Symend is a debt recovery and customer engagement platform for the Enterprise. They've raised over $100 million and have almost 300 employees. Watch the whole interview with Hanif Joshaghani →
On doing Customer Discovery right:
- You have to really understand your customers in detail
- You can screw it up, think you’ve done it right and people will buy, then not
- You need to take enough time, we took 6 months.
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On choosing your next Big Idea
- Find something you’re really passionate about and can make an impact
- Identify an experience that feels horrible to you
- Follow your curiosity and let serendipity play a part in it
On not committing to Building before deep Understanding
- Get a sample size bigger than yourself ie. others also have that problem
- Don’t have to commit to building yet before understanding well the consumer
- Make sure the problem is not already being solved the right way
- Become an expert in the problem before discovering the solution
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On the process to Define and Test a Thesis
- Do Primary and Secondary research (2 months)
- Critical to be highly informed and gain expertise to talk to experts in the next phase
- Read white papers, websites, decks, reports, demo videos etc.
- Learn current situation, how it evolved, trends etc.
- Do Field Research on the problem (3-4 months)
- Build a model of the ecosystem and problems
- Do customer interviews with 60-70 people
- Do cobble up prototypes and deliver service (ongoing)
- Cobble up together solutions and deliver the results before productizing
1- On Primary and Secondary Research (2 months)
On building a model of the ecosystem
- Map out who are all the players and the various segments
- Segment and look how the problem exists and how it’s being solved today
- Break into components, and understand how each function ie. solutions, softwares, workflows
- Spend lots of time talking with stakeholders: consumers, vendors, vendor research, partners.. (don’t label them competitors yet)
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On How to Learn, Understand and Dissect your Model
- Break it down into chunks
- Understand the key attributes of every component
- Identify how they’re the same and how they’re different
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On how to unpack the Problem
- Identify where are the most complaint being generated
- Zoom in and unpack segment
- Understand what the complaints are about
- Understand, unpack and quantify the common threads, separate the edge cases
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2- On Field Research on the problem (3-4 months)
On getting and doing Customer Interviews
- Don’t frame requests for interviews as sales
- Frame as a passionate guy doing some research and interested in the sector
- Reached out to 300-400 with linkedin queries and personalized message
- Had a weekly goal of 10/week and cranked like a call center
- Spoke to 60-70 companies in 3 months
- Recorded all sessions and catalogued in a free CRM
- Request 15 minutes only. Then charm them to stay longer up until 1h
- Search Facebook and Linkedin and get to know them well
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On iterating on your Business Canvas with each interview.
- After each loop ask:
- What did I learn?
- What assumptions can I check off and what new assumptions do I need to now make?
- What new questions have arisen?
- Find a sponsor and have regular beat-up sessions to challenge the feedback and your current view
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On validating big Assumptions with Open Questions
- Ask questions like:
- Size of the problem. What are your biggest pain points? How are you solving it today?
- If there's anything you would do better today, what would it be?
- Who are your favorite vendors that you work with today?
- Where do you see the industry heading?
- Debrief with:
- What did I learn? What new questions do I have?
- What assumptions have I verified?
- Incorporate learnings and iterate your questions with new information
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On becoming an expert while recruiting prospects for GTM
- Be thorough. Live and breath the space, and in 3-4 months become an expert
- Use these prospects as a data bank for go-to-market
- add them to your network, expose them to thought pieces etc.
- Do more interviews, it will save you 6 months of building the wrong product and going back to rebuild
- if you only talk to 10 people you will have huge blind spots
- Build a relationship so they trust you’re looking to impact positively the ecosystem
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On iterating on your Ideal Customer Persona
- Take a bit of research and create an ICP
- Target your ICP and do interviews in cohorts
- Iterate on your canvas model as you advance
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3- On cobbling up prototypes and delivering service (ongoing)
On Ranking your Prospects and presenting a Demo
- Rank your prospects based on your interviews:
- Likelihood to be a future customer, Early Adopter vs Laggard, Problem Urgency, Overlap of wanted Solution etc.
- Identify who’s at the top of the list and show them your wireframesCome back and show them your wireframes
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On getting your first 5 Pilots
- Identify candidates:
- Early adopters who had the right values
- Their solution needs resemble representative of the broader market to avoid ending up with a customer product
- Start with Free Pilots, and treat them as co-developers
- Fly to see them and build rapport in person over drinks
- Help them believe you’re competent and how this will help career their success vs just company value ( = overcome risk aversion)
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On building your first version = a prototype service (not product)
- Identify all the components to deliver solution
- Frankenstein together from other software components. Then add manual services on top.
- As long as it delivers the value/results, it doesn’t need to scale now.
- you trade off effectiveness now for borrowing against future efficiency
- Measure if the results will be better than what they do today.
- If leading indicators are better, it’s working, you have something.
- Then figure out how to build it how you can turn it into a product
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On getting your requirements right
- The cost to build missions critical, large surface problems and workflows at scale is big
- Do as much as you can upfront to build a detailed understanding of what you need to build
- Getting it wrong and have to refactor will be expensive
- it will hurt you if you’re expecting to hit on all cylinders.
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Tell me about your product challenges and I’ll share insights that will help you progress.
- We can dive into your current goals and challenges.
- Then see what’s possible together.
Created by Javier Rincon (Fractional Head of Product →)
