EP. 6: Top 8 Customer Research Mistakes

Customer research can be an absolute game changer. It gives you insight into not only what your current customers think of your product, but also who they are, what they want, and how you can better serve them and others in the future. But not every type of customer research is right.

In this episode of In Demand, Asia Orangio of DemandMaven breaks down 8 ways that you might be doing your customer research wrong and how you can update your research to upgrade your results. 

Extra Resources

• none this time~

TL;DR

• [1:20] – #1  You’re not doing customer research at all 
  • If you’re not doing research, you can be sure what you’re customers think about your product and business. You’re not only missing out on improving your product now, but you’re liking missing the big picture on where you should go in the future.  
• [4:42] – #2 – You’re asking the wrong questions 
  • There are lots of resources outlining customer research questions to ask, but asking general questions won’t get you the information you need to solve your specific challenges.

• [7:26] – #3 You’re not digging deep enough 
  • In a research interview, you will often get vague answers like “It made my life easier”, as a founder you need to know the specifics of what you’re customers are thinking, so don’t be afraid to follow up and don’t just accept the first response you get if you don’t fully understand.

• [10:18] – #4 You’re answering questions for your customers 
  • When you’re doing a customer interview, it’s natural that some awkward moments come up. And it’s human nature to fill awkward moments with words. But when we do that in a customer interview we influence the responses we get back. 

• [14:21] – #5 You’re not taking the feedback objectively
  • If you built the product yourself, it’s easy to critical feedback personally. Instead, once you have the feedback you need to take a step back and put it into context. What are the patterns? Who are the outliers? Don’t let your prior viewpoint influence the answers you get back from customers.

• [ 21:14] – #6 – You’re the only one doing the interviewing
  • At the end of the day a customer interview is a conversation, and the interviewer is one half of the conversation. So if you have one person doing all of the interviewers they will likely be missing information because they have the same blinds spots. A strong customer research process allows for this by having more than one person interviewing.

• [24:31] – #7 – You’re not recording or sharing your interviews 
  • When we recount an interview we filter out information. And when you do that you miss crucial details. If you have a team, more than one person should be watching an interview and even if you are a solo founder right now, if you expect to grow, start recording your interviews for the future. 

• [28:00] – #8 – You stop after just a few interviews
  • You can do a set of customer interviews, learn lots, implement it, but as you grow you inevitably attract new types of customers. So you need to be connecting with your customers frequently. Product market fit isn’t a state you enter, it’s an ongoing process, that means customer research should be too. 
• [31:30] – Quick review 

Transcript

What’s up founders, and welcome back to another episode of the In Demand Podcast. I’m your host Asia. I founded DemandMaven, where we work with early-stage startups on reaching their very first growth milestones. That first 100 customers, the first 10K MRR, and the first 100K MRR. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk all about what you’re doing wrong with your customer research.

When I think about the questions that I get from founders when it comes to their customer research, usually it’s an indicator of something that they’re trying. It’s not working out. Maybe they don’t believe in customer research as much as maybe they should, and maybe they’ve done customer research, but it didn’t exactly net the insight or the result that they were hoping for. Here’s a few of the things that not only have I made these mistakes myself personally, but these are also some of the things that I observed, let’s just say, in the overall Saas and startup community. So without further ado, here’s what you’re doing wrong with your customer research.

Number one, you’re not doing customer research at all. I’m not going to spend too, too much of this episode banging up against your head about why you need to be doing customer research. But what I will say is if you’re not doing it, you are missing out on a critical part of not just your growth trajectory, but your business. If you’re not really certain about what your customers ultimately think about your business, your product, and what challenges your product is ultimately helping them solve, you are basically drawing a big giant question mark, and a big, giant blank on how strong is your product market fit in the first place. But then also, where do you go next? What are the next features that you ultimately need to build? And what is the ultimate pain that people are solving here?

Customer research translates to every single department and function, especially when it comes to the overall go-to market team. If your marketers, if your sales team, if your product team, if your customer success team, support team, even development team, if no one really understands what they’re building or why they’re building it or who it’s for, then we’re basically just guessing the entire time, which is a pretty risky place to begin. It’s why I will always say no matter what we need to be doing some kind of research. If there’s a problem that you’re facing, usually you can use customer research to either outright answer it altogether, or at least point you in the right direction on where to solve it or how to solve it.

