# How to Conduct a Great User Interview – Chris Achard – MicroConf Starter 2018

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_8Y67mARpo
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 2670
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/J_8Y67mARpo

---

[0:00] [Music]

[0:07] [Music] [Applause] alright I'm Chris and I'm going to be talking about conducting conducting a great user interview now we've already heard today about why you might want to do this so I'm not gonna try to convince you I'm just trying to give you a lot of tactics from things I've learned and things that I've watched in red so first I think it's really important you think about your goal for user interviews otherwise what's the point now we've heard validate an idea that's certainly a goal but one trick you can play in your mind is to switch that to invalidate an idea the reason is because people are going to be nice to you

[0:44] they're gonna be generally supportive the people you talk to are going to seem interested and you can take that for validation but be careful because that's not giving you money that's just being interested right so if you switch that to invalidate your idea then when someone's a little bit negative then you can take that as a success right yay I'm wrong and what we're really trying to do is learn and adapt and I'm going to talk about what we can change and what the end goal really is is to find product market fit so that's important enough I'm going to talk about it that's very green I'm going to talk about it before

[1:15] I talk about the user interview I mean it's not just interest like I talked about because people are going to be nice to you generally the true test is of course dollars but that's always hard to get at least at the beginning so what you're looking for in a user interview is a switch from you pushing to them pulling a little bit and what this feels like is you can see the user imagining in their head their life with your product and then planning for it I've been on user calls where they're like oh once I can do that then I can do these three other things but I got to tell

[1:44] this guy to do this other thing and so that's them planning out the steps about using your product which doesn't exist yet that's a really good sign the things you can test and adjust and user interviews are of course your problem what you're trying to solve this might be abstract like I'm bored so I want to play a game right or I might be really concrete like I need to send out invoices but figure out what the problem is you're trying to solve the product that's what you build to address it the market that includes who you're selling it to that includes their price point if

[2:11] you're doing b2b sales that might be the person you're selling it to is different than the person using it that's all part of your market and really important and often overlooked is your wording so you want to be using the words to describe your product that your customers use to describe their problems don't use words that are like marketing speak or tech really technical listen really listen to the words that your users use to ascribe their own problems okay finding people to talk to you how do you find people to talk to you the first one which are all immediately going to ignore is your current network don't

[2:41] ignore this it doesn't have to be directly in your space just like casually talk to friends write about what you're planning to do I've been really surprised at the number of times I've been talking about something I want to do and they're like oh yeah my uncle owns a business in that space or oh yeah I talked to someone last week and you might be interested right you don't know everyone your network knows so just casually talk to people on your network you'll be surprised where it goes the next long term but really good strategy is to become a visible expert in your space this means talking

[3:08] at meetups starting a blog when you're an expert in your space it becomes much much easier to find people to talk to you that's hard long-term conferences events and meetups are really really good but don't just go to networking events go to the places where your users go to learn new things so I used to do software for healthcare and there's one giant conference and if you want to sell software in healthcare you go to that giant conference that's just what you do so find that place that you go where your users are going to be next is cold emails we have a whole attendee talk next about cold emails so

[3:40] I won't say too much but I will say a few things one keep it short and make it easy for them to respond if it's really really complicated that they're not going to want to respond to your email so just make it easy for them to say yes also find a way to personally connect do user research right and the more you can connect with them personally the higher the response rate I got really good responses when I was targeting small businesses in my area and I said I'm also an entrepreneur in Indianapolis that got really you know positive feedbacks I knew I wasn't just some random person I was in a hometown

[4:09] also follow up people do not do this enough because they send a cold email the person doesn't respond and they immediately think that they hate your guts right not true they're just busy and so one of my favorite responses is did you get my last email because it gives people you know a reason to respond to you again and a lot of times when I send that email it's like oh yeah I meant to respond to you I really want to talk to you I was just busy so make sure you send some at least one follow-up probably more all right conducting the interview I'm gonna say in person is

[4:39] better than video it's better than phone and the bed and that's better than email email is okay for like if you just get a single response from someone like you know what do you like better one two or three but otherwise I think it's really good to see the person's face because you can see their pauses you can see how they're thinking what they're doing and that's really valuable that you don't get on the other platforms also asked to record the talk it's gonna go really fast you're not gonna have enough time to take all the notes and you really want to be focusing on engaging the

[5:08] person so if you ask to record it you can watch it later and review it alright first I'm gonna talk about what not to do in an interview first don't talk very much the whole point is to get the user talking so if you talk too much and you're gonna overwhelm the conversation and not learn anything also don't put ideas into their heads remember we're trying to get the wording that they use to describe their problems if you put ideas in their heads then they're gonna think about that instead of describing their own problems also don't describe your solution which is going to be really really hard I know

