

Ask HN: Interview questions for a better Product Hypothesis? - sdrinf

On Venture Hack's Customer Development presentation[1], Customer Discovery starts out with a product hypothesis.<p>However, as they say, it's "a capital mistake to theorize without data"; and I believe if the goal is limited to "creating a viable online business", and we have a target market set -say, "professionals doing professional stuff"[2]- we can do better.<p>By asking well-phrased, well-framed questions to a small (but statistically significant) partition of the target market, we can pull out product hypothesizes right from the market.<p>So, my question is: which questions to ask, if our goal is to limit the answers to have good scaling characteristics?<p>Why you should care: finding an answer to this problem would contribute to massively de-risking startup creation.<p>[1] http://www.slideshare.net/venturehacks/customer-development-4-customer-discovery-part-1<p>[2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-business-on-5-hours-a-week/
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lnp
From linked slides it seems, that at the beginning is listening. And for that
the best questions are:

1\. What is X all about? 2\. What I need to know to really understand X?

It also seems, that Customer Development is not about finding the perfect
product hypothesis in one shot, on the contrary - the initial hypothesis is
just the starting point, things you learn on the way is what matters. Just
like with dancing, it will be better after some dancing, no need for over-
thinking it or looking for a perfect steps. It's more about expressing
yourself.

That said optimization and automation, a heuristic or even better an
algorithm, that will reliably and repeatably take some customers and output
brilliant business ideas would be a nice thing to have. But it won't reduce
startup risk, not massively for sure, because 'executing' alone is more risky
than 'executing on a wrong idea'.

Going back to questions.

3\. What do you want?

Because sometimes the problems in given industry are very well defined and
understood. And even the cliché answer "a faster horse" isn't really useless,
you just have to go little further asking...

4\. Why?

... a couple of times. Next an obvious candidates will be a "profiling
questions":

5\. Where are time and money (and resources, attention, pain, fear...) in X?

Now, form a different angle:

6\. What in X is worth spending money on? And what is not (because of
utility/price ratio)?

I have a problem with question that will filter out problems that won't make a
scalable startup, maybe because scalability is property of a solution not of a
problem?

It's far from complete, but above should already give some hints about what
can be done.

Learn more "startup patterns" to spot more potential chances for business.

------
skmurphy
In "Four Steps to the Epiphany" Steve Blank defines an earlyvangelist as
"someone who has spent money to develop a solution to a problem but is still
unhappy with the result." I would use this to model you to identify which
professionals to have a further conversation with: "what problem(s) have spent
time or money on in the last year to reduce or eliminate where you are still
unhappy with your current solution?"

I would not worry about the "scaling characteristics" as much initially as
finding a group of professionals who share the problem and would reference
each other's decision to use your product. This does not mean that they have
to know each other but that an endorsement, case study, or testimonial that
describes their background and how they benefited would influence a buy
decision. All innovations start in a niche, some go scale beyond that, but
none scale without starting in a niche.

For an elaboration on sources of innovation see
[http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/02/15/paul-grahams-six-
pri...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/02/15/paul-grahams-six-principles-
for-making-new-things/) which includes checklists from Paul Graham, Peter
Drucker, Gary Hamel, and Bob Bemer the inventor of ASCII.

------
jamesshamenski
At the earliest stages, you should just be identifying the problem. Interview
general folks in your industry and ask, 'would you like a simpler XXX'. 'what
is the most painful ZZZ'. 'what would get you to try a new service'.

From that small set, draw up your idea and re-interview those folks. if they
like it, you should present the same drawings to a wider scope and see if it
still has gravity.

The next step is to test the market and publish your solution through adsense
. I'm unaware of another method to test an idea as well as adsense. it would
be great to hear some other ways of testing an audience before building.

~~~
sdrinf
You misunderstood the question completely. simpler XXX, and painful ZZZ
_presumes_ an existing problem hypothesis. However, past data points of both
my own, and most startupers clearly shows, that our problem hypothesises
generally suck at conceptual level.

This is what I mean by de-risking: I want to take out this unnecessary risk of
blind guessing, and delegate hypothesis discovery to those _with the data_.

~~~
endtime
I didn't understand your question either. It feels very...jargon-heavy.

It sounds like your question is: if you know who you want to sell to, can you
just ask them what they want rather than polling them for feedback on
different ideas? Honestly, I think people often don't know what they want
because they don't understand which things can be made simpler. That's why
someone with a different perspective (hackers) can learn about a market, have
some new insight, and come up with something disruptive.

~~~
lnp
> learn about a market, have some new insight, and come up with something
> disruptive

This, how to this without the magic?

What are the (universal) questions you would ask to potential customers to
come up with a problem worth solving?

------
sdrinf
This question constrains the possibility space by 2 factors:

-It has to tap into the "common headaches" of the target market (say, barbers, teachers, or small restaurant owners), so scalability is given

-It constrains the headaches to those, that are mallable to software solutions

Some early candidates:

"What aching problems do barbers have, that would be a computer's job?"

"In a futuristic society, what things would you except computers to do, that
you're currently handling manually -but want to get rid of?"