Some of you are actually doing a form of customer research, and I’m going to say a form here because I wouldn’t necessarily call it very structured. But some of you are actually talking to customers, but it’s only through support or customer service means. In this case, if that’s you, I would still highly recommend that you do put some structure around your customer. I hate to call it research because I don’t know if I would say that it’s research per se, it’s really more like customer interaction. You need some kind of structure. What I mean by that is have a set list of questions at any given time that you say over and over and over again for every single interaction that you have, because that way, asking a certain question the same way over and over and over again to your different customers in the whatever context it is that you’re actually working with them in that would at least give you a little bit of structure.

But overall, I would still say, even if you have these touch-and-go customer interactions, it’s still best practice. And also just way better to actually have a dedicated 20 or 30 minutes where you ask them your research questions, your interview questions and you actually get a response back that is in the right context, in the frame of mind that you kind of want the customer in. When they are in a support or some kind of they need to be “successed”, when they’re in that support context, they’re in a I need to fix this problem or challenge that I have. They’re not necessarily in a unlimited space, if you will, like just mentally, emotionally. So you’re likely going to get different answers anyway, especially if they’re frustrated. That’s why I always recommend if you can do actual dedicated customer interviews. The touch-and-go questions as you’re working with people like through their support problems or whatever, I find that that can definitely help if you are personally strapped for time, but at some point, make the time to do a dedicated 20 to 30 minutes. Even 15 would still be incredibly valuable.

Number two, you’re asking the wrong questions. Okay. This one it’s interesting because on the one hand you don’t know what you don’t know, but on the other hand, there’s so much research and just resources out there that can actually tell you exactly what questions to be asking at any given time. But one thing I want to make sure to emphasize here is you can actually structure your interviews to focus on a specific business problem that you have. For example, don’t feel like you need to just ask these super basic questions just because it’s on a list. If you have challenges with acquisition, ask act acquisition-related questions. If you have challenges with activation, ask activation-related questions.

Some examples of that, there’s tons out there that you can ask. There’s so many different free resources out there in terms of what exact questions to ask. But I think more than anything, it’s so important to remember that you can actually structure your interviews to help you solve the problem that you’re trying to solve. Every single time I approach customer research, I always think about, well, what problem is the client really trying to solve by doing these customer research interviews? What are we ultimately trying to impact here? Are we simply just trying to figure out where the problems are? Are we specifically looking at acquisition and saying, okay, we really need to touch bases here, but then we also need to double it back with what we think we know about our product-market fit or what we think we know about the customer.

Sometimes it’s that and sometimes it’s more broad spectrum where we really want to get the lay of the land in terms of what all of our different customers mean or what their experience is. The other part to this is of course who you interview. So if you don’t have any real structure in terms of not just what questions you’re asking, but who you’re actually asking, then we’re also looking at just kind of this like willy-nilly random customer research or random customer interview.

Overall though, don’t forget that you can actually ask different kinds of questions. It’s not, you don’t have to stick to this like super rigid, oh, I just found this questionnaire online. And like, I can just ask these questions and not actually think about which ones you’re actually asking. And also what kind of responses you think you might get. Sometimes what I’ll do too is I will make sure to ask a certain question a few different kinds of ways, because I know that they will elicit different responses. That’s also something to be very critical of. So overall be critical of the questions you’re asking. Make sure that you’re asking the ones that will help you unlock something for yourself and for the business, and also generate a little bit of rapport with the customer.

All right, number three, you’re not digging deep enough. It’s so natural whenever you ask a question to a customer to just accept the very first few, maybe short responses that you get. And what I find too is depending on who it is that you’re interviewing. Now, I think that the reality is that many of us are global companies. We have customers all over the world. So sometimes even cultural differences can give you different kinds of responses. Sometimes you’ll get some customers who will just give you like a sentence and that’s it. Some cultures and some people just depending on wherever they’re located, they will seemingly talk for feels like hours. And in my experience, I have found that, yes, it definitely varies from culture to culture, from region to region. But what I find is if a customer is just is giving you like one-word answers or they’re giving you answers that are vague, don’t be afraid to dig deeper.

There’s a few different trigger words that I personally have because by this point I’ve done hundreds of customer interviews. But whenever a customer says words like, or phrases like, Oh, it just made my life easier. Well, what does easier mean? What does that really mean? What did you gain that you would have lost otherwise if it were harder? And what’s the harder version? What was the current status quo? Don’t be afraid to dig into any phrases like that. Things are like easier, faster, better and even like in regular language, these are words that are, they’re kind of like cop out words, but don’t be afraid to dig deeper. Don’t just accept the very first response that you get. Also, especially if it’s vague and it’s usually pretty obvious when it’s vague. If you find yourself wondering what does that really mean? Or in what specific way or like, in what context, that’s your intuition guiding you to ask and to dig a little bit deeper into what the customer is actually saying.

