This document discusses the importance of surveying and interviewing customers to gain insights and test assumptions. It provides the following key points: 1. Surveying and interviewing customers is important to avoid building products based on incorrect assumptions about what customers want. Asking customers questions can help validate or invalidate assumptions. 2. Great customer surveys involve asking insightful questions in the right way. The questions should provide learning around pricing, what to launch first, who to target initially, and how to engage early users. 3. Common assumptions that should be tested include whether customers will download an app, subscribe to a service, or that building the right product alone will attract customers. 4. Suggested ways

2. Survey & Interview
Customers
Gautham

3. Time
Steps
1. Idea
2. Prototype
3. Early Customers
4. Efficiently adding customers
5. Scaling Business Operations
6. Being Operational Break-even
7. Generating Business Profits
8. Defending Profits from competition
9. Recovering Business Investments
10. Return on Investment for Shareholders
Recap : Idea to ROI framework!
T= 10 yearsT= 6 months
T= 0

4. mount of money or experience can replace a “customer insight” on which a business
1. Find an Idea that will have customers

5. Why should I survey and interview
customers?
• We’re human beings. We lie to ourselves daily to get through life.
• If we lie to ourself about a consumer insight, then the market will
teach us a very hard lesson. We’re smart people, we can skip that
lesson.
• Figuring out a consumer insight is hard, it takes time, effort and
massive empathy
• All of us have this super power called the ability to ask questions.

6. Great customer survey is
all about asking great
questions the right way!

7. Watch the Video!
Action learning framework is all about
asking great questions.

8. What are the biggest things you
can learn from a good customer
survey?
• Pricing
• What to launch first?
• Who to launch to first?
• How should I engage early users?
• What do you get repeatedly wrong about users? Is there a
pattern?

9. Be shameless about asking questions!
“How far you go in life is directly proportional to the number of
awkward conversations you are willing to have”

10. How do we do this?
• List down all of things you have assumed about your
product/company
• Discuss among your co-founders and identify the
assumptions that all of you agree on (blindspots) /
fiercely disagree on (problem points)
• The TL then uses common sense to arrive at a priority
list of at least 10 items among the blindspots / problem
points
• Include any other assumption you think is relevant.

11. Examples of some
assumptions
• The customer will actually take pain to download an app that I build to
solve the <problem your company is solving>
• Customer will agree to subscribe to my service
• I just have to build the right product. Customers will automatically come
• Users don’t know what they want. I know what the users want.
• The login screen should ask for phone number, full name, email and the
desired username

12. What are some good
ways/forum to ask questions?
• Asking in person to a friend. Your friend may not the right target audience. Pay attention
nevertheless.
• Send a survey to a large user list. Doesn’t really work bro. People are tired of answering email
surveys
• Ask on Facebook to a group? Not a bad idea
• Twitter polls.
• On Product Hunt. Hunt your product and be prepared to ask great questions you want
answered.
• Show HN on HackerNews
• Best idea: Come up with a compelling question people are delighted to answer because it’s a
questions they wanted to ask and answer themselves.

13. What happens when even asking
great questions leads your
nowhere?
• You gotta
experiment!
• We’ll deal with that
in the next target!

14. Don’t forget to have
fun!