Niloo and Nina’s Practical Guide to B2C Customer Discovery Calls
Hi!
Nina and Niloo here. We’re co-founders of Good People, helping people living in big cities build strong personal communities.
Before we were co-founders of Good People, we were co-founders of Hello Iris. We went through Techstars in 2019 as an AI dating app that made matches based on personality compatibility, and came out the other end as personalized guided meditations for becoming your best self.
(Our pivots are an interesting story about what it takes to have meaningful relationships and live a fulfilling life, but we’ll save that for another day!).
In both versions of the company, we spent a lot of time doing customer discovery calls. As a dating app, we did 50 calls in a week. As a meditation app, we topped 60. It was our north star for understanding who our ideal customer was, what their needs were, and how to talk to them. It guided product decisions, marketing decisions, and was the source of truth we always turned to if we couldn’t come to an agreement.
We used two frameworks to guide our process:
- Superhuman’s Guide to Product-Market Fit by Rahul Vorha
- The High-Expectation Customer (HXC) Framework by Julie Supan
I’d highly recommend giving them both a read before diving further into our guide. It will give you the same foundations that we worked with and built on, and a better fundamental understanding of why finding your HXC is so important.
And that lets us focus on the practicalities of how to do customer discovery calls!
We’ll walk you through how to find people to talk to, how to structure the post, the logistics of setting up the calls, how to collect the right data, how to run the calls themselves, and how to sift through the data at the end so you can actually use it. We’ll also share some of the tools we’ve used that made this process easier.
This guide is mostly geared towards B2C companies, but with a little creativity it can be adapted for B2B as well. We’ll be using our guided meditation product as the example we reference for finding our HXC.
Let’s jump in.
🕵️♀️ How to find people to talk to
We started with a broad idea of who we thought would be interested in personalized guided meditations for becoming your best self. We thought it would be someone like us — a woman in her mid 20s to early 30s who was experimenting with different ways to get the most out of her life.
Starting with that as a baseline, we considered the different options we had for where we might find those people:
Facebook: Niloo belonged to a few Facebook groups for women in their 20s-30s, with focuses ranging from lifestyle to career to startups. Those groups were active with regular posts and responses and hit the demographics/interests we cared about, which made this a strong option.
Instagram: We didn’t have many followers, and thought Instagram was more about sharing visual content and ideas rather than trying to set up coffee chats. It’s also hard for people to access links you share through either posts or stories. With all these roadblocks, it made it a pretty unappealing option (although we did one story just to see if anything would come of it — it didn’t).
LinkedIn: Because of our 600+ days of writing daily posts, we had something of a local following on LinkedIn. We thought we could tap into that and just through sheer volume find a few people who wanted to chat. We also thought that people who cared about their careers (by virtue of spending time on LinkedIn) might also care about optimizing other parts of their life. This was a strong option.
Reddit: This might have been a cool option for us, but we were both very unfamiliar with what the relevant subreddits were, the etiquette, and how to go about posting our request. We didn’t want to invest time investigating when we had other strong options, so we decided not to post here. But I think this could have been fruitful!
Slack groups: We belong to a handful of Slack groups for founders, women in tech, and digital nomads. They weren’t the most active, but they overlapped nicely with the demographic and interests we were looking to hit, so this was an option worth trying.
The questions we asked ourselves when picking where to post were -
- Where does my hypothetical HXC spend their time?
- Where do we already have a following we can tap into?
- How can we hit the ground running with these calls as fast as possible?
📝 How to structure the post
After we had an idea of where we would be posting (Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack channels), we had to create the post itself.
Let’s break down all the components that went into our LinkedIn post:
- Who do you want to talk to? You want this at the top of your post. This is a broad descriptor that someone looking at your post can immediately see if they identify with or not. If they do, they keep reading. If they don’t identify with it, you save their time and yours.
- Who are you and what is your company? This makes you feel more real. Because you’re trying to get strangers to talk to you, you want to reassure them that you’re a real person, that your company is a real thing, and links to find more info on both. It’s the beginning of creating a sense of trust.
- What is the problem you’re solving? Think of this as the hook that will get someone excited about what you’re building. The problem or solution that you’re talking about here should be something that will resonate with the person you want to talk to! Avoid making it too long or sales-y so it doesn’t sound like an ad or like you’ll try to sell them something on the call.
- What makes someone a good fit for a call with you? This is where you list the criteria for people you want to talk to. The categories we chose were all potential signals that a person was looking for ways to “become their best self”, and that our product would be of interest to them. What might your HXC be doing that indicates they have a problem that your product or service can solve for them?