Sometimes I also, if I find that maybe a customer is having a hard time expressing themselves, sometimes I will actually give them polar opposites to pick from. And what usually ends up happening is it’s neither one of those and it’s something really specific or some specific thing that they actually really truly mean. But I almost always clarify when something seems vague or I sometimes I just want to make sure that I understand it. Don’t be afraid to do that. It’s incredibly helpful. And you’ll get, instead of just saying easier, you’ll usually get a response that’s just even better than whatever it was that they said the first time. This makes for a better customer testimonials. This makes for better quotes case studies, website copy, messaging in general. It’s just going to hands down, just be way better than whatever basic response that they had the first time.
Number four, you’re answering the questions for your customers. I used to be guilty of this, like forever ago. Way back in the day when I used to do my own customer interviews and research, when I was in-house, sometimes I would answer the questions for the customers, and this is a huge mistake and it’s a very uncomfortable, easy thing to do. And what I mean by that is whenever you’re interviewing a customer, especially if interviewing in general makes you nervous or talking to customers makes you nervous in any kind of way. Our brains are hardwired to avoid anything that makes us feel anxious or uncomfortable. We get that fight or flight response. We just want to sink into our chair, run away, hide, scream, whatever.

What ends up happening is we’ll ask a question and instead of just letting the awkward silence happen, we’ll fill it and we’ll fill it with a very easy response for the customer. A great example of that, I’m going to do my best to give you an example. Let’s say I’m asking the customer a question, “When you want to learn more about your industry or your job, where do you go? For example, do you go to like Google? Do you go to communities or groups? Where do you go?” And instead of just asking the actual first question, I back-filled it with, for example, communities, Google, blah, blah, blah. And it’s so natural for us to do that. And it’s something that I will only do if I can sense that the customer is very uncomfortable on the call, but overall, you should never do this. Don’t ever do this purely because our brains are very lazy.

And when a situation is uncomfortable or if it’s weird or if we’re not as engaged as we like to be, it’s easy for us to just latch onto the very first thing in our minds to just answer the question and kind of get out of it in a way. And I’m not saying this to say, make your customers uncomfortable, but I am saying, make them actually think. Let them think. They actually do have really well thought out responses. And you know, they have brains, they have minds, they have personalities. Let that shine. Do your absolute best, not to answer questions and to feed answers to your customers when you’re asking some of the harder questions. Usually people, if they just like take a breather or if they really think about it for a second, they’ll come up with responses and actual answers that are, again, way more insightful than anything you could have just fed them accidentally. So just be careful overall, when it comes to answering questions for your customers.

Again, there are situations where I might give some examples. If let’s say, for example, I’m asking a question that’s related to what kinds of channels or something related to that, like what kinds of channels they use to make decisions about things. Sometimes I’ll use a word that they might not understand, especially like the word like channel, like who apart from marketers and or startup people really know what that means. So still trying not to feed answers, but sometimes I will provide clarifying words or clarifying phrases to guide the direction that I’m really trying to go into. But overall, do your absolute best not to feed answers to your customers, especially if it’s a very obvious answer. And it’s something that if you’re just being extra lazy, you’ll just latch onto and you won’t… It’s hard to get away from that after someone latches onto the answer that you’ve given them. So just be careful about that.

When a customer comes back with, ‘what do you mean by that? Or can you clarify for that?’ That’s when you can at least give them guidance on in what context you’re kind of thinking, but even then do your best not to just give them something that they can just kind of like pair it back at you because then the feedback really is kind of you as opposed to no, this is really them really giving you the feedback that you’re kind of looking for.

