How to learn what you don't know you don't know

Despite your confidence in your nascent opportunity, there are – if you’ll admit it – a few things you know you don’t know about your idea and the customers who, if you are successful, will buy it.

What you know you don’t know

What do you know you don’t know about your idea and about customers’ likely response? You probably know you don’t really know at least a few important things:

• whether customers, or enough customers, will buy what you propose to offer;
• whether they will pay the price you think they will pay;
• whether you’ve designed your goods or services in the best way to maximize their appeal, whether you have got the offering just right;
• which target market is the most promising one – you probably lack the resources to go after everyone, so where should you start?

There’s also lots of other information you know you don’t know, above and beyond the customer issues, issues that are dealt with in other parts of this book. The focus in this chapter, though, is on customers and their needs. More specifically, this chapter will show you how to interview prospective users of whatever it is you plan to offer, whether a good or a service, to help you answer some of the key questions that you know you don’t know, like those bulleted above. More importantly, though, you’ll learn how to get customers to tell you what you don’t know to ask them!

What you don’t know you don’t know

Why is learning what you don’t know you don’t know – or what your customers don’t know they don’t know – important? If customers already know they need what you plan to offer, they’ve probably already told someone about it, including your competitors. Many of the most exciting breakthroughs that entrepreneurs bring to market are innovations that customers haven’t known they needed. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ we hear, after such breakthroughs come to market.

Did anyone tell Steve Jobs that they needed a personal computer? Did anyone tell Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the developers of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet application for PCs, that such an application for the Apple II was needed?2 Ditto for the first word processor, for email, for the Web, and so on. Did anyone tell British Airways, the operator of the London Eye, the huge observation wheel – sort of a high-tech Ferris wheel – that’s a magnet for tourists and London locals alike, that such an attraction would pack them in on the South Bank of the River Thames?

What most of these innovations have in common is that they resolved some sort of customer pain. That is, they made it much easier – or better or faster or more efficient – for customers either to do something they already did, perhaps quite differently (PCs, spreadsheets, word processors, email) or to do something they had not done before (bring information quickly and conveniently to one’s desktop; or see London, a low-rise city for the most part, from a panoramic bird’s eye vantage point).

Where was the customer pain that these innovations resolved? PCs, once relevant applications software came along – word processors, spreadsheets, and so on – made certain kinds of office work dramatically easier and faster and less frustrating to do and to revise. As Dan Bricklin later noted, ‘VisiCalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes and let them become much more creative.’ Email resolved, among other things, the customer pain of always getting people’s voicemail and wasting time trying fruitlessly to connect with them. Of course, email has now engendered its own customer pain, as it consumes increasing numbers of hours in people’s workdays! These sorts of innovations are painkillers in that their main reason for being is to resolve customer pain.

The World Wide Web and the London Eye, on the other hand, are enablers – innovations that enable people to do things they have not really been able to do previously.

One way to think about entrepreneurs’ roles is as the developers of new painkillers and enablers. In doing so, however, it helps if the entrepreneur really understands (for painkillers) the customer’s pain. For enablers, the trick is to discern whether what’s enabled is something that customers would actually embrace. Either way, interviews are good tools for gaining such understanding. To the extent that you can find, in the arena where your business seeks to play, some sort of customer pain that others have not recognized and found a way to address, you’ll have an opportunity that’s miles ahead of the mundane ones that everybody else is pursuing.

Fortunately, there’s a technique that can be borrowed from the social sciences3 that turns out to be a great way to do all this. It’s especially useful for entrepreneurs trying to find ways to solve customers’ needs, including the kinds of needs that customers don’t yet know they have, or cannot easily articulate. It’s called the long interview, and this chapter will tell you how to do it.

The long interview

You’ve probably already talked with lots of people about your idea for a new venture. If so, you’re off to a great start. If you are like most entrepreneurs, though, chances are you’ve made one or more of the following mistakes that will have limited what you’ve learned from these conversations.

• You’ve let your enthusiasm show through. Doing so is great for selling, but it can limit the amount of honest feedback you’ll get when your purpose is to learn rather than to sell. Most people don’t like to disagree in the face of enthusiasm like yours.
• Rather than asking first about the customer’s needs, any shortcomings or unmet or poorly met needs in the way they do things now, you’ve jumped right into ‘me’ or ‘my idea’. Doing so too quickly can inhibit your learning about alternative solutions to the customer’s problem, some of which might be slight tweaks of your idea or even something completely different, and perhaps even better than your initial idea.
• You’ve asked leading questions: ‘Do you think this is faster?’ The implication that it’s faster will prompt some people to simply agree, whether they’ve really thought about it or not.
• You’ve asked questions that can be answered with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Such questions tend to close off the conversation, rather than keeping it open to see where it might lead.

