By Tolulope Perrin-Stowe, Business Development and Licensing Associate for the Technology Transfer Office, and NSF I-Corps Hub: Desert and Pacific Region Regional Instructor, San Diego State University

One of the most important aspects of the NSF I-Corps™ program is the customer discovery interviews. Getting enough interviews scheduled during the regional program is often what participants focus on, but just as important is getting the maximum benefit out of each interview. As a researcher, it can be natural for you to want to spend time talking about how your product is going to revolutionize the industry or how your innovation will change the world, but if you start the conversation this way, you can bias the interview before it even begins. Below are some ways to make sure that customer discovery interviews remain focused on the customer and their experience, and will allow you to make the most of each interview.

Dig deeper  

It is important during the customer discovery process to uncover the foundational cause of an issue that a customer has. If they say they have a problem, ask them: “Why do they have a problem? How do they determine that it is a problem? What does fixing that problem do for them? How would they know or measure that the problem is fixed?”. You may also use the “5 Why’s” to understand more about the pains that customers experience. Digging deeper into the answers you get from your interviews will lead to some new insights about the possible value your innovations need to provide to be adopted in a given field.

Seek out the unknown information  

Ask your customer about their priorities and how it influences how they make their decisions. Focus on the areas that they see as pains and the ones they see as gains. Even if you know a lot about the field, your customer is the expert in their company and about their priorities. If you take an inquisitive mindset and ask your interviewee to expand on novel or unexpected things that they mention, the conversation will have more value to you than if you tailor the interview to try to only validate your assumptions or only focus on the aspect that is important to you.

Stories are better than hypotheticals  

Frame your interview in a way that you are asking your interviewee about their past and present behavior and not future hypothetical behavior. Questions like “Tell me about the last time you had a problem with your current product and what caused it” will be more useful than the questions “If you could design the perfect product, what would it do?”. Questions that focus on past behaviors are a good indicator of what the threshold is to take action to solve a problem for that customer. Understanding what the actual requirements and pain points were that motivated a customer to make a purchasing decision can give you more actionable insight than hypothetical answers can. You want to focus your efforts on the aspects of your innovation that would motivate a customer to purchase it over a competitor (or over not doing anything at all about an issue) and understanding why and how that customer has made decisions in the past is the best way to do that. 

Making a Connection  

A great way to end an interview is to thank an interviewee for their time and then to ask them if there is someone else in their company or field that they think you could interview and if they would kindly introduce you to that person. A warm introduction from someone in their network is more likely to lead to additional interviews with potential customers than a cold outreach. A follow-up thank you email where you remind your interviewee of the introduction to be made, and you write a quick blurb about yourself and the goal of the interview for them to incorporate in the introduction email, is incredibly useful and will lead to more scheduled interviews.

Bad news is good news  

Sometimes during your customer discovery process you will find out that your innovation doesn’t meet the needs of your potential customers. If you hear that same message from a large number of interviews it can be disappointing. However, as far as I-Corps is concerned, this is a great success. Maybe you just discovered that your product does not fit your proposed market. That might mean you need to identify a new market, pivot on the product, or pursue a new project altogether. On the startup journey you can spend months or years and a significant amount of capital on a business that has no true customer. If the I-Corps process can save you that time and money, we consider that news worth celebrating.

Keeping these tips in mind will make for stronger customer discovery interviews and help ensure you receive the most benefit from the time you invest in I-Corps.