Number five, this is one of the ones that whenever you do customer research and you take a step back and you look at all the interviews that you’ve done, this is where even after doing everything right, you can still walk away from the customer research process feeling inundated and overwhelmed. And number five is you’re not taking the feedback that you just gained or that you’ve heard objectively. This is really, really hard, especially if your product is kind of like your baby or your masterpiece or your brainchild in some kind of way. I think, especially if you’ve built the product to yourself. It’s very easy to take certain things very personally or, and, or I should say it’s very easy to be inundated with what you hear.
You hear all of this feedback, you hear all of these ideas. You also hear it from many different kinds of people, but you’re not really certain well, what is the feedback that is the most important for me to take back to the products, to take back to the team, to leverage, to do some kind of growth or go-to market activity. In order for you to make the most of your customer research is to after you’ve actually completed it to take a step back from it, to look at it with this a very objective lens. At the end of the day, we need to take what we know qualitatively and what we know quantitatively, and not just isolate the feedback, but really put it into the context that we’re ultimately trying to solve and to… We’re trying to use the customer research to fix something or to solve something. So let’s take a step back and let’s ultimately look at what we’ve learned.

When you take your customer feedback and you are looking at this objectively, you’re still combining that with, okay, which customers that we interviewed, which ones were paying the most, which ones seemed to be raving fans and which ones overall have been with us the longest? Usually what you’ll find is you’ll find a few different patterns. They’re going to be some that are absolutely amazing and they check every single box and they’re going to be some who they checked some boxes, but maybe they don’t check all of them in the best way. And then there are some customers that you’ll interview who are churn risks.

And defining a churn risk is %100 up to you, to your business, to your product, to the market that you’re in. But there are going to be some that are very clearly churn risks. They would be churning if a particular thing did or didn’t happen with the product. Some are already thinking about churning and they just haven’t yet because there’s something blocking them from that. It’s important to know what about them makes them a churn risk. I mean, there’s just so much to unpack even here, but we still have to take a step back and look at everything that we’ve heard objectively. And we can start to eliminate a few. Not that we’d totally disregard certain feedback, but we start to eliminate some of the interviews that we’ve done just based off of that alone. And we start to really focus on the few who really check every single box.

That’s approaching it from an objective perspective, but the second thing is now we also have to look at the patterns and the outliers. Who was an outlier? Why were they an outlier? Why don’t they really fit the mold? And overall, what are the patterns here? What are the things that we kept hearing over and over and over again? What are the things that really like what are the data points that really trump other data points according to us and what’s important to us? A great example of this to get more specific, because I realize I’m speaking a little bit in theory here, but a great example of this was actually a customer interview and just overall research project that I did for a client a few years back. And one of the number one problems that they had was they didn’t really know who their best-paying customer was.

This was a combination of not having the right analytics in place. So they had pretty bad analytics debt, but the other problem was they felt inundated with the information they feedback that they hired. And they weren’t really sure who to focus on and who to prioritize. So the first part of the project was really, okay, let’s identify what analytics you really do need to ultimately make the best objective quantitative decision, but let’s combine it with actual qualitative feedback. We need to actually hear from these people. It’s not enough to just see a number on a page. We need to know what are these people experiencing. Because at the end of the day, a number on a screen, we don’t know if those are happy numbers. We don’t know if those are about churn numbers. We don’t know if those are numbers that we should be paying attention to or not. So we need to double it up with that qualitative feedback and that qualitative insight.

So what we ended up learning was while we were fixing our analytics debt in the background, we ended up learning that overall, there were a few patterns and a few very clear outliers. There were also very clear churn risks as well. But the pattern, the overall sweeping pattern was one particular persona, one particular segment. And this segment of the market was very clear. It was a very specific kind of business owner. It was a very specific kind of entrepreneur in a very specific kind of industry and market. And there are the use cases for using the product were also very specific. The outliers that existed were specifically related to like just certain boxes that they didn’t check, but they were still raving fans. And then others that were very clearly churn risks. Like they were going to churn at some point. It was just a matter of time.

So whenever you’re doing your customer interviews and your customer research, don’t forget to actually take a step back and look at the data that you’ve acquired as objectively as possible. It’s not that you don’t want to listen to what everyone has to say. Definitely not saying that. What I am saying though, is when you do get all of that qualitative feedback, you’re going to put your eagle eyes on and you’re going to put your laser focus on to a very particular pattern and segment that you’ve identified in the customer research that you’ve already done. Part of this does ultimately depend, however, on the people that you do actually get to interview. So do keep that bias in mind. This is why volume of interviews always matters a ton, but we usually seven to 10 interviews. That’s a pretty good number at least to start. And that’ll give you enough to identify the patterns and also give you enough to identify the churn risks and the outliers.

