How we saved our company with 100+ user interviews in a month.
3 remote founders. On a ticking clock. Figuring out what to build, why to build and for whom.
In Feb 2024, we had no revenue and no clue. We were building an AI copilot for "client management". We had little idea of what exact problem statement we were looking at and how much delta could we bring as founders. So we decided to keep talking to people till we figured it out.
And we've talked about our process of outreach to get calls and build that funnel here (link), but this time let's talk about how you get value from those interviews, qualify/disqualify ideas/markets really fast and get to the promised land of early revenue.
You want to be a cheetah in this process. 3 phases - crouch, pounce, chase. "Crouch" to get a view of the land, before "pouncing" and then "chasing fast" for the kill. So here's the story of how a remote team of 3 just entered into a market super-quick and learnt fast.
The Crouch
So we had no background in the domain we were quickly looking to validate our hypothesis in. Quick context, our company Recontact is building tools for UX researchers to help condense 100s of user interviews into actionable, well-cited insights. So we started reaching to people in the domain. We collectively, as a team, atleast 400+ cold emails, straight for 4 weeks and got our calls booked. (For more context on how - check this out - link).
Every week, we'd start by revisting who we wanted to talk to - and then Monday through Wednesday, we just reached out and booked our calls. Some days I'd get no response and then on 1 day, I had 10 customer discovery calls. Cast your net wide and you'll attract a lot of good people.
As we started learning more and more about the domain, we learnt what kind of roles we need to reach out to, where to find them - was it discord communities? Slack channels? Competitor websites' testimonials? linkedin roles - whatever it meant.
We just reached out to so many UX researchers that we learnt the language the people in the industry spoke. The events and newsletters they care about. We made some actually good people our UX gurus. And we formed whatsapp groups and linkedin chats with them. 5 people offered to test our tool to give feedback. 1 wrote a detailed report of the entire space just for us. People are nice, you just gotta ask the right way - (steve jobs said it not me - Steve Jobs video)
So we built our view of the land. We knew who to talk to, we knew where to find, we knew how to talk to them. Once we'd talked to over 60+ people and developed an acumen, is when the board was reset. Time to make a decision.
The pounce
60+ interviewees done - but what did you learn "across the calls"? What are the key patterns that you should be paying attention to? And that's a lot of work because you have a lot of bias for what some people said.
Hence, we used Recontact AI to process all our calls and within 2 minutes per call we had a powerfully created repository of information connected across all our calls.
As you can see, we too learnt from here, that "Miro integration" was the top thing which most people just expected because it was so ingrained into their workflow. So we went ahead and just built it, shipped it, got some eyeballs on it.
You got to talk about your product/problem/learnings publicly. We started doing more and more of it, much like this blog and got some really amazing people to trust us, believe in our company and actually be on our side. It builds credibility, shows your execution speed and you can also educate so many people with your learnings.
One thing we heavily did in this phase was dogfooding our own product. And that gives you so much insight into what the user's daily life looks like while using the product. You can actually show good data at product demos and make people go "Ahh!! I see how you're using it, I get it now". And then mention pricing. In the next 30 seconds, their face will give you the best reaction of how much do they actually care about solving the problem.
And just like that, 1 Wednesday eevening, I was feeling sad, doing outreach, feeling dejected about the company and that's when another founder in our workspace walked in. It was Braeden from Chesski, (link). And he totally related to the problem. 2 days later he became our 1st customer and we made our 1st $25 with Recontact. Here’s a picture with Braeden.
The Chase
We're entering chase now. The game is different again. We can't use our outreach strategy for user interviews, since we want to sell. The past week, we just had 300+ outreach requests and not a single sale. And then, we ended up selling to a totally different persona that came through inbound - "early stage founders".
We're still learning. A couple of helpful learnings our friend Akash taught us that now - we need to chase customers willing to pay higher ticket sizes, and say you already have built a feature when they ask for it as a decision making factor in the sale. Then just go build it fast - anyways diligence takes a week. "Make yourself seem bigger than you appear" is what he says. Do that with a cool landing page, couple of testimonials. That helps.
Closing thoughts
So here's where we're at - should we chase the ticket size and ignore the inbounds from founders or focus on reaching out to them instead? That's TBA. But we're going to be reaching out to our warmer leads from our built network now and see if they're interested in doing a PoC.
If there's 1 word you want to take back from this blog, is remember the word "cheetah". Crouch, pounce, chase, kill. Either the idea is killing it or you kill the idea and restart the cycle. Until next time.