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Helping Your Students With Customer Interviews

In our last article, we used the business model canvas to describe why students should interview their customers. We also talked about how to motivate your students to actually conduct those interviews.

If you haven’t read that article yet, please do that now.

If you have, let’s talk about some of the common problems your students will experience when they get out of the building to talk to customers.

• They’ll have trouble getting people to agree to interviews
• They won’t find a pattern among the problems they’re hearing from people they interview
• They won’t hear anything about the problems they want to solve

All of these problems are common and are…

The consequence of simply interviewing the wrong customers.

Which Customers To Interview?

Effective entrepreneurs interview their early adopters, so we need to teach our students who early adopters are and how they can find theirs.

To define early adopters, we’ll leverage definitions by Rogers, Moore, and Steve Blank, but with a twist to make the definition more actionable. You can start by reminding your students that…

Customers don’t buy products. Customers buy solutions to problems.

Your students shouldn’t think about early adopters in terms of their relationship to a product. We want them to think about Early Adopters in relationship to a problem.

Early adopters are people who have the problem that your students want to try and solve, know they have that problem, and. . .

Early Adopters are actively seeking a solution to their problem.

These customers, who are seeking a solution to their problem, are the ones you want your students to interviews.

Focus Customer Interviews on Early Adopters

If your students can find, and interview, their early adopters, they will have accomplished the single-most important aspect of finding Product-Market Fit.

That’s because during their interviews with early adopters, your students are going to validate their:

1. Customer segments
2. Value proposition
3. Customer relationships and
4. Channels

All told, interviewing early adopters will validate almost half of your students’ business models.

Plus, these interviews will form the basis of their experiments for the rest of the business model canvas.

On the other hand, if your students can’t find early adopters, they won’t have anyone to provide social proof to the early majority. That means they’re not going to find anyone who’s going to bring on the late majority or the laggards.

If they can’t find early adopters, it is very unlikely your students are going to find Product-Market Fit.

If your students can’t find people seeking a solution to a problem, it doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t need solving. It doesn’t mean that the business idea is bad. It means the time isn’t right to solve the problem.

If your students can’t find anyone seeking a solution to this problem, now is not the opportune time to try solving that problem. Your students could be too early to solve this problem, or they could be too late. We know that now is not the right time.

By trying to interview early adopters, your students can form the basis of their business model if they find them. If your students don’t find them, that’s helpful news as well, because they can pivot with confidence. If your students can’t find people seeking a solution to the problem, it’s better to know now than later, so they can another problem to solve that’s more likely to lead to their success.

Finding Early Adopters

When you teach your students how to find early adopters, you may find it easiest to contrast early adopters with the early majority, late majority, and laggards, especially if you can a case study to do it, like Airbnb.

Start by describing the problem your case study company solves. In this case, the problem Airbnb was trying to solve when it got started was that it was too hard to find cheap hotel rooms during a conference.

Next, describe the concept of laggards, people who literally don’t have the problem the entrepreneurs are trying to solve. Because they don’t have the problem, they don’t know they have the problem, and they’re not seeking a solution for that problem.

An example laggard for Airbnb’s early days might be someone attending a conference but their company pays for their room. Or someone who can expense any hotel costs they have, so they don’t worry about the cost.

Contrast that to the late majority. This is someone who has the problem the entrepreneurs want to solve, but doesn’t know it; they are not aware they have the problem. If your students are ever trying to convince someone they have a problem, they are likely talking to someone in the late majority. These are some of the worst people sell to, because they are not aware they have the problem. Someone who doesn’t know they have a problem is rarely willing to talk about solving that problem, and if someone won’t talk about solving a problem, they certainly won’t pay to solve it. It’s important that you educate your students about the late majority, otherwise they’ll try to “educate” all their customers to convince them they have a problem, and won’t make any traction.

In AirBnb’s example, a member of the late majority might be someone who charges the hotel room to a credit card, even though it’s too expensive for their budget. They may simply think this is the cost of doing business and not even realize they’re getting charged exorbitant fees for a room in high-demand.