Okay. Number six, you are the only one doing the interviewing. Now, this really does depend of course, on who else in the business has capacity to interview, or if you have anyone else in the business at all. Some of you are solo founders and you’re cranking away on the product yourself. Others have larger teams. If you’re the only one doing the interviewing and that’s because of present circumstances, totally fine. But if you’re the only one interviewing, but you’re not the only one who could be interviewing, I would highly suggest considering having someone else also do an occasional interview and just purely because not everyone is super honest with the founder, especially if they know that you built the product.

I have experienced this both personally, but also on the opposite end of doing case studies, of doing customer interviews, just in general, there are things that a customer will tell me that they’ve never told the founder before. And then usually that’s not always the case, but sometimes more often than not I find there’s usually some small snippet of something. For example, I was doing customer interviews for a client for a particular growth project. And as we started doing customer interviews, we found out that they were actually using a competitive product in addition to the existing, like the actual client project. So they were using these competing projects in different parts of the business and the founder had no idea. And that actually happened three more times with customers. That told us that it seems that we’re meeting the needs of certain departments, but not all of the departments in one business. Otherwise, why not roll out the tool to everyone?

And then at the same exact time, maybe it’s actually okay that this is happening. So maybe we need to dig a little bit deeper into when do we potentially have churn risk and when maybe don’t we. Maybe it’s actually okay that you can use both of these tools together, even though they’re basically the same tool with, of course, a few different value propositions and a few different feature sets. You know what I’m saying? But it just goes to show that if you can have someone else do the customer interviews and do the research for you, or in addition to what you’re already doing, it’ll also give you some insight that maybe you didn’t have before. And maybe also that the customer might not have just been comfortable sharing with you. They didn’t want to hurt your feelings. They don’t want to make you feel bad or guilty.

This is also very apparent with certain different cultures as well. So this is just my personal opinion, but I actually find that Americans are much less likely to give you super honest feedback. And I find pretty much everywhere else like especially Europeans, they are much more likely to give you incredibly honest feedback. That’s just my personal experience. Not always the case, but I do find that sometimes cultural differences also give you a certain kind of feedback. So it’s especially helpful to have someone else just come to just to double up your efforts, you usually unlock something else that you didn’t know about your own customers.

All right. Number seven, you’re not recording or sharing your interviews. Oh my God. I wish I could just like bang my head up against the wall for this one, because it seems so obvious, but it’s something that so many of us forget. Whenever I even think about building a business to scale. So if you expect to grow both in revenue and in team size, start recording your interviews, even if it’s just you. And the reason why is because filtered feedback is the worst feedback. Can you imagine guacamole without avocado or garlic or cilantro or tomato, Pico, whatever? Can you imagine guacamole without its most important ingredients? No. And yet so many of us try to do customer interviews and pass on feedback second hand, highly filtered, not even the actual transcript or the recording, not even like clips of those things.

Sometimes we’ll get written versions of those things. So sometimes someone will actually transcribe what a person is saying and then send it off. But without the context, without understanding where that feedback is coming from or where that idea or praise even is coming from and why, what it’s connected to you basically just create just forever blind spots. And people because brains are complicated and complex, people will fill in, they’ll backfill in parts of that customer story with whatever they believe or what they think they’ve heard. And on top of that, different people will hear different things whenever they hear feedback.

It’s so important if you can, in the early days to create structure, not just around your customer research, but about digesting that information and about digesting that research. Get the team together, have them listen to the interview before the meeting or a couple of days before the meeting and then actually have a meeting and tear down what you guys heard. Different people will come to the table and come to the plate with different things that they heard. And you’ll also be able to dissect together as a team. And also this is also really the goal, you’ll also get an alignment about what you heard and what particular parts of the interview or the research that you guys conducted, what particular parts of that were so critical and were so important and what wasn’t. Who were the patterns? Who were the outliers? Who were the churn risks?

This is why sharing this knowledge with the team is so critical and to not filter it. This is much easier said than done. It’s so easy to actually do a customer interview and walk away from it with a particular idea or a particular piece of insight that we then share with the rest of the team. But even with that, it’s like playing the game of telephone. It’s the exact same thing. So if you can actually record, share, transcribe, highlight, whatever you need to do straight from the customer’s mouth. Here’s exactly what they’re saying, and in the context upon which they were saying it. Let’s talk about it, let’s interpret this. But when that happens, you don’t add on this like extra filter. And then people don’t feel compelled to backfill with whatever ideas or fantasies that they heard about whatever it was that was being talked about.

