who I hopped on a call with. Mechanically I recorded the meetings in google meet, transcribed them and then used my notes to compile “insights” from each interview. Then I threw them in chat gpt and prompted my way to a problem statement:

It’s still confusing, and doesn’t lead me to 1 ICP with 1 core problem to solve, but it’s a start.

In case you go and run this yourself, prepare for these types of results:

• They all stated they had a problem on the call

• They all liked the solution and said it would help solve the problem

• ZERO of them signed up, created a demo and shared it.

This is common. It’s annoying. Disheartening even. But common. It’s incredibly difficult to reveal actual preferences (not stated preferences). If stated preference were actual preferences, I’d have 20 paying customers by now.

My ICPs from cohort 1 were:

• Saas founders

• Agency owners

• A few BDRs / SDRs

Agency owners seem to be the least likely to use this. Im starting to feel like sales leaders really have this problem and it is compounded when they have employees. The problem is more acute for sales leaders in software companies.

Saas founders (small companies) still look at this tool as potentially something useful in a cold email, or to send on a follow up call.

The more interesting cohort is BDRs / SDRs / Sales leaders (with sales rep) in saas companies. That’s a much more specific ICP. They had a few things in common over the interviews:

• demoing consistently across your whole team is a problem

• making sure you’re not just showing screens, but actually contextualizing the benefits of the software in a way the customer can understand (a bit esoteric)

• Can’t customize / personalize a demo async (without a lot of work like creating a custom loom video)

• No insights - they’re running blind. It’s hard to get real stats on if a loom video was watched by a particular person or not.

So for cohort 2 my hope is 1 person with a real problem creates a demo and starts to share it. For this product I have to validate both my customer (the demo creator) as well as the demo receiver. If people look at this like receiving a voice note from a loose acquaintance (i.e there’s nothing I’d rather do less than listen to a 3 minute rambling voice note) then I’m screwed.

And on that cheerful note thanks for reading and I’ll see ya next time!

AP