The long interview technique we propose here addresses each of these problems. It serves two key purposes:

• it lets you seek answers about the things you know you don’t know;
• but first, and more importantly, it encourages the customer to tell you things you do not know to ask and that they would not otherwise think to tell you, helping you learn what you don’t know you don’t know.

Let’s use an example to bring the technique to life. Suppose you are an aspiring entrepreneur. You love yogurt and find it a healthy and delicious snack, good throughout the day whenever you need a pick-me-up. You’ve been mixing yogurt with fruit juices and other nutritious ingredients and drinking it as a beverage, rather than eating it with a spoon. There might be a business here, you think.

Planning the long interview

To conduct a fruitful long interview to better understand your prospective customers and their pain, you need first to construct an interview guide, which is easily done on a single sheet of paper. Doing so involves two steps:

• reviewing what you think you know about your idea and its use;
• reviewing what you know you don’t know.

What do you think you know about your drinking yogurt? Your drinking yogurt is:

• delicious;
• nutritious;
• thick like a smoothie;
• convenient and easy to consume;
• easily combined with fruit or other flavours;
• good between meals;
• good for breakfast;
• good for dessert;
• women seem to love it;
• needs refrigeration;
• and more.

What might you think you don’t know about drinking yogurt?

• to whom it should be targeted;
• how thick or thin it should be;
• what flavours people will want;
• how it should be packaged;
• how you should price it;
• where it should be sold;
• how it should be pitched: thirst-quenching, as an energy source, as a party drink, like beer, as a between-meal snack;
• and more.

Preparing these lists serves two purposes. The lists will provide some structure for your interview, hence your learning. Further, by acknowledging what you think you know and don’t know, they will help you remain distant enough from your own assumptions so you can learn. The lists will also help you identify aspects or relationships between yogurt and life that have perhaps not previously been addressed by the current marketers of yogurt in your market: drinking yogurt with vitamin additives, for example.

With these lists now in hand, you’re ready to develop your interview guide. In fact, you are almost done, though you’ve barely started. Your interview guide will consist of four elements.

1 A brief introduction and some opening biographical questions to put the customer at ease.

2 A few (probably just two) ‘grand tour’ questions: broad, open-ended questions to encourage the respondent to tell you, from their own perspective, two things:

• everything that’s relevant to them about the occasions in which they might consume drinking yogurt – note, though, that this question is not about your product at all, it’s about them, their attitudes, motivations, and behaviour;
• everything that comes to their mind – not yours – about your drinking yogurt concept.

3 The third element consists of three ‘floating’ prompts for each of the interview drivers. There are three kinds of these floating prompts, which you can use at any point in the interview to get the respondent to say more about something they’ve just mentioned:

• raising your eyebrows following something the respondent has just said (maybe they’ve suggested that it would be good to be able to drink vitamin supplements), a topic which you’d like them to go deeper into and tell you more about;
• repeating a word the respondent has just said – ‘Vitamin supplements?’ – with a questioning tone.
• saying, ‘What do you mean, vitamin supplements?’

The purpose of these floating prompts is to get the respondent to tell you more about what they’ve just mentioned. It might be a topic that’s already on your lists of what you think you know or don’t know, but go ahead and listen to what they have to say, so they can either confirm or refute your current knowledge. Or it might be something not on your lists (e.g. vitamin supplements). These are the nuggets of gold: things you don’t know you don’t know. You are hoping to glean from your interviews the one or two of these nuggets that might turn into revolutionary ideas that will reinvent your thinking, and perhaps the yogurt category (or the vitamin category!)

4 The fourth element of your interview guide comprises your lists of what you think you know and don’t know, determined earlier, preceded by the phrase, ‘What about . . .’ or occasionally ‘What if . . .’. These are your ‘planned’ prompts. Here, the purpose is to get the respondent to talk about each of the topics about which you already think you know or don’t know the answers. But here, at least, you know the questions to ask! You will use these planned prompts to cover any of these issues that the respondent does not touch upon as a result of your one or two grand tour questions, though many if not most of them will undoubtedly be addressed there.

5 Finally, to complete your interview guide, there are two other kinds of useful prompts, each beginning with ‘What about . . .’ or ‘What if . . .’.