- What will you generally talk about? How much of a time commitment is it? People love talking about themselves, their opinions, and their problems (especially if it looks like you might be able to solve it for them). So tell them what you’ll generally be chatting about, in a way that sounds human, approachable, and fun! Let them know the time commitment you’re looking for (we’ve found 30 mins is the sweet spot for getting enough information without asking for too much time from someone), and how you’ll be having the call. Is it in person? A phone call? A video call? A survey? The goal here is to put people at ease and let them know what to expect.
- What are the next steps? If someone is interested in chatting with you, how do they proceed? Do they comment, email, message you, sign up somewhere? Make this super explicit.
- [BONUS] Using emojis: I used a ton of emojis in my post. This made sense for the demographic we wanted to talk to, the product we were building, and our brand. I also used it to make the post more eye-catching and visually appealing. The goal should be to make the process of doing a customer discovery call with you as easy as possible, and that starts with making the post fun and easy to read. Using emojis might not be the specific way you do that, but is there another way you can achieve that same goal?
- [BONUS] This is free advertising: While the main goal of your post is to find the right people to do customer discovery calls with, this is also a marketing channel for you. Whether they do a call or not, for some people it will be the first time they’re exposed to your company. So think about how you describe what you do, the feelings you’re evoking, and the experience you create for anyone who interacts with your post.
- [BONUS] Should you compensate people for doing a customer discovery call with you? I don’t think you should pay people for doing a customer discovery call with you. Offering compensation will make people want to talk to you because they’re getting paid for it. Your goal is to find people who feel the problem so strongly that the hope of having it solved is motivation enough. I believe in showing appreciation for someone’s time through the quality of the call — by making it feel human, personal, and fun. Where the person you talk to feels like they’re interacting with a real human being, and that what they share is genuinely helpful to you.
Depending on where you decide to post, the copy that you write will likely change a little. It might become shorter, more casual, more formal, the way you ask people to reach out to you might change, etc.
When we posted to Slack, we changed a few things about the copy. The Slack group itself was already quite specific (digital nomads), so we cut down on the description of who we wanted to talk to. Rather than mentioning millennials and Gen Z or the specific categories we wanted people to fit into, we summarized it as “anyone who’s thinking about or already actively building habits around personal growth and fulfillment.”
We touched on what our company does and the problem we’re solving, gave a link to our site, then talked about how anyone who was interested could reach out. Our goal was to keep the post short and informative. Think about the norms and what will be successful where you’re posting, and adapt the copy to fit!
⚙️ Logistics and tools for setting up the calls
Tools for setting up and running the calls
We started by manually scheduling people into our calendar, but this became too time-consuming. So we switched to Calendly to let people schedule 30 minute calls with us, and shared the link with everyone who reached out. We put a 30 minute break between each call, having learned from the first time we did it that 8 hours of back-to-back calls is exhausting. This also gave us a buffer for the times when calls ran longer than expected.
We used Zoom to do the video calls because it worked with the recording tools we were using, and we found the audio and video were better than Google Meet. This was just an integration that Calendly lets you set up, so it would automatically plug the Zoom room into every cal invite.
We used Fireflies for recording the calls, but Otter is another great option. It’s an account that joins the room and records the call for you. If you sign up for the basic tier, it will also transcribe the call! Just make sure to turn on the waiting room feature for Zoom so that you can ask the person if it’s okay for you to record, and only allow Fireflies into the room when they give you their permission.
How many people do you need to talk to?
Our goal was to talk to a minimum of 40 people so that we had enough data for it to actually mean something. We ended up with 82 people scheduling calls with us. We were told to “talk to enough people until we started hearing the same things over and over again and stopped getting new information”. That happened around 35–40 people in, so most of the way through our first week. We decided to do the remaining calls anyway so we could keep refining our new pitch, and as a way to introduce ourselves to potential future customers.
How many calls should you do per day/week/month?
We decided to do all our calls back-to-back, every single day, rather than spreading them out throughout the month. We wanted to stay in the headspace of customer discovery without context switching, so that was the only thing we were thinking about. This was also the foundation we needed to build before we could move forward with anything on the product or marketing side, so it made sense to do it as quickly as possible rather than spreading it out.
Who from your team should be on the call?
Our team was just Niloo and I, the two co-founders, so we decided we should both be on the calls as much as we could.
A couple of months ago we’d been working on v1.0 of the meditation product and had decided that Niloo would take all the customer calls while I handled marketing. After a couple of weeks, I realized that I felt very disconnected from our customers, what they wanted, what they enjoyed about the product, and how to talk to them. Even though Niloo summarized the general takeaways from her customer calls, it couldn’t quite give me the understanding I needed.
So we decided that this time around, we’d both be on the calls. Niloo would listen and ask questions that would help her build the product, and I’d do the same with a marketing lens. We’d catch things the other person missed and make sure we weren’t falling into our own confirmation bias. Most importantly, we would come away with the same fundamental understanding of who our customer was.
