You need information from your customers; here's how to get it and want to look for. 

Feedback from your customers is critical for startup success. Remember, when you start a business, your goal is to meet the need that your customers experience. The best way to ensure that you achieve that objective is to talk to your customers. This is true regardless of the kind of company that you're starting. But how you talk with your customers is really important. You aren't looking for encouragement; you're looking for helpful information about how well your product is meeting the need of your customers and how you can improve your product or service to meet the need better. 

We recommend reading the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick. This book is an excellent guide to avoiding pitfalls and asking intelligent questions during customer interviews. 

Conversations with your customers are critical to every stage of your business's development. During the idea stage, these conversations will help you understand the problem that your future customers are facing. During the prototype phase talking to customers will help you know who the first customers you should be targeting are. These conversations will guide you to problem-solution fit once you're ready to launch your business. 

Here are the five questions you should ask and your customer interviews. Before you start asking, remember your job is not to sell them on your product or share your passion; your job is to listen and collect valuable information.

1. what's the hardest part about _______________ (insert whatever activity or process your product or service is designed to improve)?
2. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem?
3. I why was that hard?
4. What, if anything, have you done to try and solve this problem?
5. What don't you love about the solutions you've tried?

These interviews Should not be formal. Keep them casual and be respectful of people's time. The notes you take during these interviews are critical, so take some.

Find numerical answers that can be tracked and measured like the ones below.

• What does this problem that you're solving cost your customers financially?
• How often do they experience this problem
• How much money are they willing and capable of spending to solve it?

here's a helpful question to ask at the end of these interviews once the customer has experienced your product or service.

how would you feel if you could no longer use _______ (insert your product or service here)?

a. very disappointed

b. Somewhat disappointed

c. Not disappointed

Your goal is to have at least 40% of your customers say that they would be "very disappointed" if they could no longer use your product or service.

Here's a great video by Eric Migicovsky that outlines this process and share some examples from Silicon Valley startups. This talk focuses on tech startups trying to develop large user bases, but the framework and fundamentals apply to any business.

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