Number eight, this is the last one. But it is that you stop after just a few interviews. Some of us get this like little ego trip whenever we do a few customer interviews, we’re like, yeah, we’ve done like four and we get it. We totally understand. Now let’s go heads down and like, let’s execute for awhile. And then like five years go by and you haven’t done a single customer interview since. This is shockingly common. But what ends up happening is you can do a set of customer interviews. And that’ll unblock you, give you the insight that you need to move forward in some kind of specific way, confirm some things, reaffirm some things, but then also disprove some things.

And then at some point, you and the team, you guys trudge along and you build, you break things, you test different things, you learn, you grow. But then what ends up happening is as you grow, and this is inevitable for every single business. But as you grow, you inevitably attract different kinds of customers and different parts of the market and different segments of that market. And then what ends up happening is as you grow, you built the product and the company based off of that first set of interviews that you did, but now you don’t have any new interviews. You don’t have the voice of the customer representative of this new segment that you’ve attracted. In fact, you might not even know that you have a whole new segment. You might not even know that you’re solving a whole different set of problems.

Something that I tell founders all the time is you can achieve product-market fit within a particular segment. But as soon as you grow and you enter into another segment, you’ve got to get to product-market fit all again. Product-market fit is not a thing that just happens and you’ve achieved it and you’re done. You’ve got to consistently and constantly evolve the product and your experience and your customer set purely because your customer set is also evolving. And as you grow, you just naturally will attract different segments. You’ve got to achieve product-market fit every single time constantly, and you can lose it too.

There’s countless cases of businesses that have grown, lost touch with their customer, no longer really had product-market fit. And then a competitor either came in and land-slided, or just like totally siphoned the original business, or sometimes the business dies. And that is something that you can absolutely avoid by doing consistent customer research and doing consistent customer interviews. It’s an ongoing process. Never forget that product-market fit is not a state that you enter. It’s something that you are just constantly working towards, and that might sound exhausting, but that is ultimately the product-market life cycle. So don’t forget if you can consistently do customer interviews. It is a game changer. It’s a lifesaver. It will make all of your insights and everything that you build from this day forward so much more applicable, especially as you continue to do them. You’ll also notice your patterns shift over time. You’ll notice the curve shift of your customer base just move over time. It’s just like keeping in touch with the seasons changing. You feel much more grounded when you do it.

All right, everyone. I’m just going to very quickly list out everything that we just talked about, all-in-one. Okay. Number one, you’re not doing customer research at all. Okay, well, it’s time to start if you’re not. Number two, you’re asking the wrong questions. Don’t forget that you can actually change your interview question set to match the problem that you’re trying to solve. You don’t have to just ask random questions, you can ask ones that actually help you. Number three, you’re not digging deep enough. Don’t accept vague answers. Just don’t. Things like easier, better, faster, cheaper even, those are things that you got to dig deeper into. What are the opposites here? What is someone’s sacrificing or what is the opportunity cost of doing this versus another? That’s how you get that deeper insight and just the insight that you need that will unlock something else.
Four, your answering the questions for your customers. Do your best not to feed customers answers, especially for those really critical strategic product-related questions and or those growth-related questions. Try not to feed people answers. If you need to clarify, do that, but try not to just give the customer a way to answer something. Five, you’re not taking the feedback you hear objectively. Also, don’t forget to take a step back after you do customer research and look at this objectively. Use your qualitative and your quantitative data. Six, you’re the only one doing the interviewing. Guys, don’t forget to also do a little bit of extra interviewing from someone else because you’ll get different feedback.

Seven, you’re not recording or sharing your interviews. I just went over this, but don’t forget to actually record these, especially if you expect for your team to grow at some point, you’ll want to be able to share that insight and that feedback with other people and actually have it be a source of truth. And lastly, you stop after just a few interviews. It’s not a one done kind of deal. It really is constant. It’s a moving target, especially as you grow. Some of you will have niches that you only focus on, like maybe you only focus on boutique agencies, but even then movements inside of a particular market happen all the time. You’re going to want to keep a pulse on that, no matter what.

All right, founders, thank you so much for listening. My name is Asia. I really hope that this really broke it down for you. I hope this was helpful. I hope that you walked away with something that you were kind of like, oh man, I’m totally doing that. Here’s how I can change it. And more than anything, I hope that you actually do your customer research. Do these customer interviews. They are absolutely game-changing. Even now, it’s pretty much impossible for me to do a great job growth-wise without doing that customer research and without doing those customer interviews. It’s just so critical to the process. Anyways, thank you again and have an awesome day. Bye.

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