It’s a huge ask to have multiple members of your team spend several full days doing customer discovery, but it’s also the foundation that so much of a company is built on. The right answer can vary based on your company size, what you’re building, etc. but it’s something work thinking about!
👩💻 How to run the calls
So you’ve got a good pipeline of people scheduled in for your customer discovery calls. Now what do the calls themselves look like?
Your goal here is to find your HXC — the person who will enjoy your product or service for its greatest benefit. So you want to both get the right information and to create opportunities to see people light up.
Here are the questions we asked on our calls.
After we said hello and settled into the conversation, we asked the person if they were okay with us recording the call for internal use, so we could take notes on it later and just have a conversation in the moment. Then we went over some basic demographic questions, both for our use and to ease the person we were talking to into the harder questions coming up.
The first major check in point was seeing how people reacted to our short pitch on what we’re building (“Hello Iris background” in the Excel sheet above). Do they seem engaged? Do they nod along? Do they look energized or unaffected at the end? Do they say anything? You can also use this to try different versions of your pitch to see what resonates most.
After our pitch, we asked the person to tell us about themselves and what made them want to take this call with us. We used that as a second indicator of whether the person we were talking to could be our HXC — was what they saw as being the greatest value of the product the same thing that we saw? Or were they interested in something we just saw as a minor side benefit?
We used that as a jumping off point to dig into anything interesting they mentioned, and usually the conversation would flow smoothly from there.
Otherwise, you can see the questions we had prepared in case the conversation lagged or didn’t cover the points we wanted to talk about. We relied on them more heavily in the beginning, but didn’t need to after the first few days. Niloo asked the questions that would help us build the product, while I asked the questions that would guide our marketing strategy.
Regardless of where the conversation went, we always wrapped up with the same two questions.
The first was a bigger picture, aspirational question — “What does the best version of you look like?”. We wanted people to not only think about the answer, but to associate that sense of possibility and growth with our company and what we were building. And we wanted them to take that feeling into the rest of their day. (Just like the customer discovery post, this too is a marketing channel).
The final question was, “What’s exciting to you about what we’re building at Hello Iris?”. We wanted to see what people’s takeaways were after everything we’d told them about the company we’re building, the questions we’d asked them, and the answers they’d given. Did it reflect our vision of the company or were they seeing something different? Were they excited about it?
This was a huge clue about who our HXCs were. We noticed that almost all of them could pitch our company back to us even better than we could!
- What are the questions you can ask to make someone feel optimistic and like the world is full of possibilities, and that your company can get them there?
- This is likely a person’s first face-to-face interaction with your company. How can you make them feel good, feel appreciated, and leave the call feeling better than before it?
- Aside from what the person is actually telling you, what is their body language , eye contact, and tone saying?
Leave time for questions
We always made sure to leave a couple of minutes for people to ask us questions. Were they curious to know more or were they happy to end the conversation there? This was another good clue about how excited someone was about what we were building.
Ask people to take action
Finally, we had one action for people to take at the end. We told them that our waitlist was open and that we’d be providing sneak peeks, early product testing, and asking for more feedback from everyone who signed up. It was another way to see who felt engaged enough with the product that they’d take the time to go to our site and put their email down.
There might be some action that’s more relevant for you —especially for B2B, it might be asking for a referral to someone else that it would be useful for you to talk to.
Be careful of leading questions
The kinds of questions you ask will shape the answers people give.
One mistake we made early on was to focus a lot of our questions on the habits people had and the goals they were working towards. Which meant people spent a lot of time talking about habits and goals. This made us think that accountability, progress tracking, etc. were all things that were top of mind for people and that we needed to include in our product.
It turned out that we were really the ones steering the conversation in that direction, and when we stopped asking questions about habit building and goal tracking — very few people mentioned it! So we cut those questions from our list.
It’s a fine balance between asking open-ended questions that aren’t leading, but also being specific enough to get the information you’re looking for.
Managing your energy levels
Talking to a lot of people back-to-back, day in and day out can be exhausting. It’s important to manage your energy levels so that you don’t burn out through the calls. We chose not to pay people for doing customer discovery calls with us, so it was really important to us that our “compensation” for someone’s time was making sure the calls were interesting and fun. Which meant we had to be in that headspace ourselves!
So make the most of the breaks you have between calls, make sure you’re set up with water/tea/something to drink, and that you take time to eat.
🔔 Checking in
So you’ve done a few days’ worth of calls. Here are some questions to think about:
How fast are people responding to your post and setting up calls?
This is a super important question to consider. Have you found a problem that’s so pressing and so on people’s minds that complete strangers are fighting over the last of your Calendly slots to talk to you?
