Dear Founders: "Listening" To Your Users Isn't The Same As "Waiting To Talk"

Since my last post “Distribution is 80% of your problem” I have had the opportunity to speak in depth with several terrific startup founders about some of the incredible things they are doing. And why it’s not going so well. Several of their stories remind me of another big lesson I have learned over the years: We entrepreneurs often mistake “listening” to be the same thing as “waiting to talk”. Until it’s too late. A Little Knowledge (About Your Users) Is a Dangerous Thing All these stories have a similar meme: We launched our product. We got to 10,000+ users (or 100+ small paying customers) using unscalable ways. Now we are not so sure of what to do next. One founder had talked to 100s of her paying users and convinced herself that her market was “women who want to make sure their kids don’t get too much unsupervised screen time”. We went back and talked to their users and discovered in fact that the core group that loved the app were “working women who want to keep track of their kids and know they are safe after school”. In effect, so far whenever they had spoken to their users, this startup kept hearing the answer they wanted to hear. Not what their users were telling them. Listening was about waiting to tell their users what they “should” be doing with the app. Another app — one that got to 20,000 users quickly with a small amount of seed money — found once we dug deep that less than 150 of their users were active weekly. They had no idea who these 150 users were or what specifically they were doing with their product. 20 user interviews later we discovered their core use case was far from what they had thought it was. And that their product was too hard to use. For far too long they were too convinced that their technology would change the world especially since 20,000 users seemed to be using the product. A third, a B2B focused startup I recently spent time with that has over 100 paying users but stalled growth and usage numbers. When I initially asked them to tell me who their users were and what pain point they were solving I kept getting back a laundry list of features and “user personas” instead. When they dug deeper and spoke to users, they found that of their 27 features, their real users are using 2 and no one has apparently discovered the 3 they think are the real “killer benefits’. I (and they) realized that their mental model needs to shift from “my users are using the wrong features and SHOULD in fact have discovered the “right ones””. As a startup you don’t get to tell users what scenarios and which features they should use your product for. THEY TELL YOU by using whatever they find useful. Apple May Not Need To Talk To Users But The Rest Of Us Do As a founder, you start with a hypothesis. You have all these incredible suppositions on how you will change the world. And I’ll be the first to admit that there is a tiny class of startups that will get away with “My users don’t know what they are doing. I will tell them what they should do. It works for Apple (or so goes the myth) so it will work for me — let’s just ignore users”. Believe me, those kinds of companies are black swans. Then there is the rest of us. Our users matter. Who they are, what they use our products for, and what they ignore. For 2 basic reasons:

grabbed from http://www.forbes.com/sites/sanjeevagrawal/2015/10/31/dear-founders-listening-to-your-users-isnt-the-same-as-waiting-to-talk/