• Contrast prompts. Use these to ensure that all the alternatives are fully examined. The key word in contrast prompts is usually ‘not’. For example, ‘What if it’s not for between meals?’
• Exceptional incident prompts. Use these to explore non-obvious uses or situations where your idea may have utility. For example, ‘What about not drinking it at all?’

Here the purpose is to get your respondent to stretch their thinking in ways neither you – nor they! – had previously thought of. You may find some more nuggets of gold this way, too, more things you don’t know you don’t know.

Conducting the long interview

With a basic understanding of the interview now, you are ready to pick up the phone and line up some appointments. But there are a few more questions you’ll have to address in order to do so and to conduct the interviews.

• Whom should I interview?
• Face-to-face or on the telephone?
• How many interviews should I conduct?
• How should I present myself in the interviews?
• Should I record the interview, or simply write very fast?
• Can I update my interview guide after I’ve done the first interviews and learned a few things?

Choosing respondents

Should you interview your friends, or strangers, you may ask? One problem with friends is that they are likely to tell you what they think you want to hear. Perfect strangers are better, and you want a very diverse pool, sampling as widely as possible, so you are more likely to hear diverging views. Should you interview experts, or novices? In general, experts are too knowledgeable, and too wedded to the way things are now. It’s good to include a few experts in your sample, but they should not dominate it, unless your area of enquiry is so specialized that experts are the only realistic people to talk to.

Face-to-face or by telephone?

If you can get people to meet with you, that’s far better. They’ll talk longer than they will on the phone and you’ll get their full attention. In my experience, an hour to an hour and a half is a common length, even from a short interview guide like the example shown here, which means you’ll learn more than you would in a shorter phone call. But if the phone is the best you can get, take it. The technique – OK, not the raised eyebrows – will still work just fine.

How many interviews should I conduct?

Experienced researchers who use this technique find that the answers begin to get repetitive once the number of interviews gets into the teens. By about interview number 20, in my experience, you’ll have heard virtually everything there is to hear. It’s time to stop, draw your conclusions, and get on with the rest of your seven domains analysis.

What about my interview persona?

Here’s the hard part. You don’t want to appear too clever, like you know all the answers – in fact, quite the opposite. Your interview persona should be benign and agreeable, not aggressive; accepting of whatever they say, but curious enough to ask your endless floating and planned prompts; a bit dim or naïve, to encourage them to enlighten you with all they know. With this sort of persona, you will present no danger that they will lose face in any way.

What about recording the interviews?

My experience is that people are happy to have you record what they say, as long as you tell them their remarks will remain confidential. The small micro-cassette recorders available at office supply stores are great for this purpose. I’ve found that buying a plug-in microphone makes the sound quality better, thus making the tapes much easier to transcribe when you go back to review what was said. Another way to go is to do your interviewing with a partner, where one person does the asking and careful listening, and the other one writes.

What about updating my interview guide?

It’s almost certain that, in your very first interview or two or three, your respondents will address some issues that you simply had not thought of.

This is good news! You’ll want to add some or all of these issues to your list of planned prompts for the rest of your interviews, to allow you to get additional perspectives on them.

Consolidating your learning

Having completed your interviews, there are a few possible outcomes for each of your two grand tour questions. From your first grand tour and its subsequent prompts, you’ll have learned much about how your idea might or might not fit into your intended users’ current attitudinal, motivational, and behavioral patterns. You might find your idea fits quite nicely. You might find some opportunities to adjust your concept, though you are generally on track. You might find there’s a mismatch. You might also find there’s something else the customers need more than what you were thinking about, which may prompt you to redirect your entrepreneurial efforts entirely.

From your second grand tour and its subsequent prompts, there are several likely outcomes. One is that the respondents will have widely turned ‘thumbs down’ on your idea. While this result does not necessarily mean you should abandon your idea entirely, it certainly does raise your risk! If this is what you hear, however, you may decide to pursue something else that looks more promising.

Another possible outcome is that you get concrete suggestions about how to improve your offering to give it more utility or appeal. You might, if you are lucky or especially insightful, get rave reviews that indicate you have a potential winner on your hands. While this is good news, it does not mean you are ready to go to market yet, for there are other questions raised in the seven domains for which you’ll also want answers before you invest months or years of your life and lots of your and other people’s money.

If in your interviews you find enough promising regard for your concept, one good way to wrap up your learning is to edit your concept description to embrace the useful input you have obtained. Revise your offering to respond to what you’ve learned. Rarely does an entrepreneur fail to get useful feedback from an exercise like this, feedback that can help further develop the offering.