What Customer Discovery Questions To Ask To Validate Pain Points

What are Customer Discovery Questions to explore Pain Points and how to validate assumptions about customers’ problems by conducting informal customers interviews? A practical guide and how-to.

Speaking with customers from a very early stage of a new product definition is an extremely powerful, informative and cheap tool to validate assumptions on customer segments and their problems. Customer discovery interviews will also equip you with insights to define a Unique Value Proposition for a product for which there is an actual market need.

However, it is crucially important to avoid spending precious time without getting to know the truth from customers. The biggest risk is to collect either false positives (what a great idea) or false negatives (this is never going to work).

Let’s review together how to conduct the actual interviews, which are the questions to avoid and which are the best ones to use.

Rob Fitzpatrick has written a great book full of practical tips on how to run Customer development interviews, and we really recommend buying it (get it from Amazon here).

The book is extremely practical and quick to read (just 150 pages long), and it guides the reader through successful techniques to identify early adopters, to let them tell the truth about their pain points, and to get a commitment when we finally get to show them our proposition.

We keep consulting this book all the time when running interviews or sending out cold emails to secure meetings, so it’s really a must have in the early stage entrepreneur toolbox.

Two Golden Rules to Investigate Customers Pain Points

1. Never tell them about your new product idea.
   This is not about being secretive. The reason is that in general people tend to be polite, and anyone will say an idea is great if we are annoying enough about it. This will produce a big fat false positive.

   So when interviewing customers you should give them as little information as possible about the product or business idea, while at the same time you will still be still nudging the conversation in a useful direction.

   An example is to start the interview with a very broad picture of what you are trying to solve, at a very high level. e.g. “we are working on a service for people who love watching TV but are annoyed by the way current services work today“. It says nothing about what you have in mind, but at least it gives a little bit of context to the person participating to the interview.

2. Always ask customers at least one question that has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.
   This is a pain. Everyone is in love with their idea, and the last thing we want to know is that it’s not a good one.

   Entrepreneurship has magic power, it triggers positive energies and it leaves people with an irresistible willingness to start doing things.

   That’s great, but all these positive energies can easily become negative when they not channelled in the correct direction. And by negative we mean: having quit a day job, having spent most of our savings, having re-mortgaged the house and ultimately having trouble explaining to our life partner, family and friends why we have done all of that and we haven’t been able to succeed. That’s awful.

   That’s because it’s much better to know if an idea is flawed (i.e. there is no market need for it) as soon as possible.

Now that we know the golden rules, what questions should we ask to customers?
When investigating customers pain points, we should aim at getting information about specific behaviours that occurred in the past instead of generic opinions about the future.

Questions to Avoid When Validating Customer Pain Points

• Do you think it’s a good idea?

• Would you buy this product?

• How much would you pay for it?

• Would you pay £x for a product that did this?

It should be quite clear already why those four questions are “bad”.

They assume we have presented our idea to the customer, and we trying to get their opinion on that. Unfortunately, even if they said “I would definitely buy it!“, that won’t necessarily mean that they will do it. That’s because it’s an opinion about the future, not a behaviour that occurred in the past. And it’s another false positive.

Questions to Use When Validating Customer Pain Points

These are the steps to effectively validate pain points:

• Elaborate on the problems you are willing to solve, one by one. While doing that, put them in context so that the customer can relate to them

• Ask them how to show you how they currently solve each problem

• Let them talk about what they love and hate about it

• Ask which other tools/approach they are using

• Ask how did they find out about the current solution

• Ask them how much they pay for it

• Ask them what happens if they fail to solve each problem

The questions above are extremely powerful and informative.

By asking them how they solve the problem today and what they love and hate, we will get to know the pain and gain points for the jobs they are willing to do. It might be that customers don’t actually do these things or they don’t care at all about the problems you are willing to solve. That’s cool, you have learnt that they are not the right customer segment. The good news is that you haven’t spent much money till now.

By asking them what tools or services they use today, we will learn how big is the problem. Because if they haven’t bothered exploring or finding a solution, it means the problem is not really a problem.

By asking where did they hear about the current solutions they are using, we will get useful info on the marketing channels that we can use later, when the product is ready.

By asking about how much they spend for the solution, we will get an anchor for future pricing.

And finally, by asking what happens if they fail, we will learn again how big is the problem, and understand if the target segment is the right one.

After you have described the problems you are willing to solve with your business idea, here are a few good questions to ask during customer development interviews, and why.

– Could you talk me through last time that happened? This should be the very first question. It’s even better if the interview is conducted in context (so in the location where the problem occurs) so that customers can show us how they do it. By watching someone doing a task we will see clearly where the problems and inefficiencies are, not what customers think about that.

– What are the implications if you fail to solve the problem? This will help to understand the size of the pain of a problem, very helpful to prioritise customer segments.

– What else have you tried? If customers haven’t looked for ways of solving the problem already, there is a good chance that they won’t bother about what we are going to launch.

– What’s wrong with what you’ve tried already? Useful to explore weaknesses in competitors proposition.

– How much are you currently spending to solve the problem? This will allow to explore competition and how much customers are paying for them in order to have a price anchor.

– Is there anything else I should have asked? This is a must-have, and should always come at the end of the problem list. People want to help us, we should just give them an excuse. The objective is to explore what we still don’t know.

Final must have question: Who else should I talk to? Recruiting customers for interviews might be a pain, and might take time especially if we are targeting a market which is quite new for our background. Every interview should finish with this question, as it will create a snowball effect and we will find it much easier to recruit target customers to speak with. If they don’t do intro, take anything they have said with an extra grain of salt (read more about how to recruit customers to interview).

One last point about customer suggestions.

Certain customers just won’t resist from telling us how their dream service would work and suggest new features.

So let’s get this straight: it’s our job is to define how to solve customers’ problems.

As a rule of thumb, we should never accept feature requests or let customers dictate our roadmap. However, feature requests are still a big opportunity to learn.

So in case someone tells us how they would see the service working, we should take a deep breath, and use this opportunity to dig beneath the underlying need and understand why they requested it by asking:
– “Why do you want that?”
– “What would that let you do?”
– “How are you coping today without that feature?”

Want to learn even more?

If you haven’t enough about Customer Discovery interviews yet and want to learn more, you can check out this very interesting video where the main concepts are explained in a very clear way. Enjoy!