[5:38] because I do it all the time and it's tough at the end maybe you can talk about your solution a little bit but remember you want them to describe their problem in their words not your solution I'm also this was mentioned before don't ask for what they want if you've ever like been with a big group and try to figure out where to go for lunch people don't know what they want it's it's really hard so don't ask for what they want finally don't ask just yes-or-no questions you want to get them talking a lot and so if you ask yes or no questions like do you have that

[6:06] problem if they say no well then where are you you know if they say yes then you don't have really any more information either so you can change that too how does that problem rank among your day-to-day priorities then if they say it doesn't rank then the obvious follow-up question is okay what are your day-to-day priorities and if they say it's really important one or two then that gives you a lot more information than just yeah I have that problem also don't say does that sound like a good solution remember they're gonna be nice to you supportive so they'll be like yeah that's an awesome solution but that doesn't mean they're

[6:36] gonna buy it right and said you could ask why might that work or not work for their business that gives them an out that gives them an easy out to say well yeah that wouldn't really work for these reasons right and then you work on those reasons another yes or no question that you'd want to try to avoid now is do you know anyone else I could talk to now you definitely want to ask for referrals I've whole slide about that but you could change that too who were to two or three other people who might be interested to talk about this now they might still say I don't know anybody but

[7:05] like they can't just say no immediately they have to think about saying no right also if they say no and I can say this again later if they say no to say that's okay I'll follow up in a couple days to get more to get the referrals okay so what can you ask about the first is factual questions like how big is your company how long have you been in business so these are like demographic pieces of information next is past behavior people are really good at recalling what they've done in the past they like telling stories so you want to hear stories about what they've done

[7:32] related to your problem next is how they operate now you really want to get a good feel for their cadence what they do every day what's their week to week priorities also they're not good at telling you what they do want but you can't ask what they don't want or what they don't like people are really good at saying like yeah I don't really care about that that's something to ask next is underutilized I think is what do they see others doing because that's like the aspirational question like what do you want to be doing in the future what do you see others doing that's good and pay

[8:02] attention to the words they use because that's the words you're gonna use in your marketing that's the aspirational words that you're gonna use in your marketing and whatever they respond with digging deeper some of the question you want to understand why and some of the things you can say are like interesting tell me more about that or how does that work or describe how something or what was a time when the whole idea is you're getting them to talk about their experiences talk about their process and you want to understand why they operate the way they operate alright if you do this for enough time you're gonna find

[8:32] competing products don't despair that's a good thing that means there's a market and what you're trying to do it's actually really really valuable information so you can ask what they like about the products what they don't like about the products what would it take for them to switch and remember use the words that they use in your marketing what would it take for them to switch is a great question to ask because whatever they say that's what you want to use in your marketing okay at near the end of the call ask for referrals warm leads can convert much better than cold leads I was trying to

[9:03] go through my history and try to figure out how much better I got to something like five or ten times better more leads convert better and it doesn't have to be on the call it could be if they say no I don't really know anyone say that's okay I'll follow up in a couple days to see if you know you've thought of anyone and you can't ask for an intro email that's where they will email both you and the referral and those respond much better also those have almost 100% response rate would I do that okay after the interview say thank you you want to be very very grateful of the

[9:35] time and also follow-up send a follow-up email say one thing I'd like to say is I'll definitely let definitely let you know and have more to show you that gives you an excuse to follow up with them later it tells them that in the future I'm gonna talk to you again and it kind of prepares them for that also make changes to those things your product your problem your market your wording especially if you do these interviews and you don't make changes then there's no point so make sure you give yourself time after the interview to think about the changes you're gonna make and those four things and then do

[10:08] more interviews until you stop learning new things everyone wants like a number how many interviews do I have to do and it's gonna be different from market to market if you want a number I'm gonna say ten do ten interviews just because that's easy to remember but really you want to do interviews until you stop learning new things also you don't want to do interviews just once do interviews at the beginning and then maybe you know three six months later you've iterated a lot do interviews again right maybe the markets changed maybe your wording has changed and you get more information maybe you have an audience now and you

[10:37] can talk to more people so do interviews more than once if you want some videos for more information first of all the micro comp videos are great at this if you go on the micro comm website then they have all the past videos look at those but these two are especially helpful for this topic and they're both by Y Combinator one is how to run a user interview and the other is how to find product market fit and these I think are excellent they're not there by Y Combinator but they're not especially for like VC based companies they're great for just regular companies too I mean if these URLs or long

[11:10] have a short URL so there's a short URL all my slides are there you can also send me an email and I thought of this last night we'll see if it's a good idea I really want you to get success with user interviews so I want you if you're thinking about sending cold emails but you're worried about it find 10 emails 10 emails of people that you think you can inter send emails to it's not that hard if you can't find 10 emails of direct prospects then find 10 bloggers who blog about things and email them and if you can't find that then send me an

[11:38] email I will find you 10 emails for your niche that will write the email for you and so you can just send it out all right that's my offer for you guys [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt