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Business questions worth asking

gmays.com

168 pointsgmays31 comments

I feel like getting customers to talk to me is the hardest part. Even when I have hundreds of people using an MVP for free, literally less than five would say anything in the Discord.

I feel like I could immediately build multiple great products using generative AI for specific communities. If I could just get three people from that community to tell me what they were trying to do and then try the solution I build.

But it seems like people just want to do the specific activity they are doing in the specific niche they are in. They don't want to do new things. So it seems like somehow it's a social problem not a technical one. I need to be inside of a community and observe their existing activities and insert something that just makes it easier. Without requiring them to think differently or try something new or go outside their niche.

I did do that last year and managed to make several hundred dollars on transaction fees multiple months in a row. That was a big win, for me. But it was a small niche and that dried up.

People are busy. They have a million things vying for their attention.

If you want feedback that badly, you need to ask them one at a time for feedback. Go to them, go network with them, have coffee with them, call them, email them directly.

Well, everyone needs to have some level of feedback, it's not just me. That is a good suggestion though.

I have tried messaging a few people today. They seem to be ignoring me. But it's a small sample so far.

I will keep your suggestion in mind. I have a feeling that most are going to ignore me still but I assume it will be better than just only hoping people will write something in Discord.

It's probably helpful to first get a sense of how much work it is to gather customer feedback. As an example, Qualtrics was getting single digit percent response rates, on a simple NPS survey (https://delighted.com/blog/average-survey-response-rate). If you're asking people to give you more detailed feedback, I'd imagine the hit rate might be even lower. Another data point, people who gather feedback professionally often offer customers $100 for an hour of their time.

Thanks for taking my suggestions onboard. I was trying to be positive.

I do agree with your premise that obtaining customer feedback is hard. That's why you have to be relentless about it.

Actually one of the people did respond eventually. So for this effort, I'm at 50% response rate!

Conventions and conferences is what you want. As a salesperson my problem with them has always been that people want to talk too much at them! Harder to tell who is serious.

I'm not just talking about conventions and conferences that your target market attend and you/your competitors rent booths at. Attend ones where your target market is doing the selling from their owns booths. Obviously don't approach if they have their own prospects to talk to and back off if someone else approaches, but as long as you're doing that they'll take your ear off during their downtime.

> What things about our [market/customers] will never change? Are we investing enough in those?

A seemingly obvious question but one that isn’t posed often enough. Open your eyes and play the long game, don’t waste too much time or money chasing what won’t be around in 3, 6, 12 months unless you absolutely have to.

Loved the list, really has my gears turning thinking about my own business strategy.

I recall reading The Robert Collier Letter Book when I was studying copywriting, and he had this quote about fads versus trends versus things that will never change.

It said that some products will always be needed, and gave an example : men will always need hats to wear in polite society.

Reading it 100 years later when societal norms have changed so much (and not only will you not see a single hat in a posh restaurant, they are even listed on the forbidden things of their dress codes) reinforced that there is no such thing as needs/products that "never change".

Also a fantastic point, what do we mean when we say ‘never change’ ? I think it was a bit near sighted for the book to use a fashion example, albeit a fashion example that had, at the time, been around for hundreds of years prior, but even 100 years later through its own mistakes the book is ironically teaching a whole new set of lessons through a retrospective lens. The lesson it’s teaching by being wrong is arguably more meaningful than the lesson it was trying to teach at the time of writing.

The pandemic caused a "never change" to happen in many businesses. There are many things unlikely to happen that could have high impact. Taken as a group, something unlikely yet high impact becomes likely (i.e. the Black Swan paradox).

And Black Swan events do happen, it’s like the fact that growing up my town got hit by a 100 year flood. Twice.

But in the wake of Covid when it comes to business analysis I think that we now have a different outlook on why is variable and what is not. We might have gotten a little too high and mighty with our assumptions.

There are still things that will never change about the base relationship you have with your customers if you have a viable business model though.

While a hat may be not an eternal feature of a nice restaurant, food likely is.

With the rise in popularity of delivery and people working on things like delivery drones, I can absolutely see a future where environment and food provision are different services offered by different companies, and people still calling the environment "restaurants".

RemindMe! 100 years :)

The irony is that he did use social norms as an example that will never change. However, if we change the example to something that will _really_ never change, it's still quite accurate: (wo)men will always need hats in cold weather.

And yet, when things freeze over where I am, I see a lot of people out and about without hats on.

Maybe the hat industry hasn't invested enough in marketing to them ;)

>(wo)men will always need hats in cold weather.

Women will always need yoga pants in all weather. There updated for modern times )

This is a very nice and comprehensive checklist. I find that many articles e.g. on creating a Lean Canvas are so buzzword-heavy, even pompous, that they are unbearable reads. This reads like a practical guide. Awaiting the next installment. Thank you.

Great collection of questions for a business with product market fit. Most of the questions focus on making existing operations more efficient.

One question that could be added to the first part: Customer & value props

Which pain of our customers does our product remove?

Yes. I, too, was thinking that the three most important questions should have been four, and that the fourth is essentially what you say here.

What are we really selling? (To put it another way, what are our customers really buying?). Hint: it's not the software, hardware, service, etc. It's rare for new businesses to have a good handle on this question, but the question is a critical one.

We (AI startup, $425k ARR, 15% MoM growth) just answered to every single question on the list:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245108

"UX is more than just UI. It’s the holistic user experience, including how people buy. How can we improve here? Features don’t create differentiation. Experiences do. Does [X] align well with marketing to leverage cycles? Does it drive behavior change for true differentiation?"

Nah fam this ain't it.

Is this guy able to answer any of these himselves? Or does he ask these in meetings to look smart?

OP here. Good feedback, thank you. I tried to combine too mich into this one and it came out muddled.

I reworked it, hopefully it's clearer now. I removed the bit about aligning to leverage marketing cycles, so I'll have to think more about that one and if it's meaningful enough to add back elsewhere.

I did my best to answer all the questions, and this one was terribly unclear.

However I think the other questions were useful and a handful sparked great insights. My answers for our startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245108

Don't let us hanging.

What's your version?

Good answers to such questions are worth a lot of money. Don't expect such answers shared casually, except in the most general, least actionable form.

I find a focus on uniqueness tricky. A lot times, firms within the same business line have a lot of commonalities between each other and products and services are quite fungible. The particular uniquenesses might not be worth much.

The uniqueness may not be in the product. It may be in the business practice. A truly customer-focused business is actually very rare (despite all of the marketing business engage in to convince us that they're "customer-focused"), for instance. That can be the differentiator.

Or maybe providing a common product/service in an unusually accessible or convenient way. Or providing a common product/service in a way that is tailored to a particular subgroup. And so forth.

It could be. When I looked into this closer at various places, internal and external uniqueness was often less than what management thought. I think it is pretty rare to have sufficient uniqueness that it truly matters.

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