Startup School Q&A Week 1

Okay, any questions? So the question was, have I experienced any different differences between running user surveys in person or online? Honestly, you'll probably figure out what the best solution is for yourself. Online honestly gets a lot of it right. I conduct a lot of interviews over Zoom.

I think it’s again, it depends kind of on the context of the problem. Sometimes I really find it powerful to stand behind a user and ask them to use their existing tools— that can only really be done kind of well if you're in person. But I have seen some people do that pretty effectively over Zoom as well.

There's something that I keep in mind is, um, a UX researcher named Jared Spool, and he talks about some research where he says, like, he noticed that in product teams, products tend to get worse over time if you find out that the product and design teams are not interacting directly with their users a minimum every six weeks, some amount of time, some set of hours.

So it's one of those things where it's like, there’s just so much to be gained from talking and having a small conversation where it’s like, you just miss a ton of stuff. Because it's like, I don't know how many surveys you fill out, but the people who do tend to fill surveys, they fill a very weird bucket.

Oh yeah, sorry, I mistook the question. It's just you, online or offline? Yeah, no, you definitely need this open-ended conversation with a user rather than like a survey. Yeah, absolutely. So you always want to supplement, yeah, definitely.

Yes, do you have any examples of when your user is different from your buyer? So for example, my startup involves potentially selling in two countries. So I will be trying to get entire countries to sign agreements to buy from me, but they will be the users of the products. Are going to be the people in the country.

So, who am I? Yeah, yeah, we should repeat the question. Yeah, the question was, what happens if the users of your product are different from the buyers? And in the context of the asker, she was asking whether in countries maybe the people using it, but the buyer may be an individual.

Yeah, this is a tough problem. This usually calls for more user interviews. So, the best answer here is just to have conversations with different people in the buying chain. Remember that a great user interview is not actually a sales pitch; it’s actually learning more about the context in which that person encounters the problem.

So, in your case, I might consider having several different layers of interviews with potential buyers, potential users of the product, potential influencers. Oftentimes, in an enterprise sale, there are some people in the buying chain that aren’t even involved in using the product whatsoever, but they have a say in maybe the budget or the time frame in which they’ll purchase or use new solutions.

And so, it helps to actually have conversations with them as well so you can get context around maybe past attempts that they’ve tried to solve this problem. You know, millions of dollars that they’ve already spent that went down the drain. And you can learn, like, how they may be helpful or how they may hinder your sales process in the future.

Just a quick add, so that I would say for the economic buyer in the company or whoever, government or whatever it is, talking to them and trying to understand how they’re going to make the decision and what they actually value is probably most important.

The only thing I would add to that is that when you’re talking to your user, there’s usually, like, in a complex B2B enterprise transaction, you have someone that’s acting as your champion—someone who’s like super excited by using the product, usually their user. And/or there’s someone, or like, I don’t have to do this anymore if you get the implementor about by my company.

And so you need to use them as your like Virgil. Like, you’re gonna basically say, like, help me map out who's all involved, who needs to be in the room, and what are their sort of motivations. And so you’re basically looking to get Intel for all that process.