Don't skip customer research: a tasty analogy

Let’s say that you’re going to make a meal for some kids you’ve never met. You think to yourself: “well, everyone knows that kids love spaghetti, right? I loved spaghetti as a kid!”

So, you make spaghetti! You combine some noodles and some red sauce—no problem!

Then, it turns out that the kids you made spaghetti for have much more specific spaghetti-related demands:

• One likes spaghetti noodles with butter, no spaghetti sauce at all, so she won’t eat yours.
• Another likes spaghetti with only a tiny dollop of spaghetti sauce, so she also won’t eat yours.
• Another kid declares that the spaghetti and sauce have to be served in separate bowls, so he won’t eat yours.
• One kid tries your spaghetti but decides that he doesn’t like your spaghetti sauce; he only likes his Grandma’s spaghetti sauce. He stops eating yours.
• All the kids demand parmesan cheese. Parmesan cheese is something you never even thought about!

You had almost all the right parts and pieces for a meal they’d happily eat, but you assembled it the wrong way and missed one requirement altogether! And now nobody will eat your spaghetti, and everyone is hungry.

Imagine that meal was your startup idea! You complete your effort only to learn that you didn’t quite understand your audience’s needs.

That’s exactly why customer research is so important for founders. If your spaghetti meal was your app idea instead, you would have invested a lot more time and budget in making an app that nobody wants than a spaghetti dinner nobody will eat!

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Customer research means better understanding your customer

Customer research can take on a lot of different forms, but the essential definition of it is a formal effort to learn about your startup's customers in such a way that you can better understand them. When founders better understand their customers':

• preferences
• attitudes
• values
• motivations
• behaviors

They're better able to have empathy for their actual needs. Customer research can be either quantitative or qualitative, which just means that the data collected can come back in either words or numbers. That data then reveals themes, and themes can work together to form insights. Data, themes, and insights drive product design and development decisions far better than personal preference, guessing, or gut instinct.

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Customer research takes the guesswork out of what to build

Gathering customer research data would tell you what to change to make the most kids (in the case of the spaghetti dinner) happy. If you learned that 90% of the kids would be happy if you just didn't combine the ingredients before they got there for the meal, imagine how different your outcome would have been!

Customer research gives you the tools you need to have confidence in your next move. Without it, you're just taking your best guess on what's right.

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Being a customer yourself doesn't count as customer research

Maybe you are a part of the audience you're trying to solve a problem for! Or you're so close to the audience (ahem, you have a small spaghetti-eater at home), that you've got a strong point-of-view.

That's a start!

But you're still an "N of 1," as they say in the wide world of clinical trials. It essentially means that you're a single case study. You might say "but, my kid loves spaghetti!" Statistically, your kid, the "N of 1," is anecdotal at best—it doesn't represent your whole population.

When founders come from the the audience they are trying to solve a problem for, they can think their direct experience is enough insight to know the right solutions, and the right incarnation of the solutions. Founders whom are SMEs (subject matter experts) in their industries are absolutely insightful; they are also biased toward their own point-of-view.

Having a large volume of insights helps researchers identify themes in individual points of view. And that's how we extrapolate insights that go beyond numerous "Ns of 1."

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Passion and opportunity don't count as customer research either

Founders can also fall into the trap of letting their belief in their idea and their passion for it stand in for audience research. (I know kids love spaghetti. My kid loves it; I loved it when I was a kid! I make great spaghetti!) They trust their perception of the idea—and their passion for it—so much that they forego this very important step in the innovation process.

Some founders believe their understanding of an opportunity tells a big enough story about what their customer thinks and how their customer will behave that they focus their efforts on only understanding the opportunity space rather than the actual people who exist within that space.

Example: you could have invested all the time in the world in researching children's meals, different types of spaghetti noodles, different types of spaghetti sauces, different preparation methodologies, you name it! But if you didn't interview kids to test your belief (kids love spaghetti!), you'd still miss what your audience's needs actually are.

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Customer research helps founders avoid expensive mistakes

Sometimes, the reason founders skip customer research is because they can’t afford to do "proper" customer research. We’ve found that perception to be flawed. What’s actually true is that it's expensive to build something nobody wants!

Imagine the price of having cooked that spaghetti meal expecting that hundreds of thousands of kids would want your specific spaghetti preparation only to find out that kids, in general, have their own definition of what spaghetti is and how they like it. That’s more expensive than finding some kids to talk to about spaghetti first!

"Proper" customer research can be done a bunch of different ways—indeed, some more expensive than others. But the price you pay and the risk you incur for doing no customer research is much greater.

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When you have it in your head that what you dish out is going to be a hit, it can be tempting to get to cooking without consulting anybody. You may be close to the problem already or feel like you don't have the money, but understanding your customers' needs upfront takes the risk out of making them happy.