Ask people how they solve the problem today, not whether they like your idea

Pat Walls… built In the AI world, talking to customers isn't the solution, but it is the mechanism to figuring out where to market. So, let's dive in a little deeper. Let's talk about the process of doing a customer call. How are you talking to these customers? How do you convince them to get on the phone with you, and then once you get on the phone with them, what are you trying to get? Could you walk me through what a great customer call looks like?

GauravWe were very scientific with it, and we had three main phases of customer calls. And so, early in our build phase, when we're trying to figure out what to build, we went through a very strong customer discovery phase. And if you're still in the customer discovery phase, here's exactly what I'd suggest to do. Assuming you know the problem space that you're working in and have a rough idea of who the customer is, just try reach out to your personal network. Try DM people on Twitter, and get on a call with them, even if you have to pay them, and just ask them a few questions. We used the principles from this book called The Mom Test. So, the principle in The Mom Test is essentially never asking questions like, "Hey, would you use this?" or, "Do you like my idea?"

GauravInstead, you should shift the frame of your questions to, "How are you solving this problem? Walk me through exactly the last time you solved this problem. How much time or money did it cost you? What would happen if you did nothing about it?" And once you feel you've heard a shared common painful problem, that's how you know it's time to build the solution. And so, phase two was actually usability tests. So, once we had run enough customer discovery calls, we obviously realized there was a real pain for solopreneurs. And so, we made the leap, and we built an MVP that we thought would solve the problem according to what they told us. And then we had to actually acquire customers.

GauravSo, we liked to call this fighting for customers one-to-one. So, we'd be crawling Reddit threads, posting lead magnets all across social media, and the moment they signed up to our wait list, we sent them an email, invited them to a call, and once they jumped on the call, we just sent them a link to our platform, asked them to share their screen, and we just sat there quietly and watched them use the platform. The key here is to speak as little …