

How to Build Relationships When Researching SaaS Product Ideas - danhodgins
http://www.saastimes.com/research-saas-product-ideas

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danhodgins
Many of the SaaS entrepreneurs I have spoke with have mentioned that
contacting prospects via cold emails or calls is very effective for getting
brief customer development interviews set up.

When these conversations are positioned as interviews rather than 'research'
or a 'survey' people tend to open up more about their biggest business
challenges. Creating such a high fidelity connection with customers is
difficult to achieve in any other way during the early days of market
validation, so pick up that phone and make some calls.

Better yet, get their permission to record the calls, and then post the
interview audio and transcript on your customer development blog!

This tactic has worked well for me.

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tchock23
A word to the wise for anyone on HN thinking of following the advice in this
post... Be careful not to venture into the realm of "sugging" (selling under
the guise of market research).

If you're going to interview people in a market as part of your customer
discovery and development process, then by all means do it. However, try to
resist the urge to sell them your solution at the end of the interview.

You'll likely find that people drop their guard when you ask them for their
opinions and ideas, which could lead to a business relationship at some point
in the future (when they're ready). You won't even need to "sell them" per se.
If you've discovered a real problem, they'll get back in touch with you.

The saying from the VC world applies in research as well - when you ask for
money, you get advice, when you ask for advice, you (sometimes) get money.

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danhodgins
This is bang on. I would not advise trying to sell your solution at the end of
a customer development interview, and perhaps not for weeks or even months
after. If you truly solve big pain points the time will come to ask for the
sale, but it's not after the first conversation.

Simply enjoy the conversation, ask them to tell you about the biggest
challenges in their business, and most people will open up and give you some
of the most valuable feedback you can get as an entrepreneur. It's much more
valuable than sitting in your basement and running an Adwords campaign to a
landing page. The depth, richness and quantity of feedback you get might
surprise you. You might even consider asking your prospect if you can publish
a transcript of the interview on your blog.

Publishing your customer development interviews (with your prospects'
permission) will give you near instant content for SEO (get it transcribed
with SpeechPad if you like), added value in the form of information for other
prospects in the industry, and insight into how they express their pain points
that you can inject back into your pitch and marketing messages.

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bobbles
Does anyone have a link to the story they talk about (getting 100%
conversion?)

~~~
aymeric
[http://www.whitetailsoftware.com/2011/07/how-i-
got-a-100-con...](http://www.whitetailsoftware.com/2011/07/how-i-
got-a-100-conversion-rate-cold-calling-prospects-for-customer-development/)

~~~
bobbles
Thanks

