Don’t have useless conversations for your start-up

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Talking with your users/customers is vital to really understand their needs and how your product or service can properly address these. The issue is, it's SO easy to get these conversations wrong!

Here are a couple of tips on avoiding useless conversations and getting to the good stuff with your customers:

TIP 1: Use the Mom test approach...

The Mom Test helps you get the truth out of potential customers, understanding their real opinions through framing questions and structuring the conversation in the right way.

The key 3 elements of this approach are:

1. Talk to customers about their life, not your idea (you want to understand if your solution would really work for them, and solve a problem that they have. So the best thing to do is ask questions about this rather than talking about your idea)

2. Talk about their experiences in the past, not the future (this roots your conversation in reality, rather than inaccurate assumptions about how they may behave in the future)

3. Talk less, listen more (it's about them, your role is to listen and dig into their responses, not take over the conversation)

To learn the full approach, here's Rob's book on this: The Mom Test (it's a really short and very useful read!). There are loads of great suggestions in here of the types of questions that you could ask to avoid just leading customers into telling you that they love your idea.

TIP 2: People will be more honest with strangers- take advantage of this

When we're talking to strangers, we have the ability to have more honest conversations with them than we do anyone else. We also have the ability to have a quick chat about the weather, get short throw away answers to questions and go our separate ways. It's all in how we behave and set the context.

Kio Stark did a really interesting TED talk on why we should talk to strangers that I think points out the power we have to have very genuine and honest conversations, providing we go about them in the right way.

One of the key reasons, she says, that people feel more comfortable opening up to strangers is that there are no consequences to sharing secrets with them.

It's also been found that people often feel more understood by strangers, this is put down to the fact that we have a bias when it comes to people we are close to, assuming they understand us and can read our minds. With a stranger, we start from scratch and spell everything out - this gives strangers a better opportunity to really understand what is going on in our heads.

As an example, a man sat next to me on a train a few weeks ago and we started talking, I was feeling chatty and decided to skip the small talk and started asking more questions about his life. Very quickly he opened up about a friend who wanted to start a romantic relationship with him, but he was married and didn’t know what to do. This wasn't something he'd told anyone else, and yet there he was, ten minutes into a train journey spilling all to a stranger.

Now, in the majority of customer interviews we're not expecting the customers to open up about all the secrets of their marriage(!) but, we would like to have open and honest conversations. This being the case, it's useful to think about tips for setting a conversation up for success:

1. Find something you can connect around, have a conversation that goes deeper than small talk, as if you're making a friend

2. Remember their name and repeat it back to them, make them feel like you're paying attention and the interaction is important

3. Make them laugh - it'll make you both feel instantly more comfortable and connected

4. Disclose something about you - people feel more comfortable opening up, if they feel like you have shared something too

5. Pay a unique compliment - people remember how you make them feel, stay away from things that people might be immune to (things they hear all the time, make it unique and genuine)

Essentially, you're looking to make the person feel comfortable and like you've connected ahead of getting into your question set.

From that point, jump straight into the Mom test and you're ready to go!