Compare the late majority to the early majority. These are customers who know they have the problem, but are not seeking a solution to it. Maybe they have experienced the problem, and acknowledged it’s an annoyance, but they haven’t been so disturbed by it that they sought a solution. Or maybe they did seek a solution, and either found one that was good enough, or they didn’t, and assumed the problem wasn’t solvable. No matter what, a member of the early majority isn’t actively seeking a solution now (but will jump on one if they hear about it from an early adopter).

In the Airbnb example, a member of the early majority might be someone who skips the conference because they can’t find a cheap hotel room. They know rooms are too expensive. They searched for cheaper rooms online, but they couldn’t find something to fit their budget. They had other problems to solve so maybe they gave up and simply decided not to attend the conference.

The last, and most important, group is our early adopters. These customers not only know they have the problem the entrepreneurs want to solve, but are seeking a solution to that problem.

In the Airbnb example, an early adopter might be someone posting on the conference discussion group asking to share a room to lower their costs. Or maybe they’re searching the hostels in the area to find an affordable room.

To find these all-important early adopters, your students should brainstorm behaviors that indicate someone is seeking a solution to the problem. In the Airbnb example, the behavior would be “posting on a forum for a room share”, so to find those early adopters, the founders would simply look on the design forum.

Only Interview Early Adopters

Your students should avoid interviewing anyone who is not an early adopter for the problem they want to solve.

That’s because if your students interview non-early adopters, they will discover problems entirely unrelated to the problem they are trying to solve – and problems few people actively seeking solutions for.

Imagine your students asking a late majority, laggard, or early majority the hardest part about going to a conference in the Airbnb example. Because these non-early adopters customers are not aware of, or seeking a solution to the problem the founders want to solve, the customers will describe completely unrelated problems like…

• The food isn’t very good
• The presentations are boring
• The tickets to the conference are too expensive

We don’t want your students getting distracted by these other problems – we want them to validate, or invalidate their current problem hypothesis.

To do that, your students’ best bet is to focus their attention on their early adopters. Your students can use their customers’ solution-seeking behavior to tell them where their early adopters are.

In the Class

Another case study that’s fun to use is Uber. Have your students think about the early days of Uber. The problem they were solving was the difficulty finding a cab in a big city like San Francisco.

Ask your students to describe a laggard in the Uber example. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t take cabs at all – maybe they ride their bike everywhere.

Next, ask your students to describe an member of Uber’s original late majority. An example example could be someone who takes cabs but is often late. This segment, the late majority, take it for granted and don’t think cabs could be faster. To them, it’s part of their daily routine and they don’t think it’s a problem.

Now ask your students to identify behaviors exhibited by an early majority customer. Remind them this is someone who knows they have the problem. Maybe they have a black cab service on speed dial. They don’t want to use regular cabs because they’re too slow, so they’ll pay the extra price for a black cab service. The early majority is someone who has a solution that’s good enough for now.

Finally ask your students to identify behaviors exhibited by an early adopter. Remind them that early adopters are seeking a solution. They could be reading reviews on Yelp to find the fastest cab service in San Francisco, or they could be leaving reviews complaining about the slow response time for certain cab companies.

Remember: students should use early adopters’ solution-seeking behavior to find them for interviews.

For more details, take a look at the complete lesson plan we’ve provided below.

Get the Who are Early Adopters Lesson Plan

We’ve created an experiential, 45-minute, Who are Early Adopters Lesson Plan to help you teach your students who to interview. It encapsulates everything we’ve talked about above.

Click here for your editable copy
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.

All we ask is that you leave us some feedback on it the comments below so we can improve it!

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Better Customer Interviews

In this article we described who early adopters are and how to find them. That will help your students conduct better interviews.

• They will get more interviews.
• Your students will find consistent problem patterns because they’re talking to people who are trying to solve that problem.
• And Your students will find problems they want to solve because they’re not talking to late majority or laggards.

If they interview their early adopters, your students will form the basis of their business model. If they can’t find early adopters to interview, they’ll know isn’t the right time to solve the problem they hypothesized and they will have the confidence to pivot (to a backup idea they generated through their problem generation process).

What’s Next?

In future articles, we’ll talk about who your students should target for interviews, and what to ask during them. If you’d like those lesson plans, subscribe here to get them in your inbox.