(2025-01-18) Maurya How I Learned To Stop Avoiding And Love Talking To Customers

AshMaurya: How I Learned to Stop Avoiding and Love Talking to Customers.

1 Universal Principle
“Keystone Habit: Build a continuous customer feedback loop.”

Me after the trigger:

• You have to know how to talk to customers
• Building an automated continuous feedback loop where I talk to customers regularly
• It is my job to figure out what customers want

In this issue, I want to focus on item #2: Building an automated customer feedback loop

2 Underlying Strategies at Play

I. Talking to customers serves like a canary in the coal mine.

No-agenda customer conversations

Over the years, I’ve watched my customers evolve from high-tech technical founders practicing lean startup to aspiring founders who may not be technical or know anything about lean startups.

I still remember this conversation from a few years ago with a fisherman in Chile who was struggling to create his first Lean Canvas.

I invited the next 10 sign-ups to a conversation and learned that our audience had changed without us realizing it. This also explained the drop in lean canvas activations that we had spent months trying to fix.

II. Talking to customers is the fastest way to learn, even at scale.

Even at scale, it can be much faster to contact customers before a major feature release, price change, or other major change, talk to a few customers first, and get their reactions.

3 Actionable Tactics

I. Lead with Value.

Building a continuous feedback loop with customers starts at hello with a give-before-get mindset.

For me, that begins with a welcome email and a few lifecycle value-driven messages with a prompt/invitation to reply -- before I ask for any feedback or conversation.

Next, you have to frame the conversation around something they want, not about you getting feedback.

• lead by helping them achieve an outcome they care about.
  • After launching Lean Canvas, I offered (and still do) business model diagnostics to the same effect.

II. Automate the process.

Talking to customers is like eating healthy, exercising, or saving money. We know these things are good for us, but other (seemingly more important) things tend to get in the way.

I’ve automated invitations to customer conversations at various stages in my product’s lifecycle so that I no longer need to reach out to people manually. I’ve set aside time on my calendar for these no-agenda customer conversations, which fill up weekly.

III. The reward loop takes care of the rest.

you’ll learn at least one actionable insight you didn’t know within your first three conversations.

When you put this insight to the test and reap a measurable traction reward, there's no going back.

It is this faster learning reward loop that got me hooked. I encourage you to give it a try, too.