Or does it feel like a slog, where response rates are slow and even people who have said they’re interested don’t follow through with booking a call?
Does it feel easy? Or does it feel hard? If after some experimentation with the copy of your post and where you’re posting it, you’re still not seeing any change — consider if there are any takeaways to be had.
For us, finding people to talk to was incredibly easy. It took us 2 days to set up a bulk of the calls we ended up doing, and they continued to trickle in for a week or two after.
When we tried to do the same to explore B2B opportunities, we got crickets. It took 3 weeks for me to line up just 7 calls, and what people told me on the calls confirmed that it just wasn’t a pressing problem.
How many cancellations or no-shows are you getting?
Things come up and you’ll likely have some people cancel. Do they reschedule after? Or was it just something they were initially excited about but didn’t care to pursue? How many people are no-shows?
For us, we were lucky to have calls with 80/82 people. We’d booked out all our Calendly slots and ended up having to open more for people who needed to reschedule for later on in the month! That was obviously a great problem for us to have, and confirmed the problem we were addressing was one people cared strongly about.
Should you change the questions you’re asking as you get more information from talking to people?
This was something we debated, especially because the first two days of back-to-back interviews weren’t giving us the information we were looking for. We couldn’t tell if that was because we weren’t talking to the right people, we were asking them the wrong questions, or we just didn’t have enough data yet.
We decided not to change the questions we were asking in case we just needed to talk to more people to see patterns. And that’s exactly what happened. On the third day, we found the first few people we thought could be our HXCs. It turned out that we just needed more numbers!
Another benefit of keeping your questions the same is that you’ll be comparing the same data across every call. It would be more tricky if your questions changed every other day, because it would limit the amount of data you collected.
So aside from dropping our one batch of leading questions about habits, we kept everything else the same throughout.
📇 Sifting through the data
You’re wrapping up your last calls. You’ve got all your transcriptions. Now what?
Gut check
Even without taking a hard look at all the data, we came out of our customer discovery calls with a general sense of who our HXC was and what they cared about.
- Day 1 of our calls showed a pattern of spiritual but not necessarily very driven people
- Day 2 showed a pattern of driven but not necessarily spiritual people
- Day 3 is where we started to see our HXC — the person who was both those things
So keeping the vibe of our day 3 people in mind, we took a very quick look through all the video recordings to jog our memories and remember who we’d most resonated with.
A mix of science and magic
Our metrics for the HXC shortlist were a mix of science and magic. It wasn’t just based on hard data of who gave the “best” answers or happened to fit a target demographic. We thought deeply about:
- Who were we excited to build for?
- Who was excited about what we were building?
- Who did we look up to and admire?
- Who saw the main value of our product as being the same thing we did?
Imagine working long hours, enduring setbacks, overcoming disagreements, and every other hardship that comes with building a company — what would motivate you to keep going? An HXC that makes sense on paper but that you don’t have any emotional connection to, or an HXC you deeply admire, who’s invested in what you’re building, and whose life you want to make easier?
We asked ourselves those questions about everyone on our shortlist, and only kept the ones that came out on top.
Defining your HXC
Once we had our list of HXCs, we pulled up the transcripts from their customer discovery calls and created a new Trello board.
Step 1: We pulled every interesting quote or idea from the transcripts and put it into a separate card in the leftmost column.
Step 2: We read through all the cards and looked for what common themes were coming out. Sometimes these were the same as the questions we asked on the calls, but sometimes other themes came out as well. Look for the things that people keep going out of their way to tell you.
Step 3: We made new columns for each theme or question. Then we sorted all the cards from the leftmost column into the appropriate theme/question column. If there were cards left over at the end that didn’t fit into any theme in particular, we deleted them. Our goal was to find what our HXCs had in common, so we were okay to lose one-off ideas.
Step 4: We created one new card at the top of each column and used it to write a summary of the responses below. So when we looked across the top card of each column, we could get a sense of who the HXC was. If we wanted more details or to pull verbatim quotes, we would look at the other cards within each column.
Step 5: We used that information to create a profile for our HXC using Julie Supan’s High-Expectation Customer (HXC) Framework. This would become the holy grail that we referred to for any future product and marketing decisions. [*Note: the Trello board we linked above is not what we used to create our HXC! So you might notice differences between the info there and our HXC here 🙂]
🔮 Next steps
After our customer discovery sprint, we decided we wanted to keep doing customer calls, but on a slower basis. We ended up doing two calls per day for the next couple of weeks so we could continue to practice our pitch, grow our waitlist, and stay connected to the people we were building for.
I hope this guide helps you find the people you can best serve too!
🦾 Need help?
If you have any questions or need help with your customer discovery process, shoot me an email. We offer workshops, consulting, and also speak at events. We LOVE to help however we can, so get in touch!
