Hey, Techstars attendees, I'm Justin Wilcox. I'm the founder of Nimbus Health, a software company where we help hospitals automate medical record processing.

Now, that's what I do for work, but what I do for fun is actually Customer Dev Labs. It's a blog where I and other founders take our customer development experiences and we write them up and share them so that other people don't fall into the same traps that we did getting started.

So if you like what we talk about today, definitely go check out the blog. Speaking of which, what we're talking about today is four customer discovery hacks.

These are the four things that I found hardest to get started with customer development. All right, now that we've got our interview set up, we need to figure out what are we going to ask our customers, and this is something that I really struggled with when I started customer development.

So that's why we have hack number three: what to ask. So a couple ground rules for interviewing: Number one, no pitching.

This is about listening. If you find yourself ever proposing a part of your solution just to get some feedback on it, stop. You're pitching, and we don't want to do that.

The reason being, as soon as you start pitching, your mind changes gears. It goes from learning and absorbing information into trying to pitch something and sell a product.

And this time is all about learning, so this is all about listening to your customer, all about listening to their problems.

You'll have plenty of time to pitch later. Okay, rule number two: past and present questions are fantastic, that's what we're going to ask.

Questions about the future like, "Would you ever?" or "Will you ever?" hypothetical questions, those are no good. We want to ask questions like, "Have you ever...?

" or "Tell me about the last time..." things that have happened in the past and are in the present.

Now, the reason is if we ask about future questions, we're getting our customers' predictions, and those are basically useless. And in fact, they can be worse than useless because if they tell us something that we want to hear, "Would you ever pay $5 for blah, blah, blah?

" and they say yes, we might mislead ourselves into thinking we have a real product.

The truth is, they don't know the answer to that question, and it's going to be misleading, so we don't do it.

The other reason is, as soon as you're asking "Would you?

" or "Will you?" questions, you're probably starting to pitch a solution, and we don't want to do that. Okay, so with those ground rules in place, let's talk about what you ask your customers.

The script that I use looks a little something like this. Number one: Tell me a story about the last time [problem context].

So for example, "Tell me about the last time you were late to an appointment." Now, the reason why we ask this question first is because it's very open-ended.

It's asking for a story, and it's asking our customer to sort of go on whatever tangents they want. What , we're looking for here are things that are particularly difficult or annoying for a customer.

So your job is to ask this question, listen intently, and then dig in.

When you find your customer talk about something that's interesting to you, that you don't know about or you don't fully understand, dig in. Ask questions: "Why was that hard?

" "What was annoying about that?" "Why is that that way?" This is where you're going to spend most of your time.

Now, if during this conversation it's not obvious to you what was the hardest part about this context, you're going to ask them explicitly, "What was the hardest part about this problem that you ran into?

" Then they're going to tell you the hardest part, and this is exactly what we want.

And now this question number three, this is golden. It's also very awkward. You're going to ask them, "Why was that hard?" Let me give you an example of why it's going to be awkward.

So, tell me about the last time you were late. "Oh, you know, I had to feed the dog, and I had to pick up my keys, and I couldn't find them, and then I ran into traffic." "What was the hardest part about it?

It was frustrating." And then I'm going to ask, "Why was that hard?" And they're going to think, "Of course I know why that's hard.

It's hard because it was frustrating." And we're going to ask, and then they're going to say, "You know why it was hard?

Because I had to drive across a bridge, and I was afraid it was going to run out of gas, and I was stuck in traffic." And we ask because the 'why' is exactly what we're going to parrot back to our customers when it's time to go pitch our solution.

We want to use our customers' own words when we market to them so that we know it will resonate. So in this case, why was it hard?

Afraid to run out of gas. We can say, "Afraid to run out of gas because you're running late." That might be the best marketing message.

So this is really important, even if it's awkward to ask, make sure you understand why this was particularly hard. Number four, we're going to ask, how do you solve this problem now?

So I might ask, how do you solve this lateness problem now? They might say, oh, you know, I just, I'm not late at all.

I just don't care. I don't do anything. In that case, we know this isn't a real pain for our customer because they're not trying to solve the problem.

If they are trying to solve the problem, you know, I set my clocks forward fast and and I, um, I try and get reminders from Google and blah, blah, blah.

Uh, then we can ask the next question, which is, why is that solution not awesome?

If they say, oh, you know what, I know the clocks are set fast and I just ignore the reminders.

reminders. We've got a problem they're trying to solve. So it's a real problem and their solution is not awesome. So maybe we can solve it in a better way.

All right, so this is the outline for your interview. These are the basics. Bonus points though, if you can do any of these three things.

Number one, emotions. Take real note of the emotions your customer expresses during the interview: frustration, anger, guilt, greed, happiness, whatever it is.

Note those down because those emotions, that's how you're going to connect with your customer. When you can empathize with your customer, they can feel that and that's how we're going to actually move our solution.

Number two, three-peat. Once you get through this process, you can start all the way over at the beginning.

Tell me about another time you were late. If you can get through this process three times, you'll learn something new every time and you'll really understand your customer through and through.

Finally, five whys. If you can ask why five times, why was that hard? Why did you do it that way, why is the world like it is?

You will understand the core crux of why someone is doing what they're doing and why it's difficult.

If you ask five times, you'll get down to the core emotion and the core motivation of what it is that they're trying to solve.

All right, so that's my script, and now it's your turn. Go ahead and write your version of this script and then go to a neighbor and interview him or her.

When you do, make sure you're not pitching and that you're always asking questions about the past and the present and never about the future.

Good luck. So all this information is documented up on customerdevs.com. Go check it out. I'm Justin Wilcox. Let me know what you learn.

Customer Discovery: What Do You Ask, with Justin Wilcox

Scripts