*Learn More Faster: Find Your Bullseye Customer - Michael Margolis

Partial Excerpts

Table of Contents

Founders obsess over the problems they’re compelled to solve. They have a stubborn conviction about the unique solutions they’re already building, which they have pitched hundreds of times to anyone who would listen. At the same time, they are under huge amounts of pressure to answer critical questions like: Who is our ideal customer? Are we solving the right problem for them?

For many early-stage founders, trying to answer these questions can feel more like a fishing expedition than a series of well-planned experiments

CHAPTER ONE YOU COULD BE LEARNING MORE FASTER

CHAPTER TWO AGREE ON GOALS AND KEY QUESTIONS

CHAPTER THREE DEFINE YOUR BULLSEYE CUSTOMER

At an early stage, we see startups accelerate after they define and align around their bullseye customer—the very specific subset of the target market who—initially—is most likely to adopt a company’s product or service.

Knowing who is in and who is out of the bullseye will allow you to draw insights more quickly and to make tough decisions with more confidence. Plus, you won’t be distracted by feedback and requests from anyone outside the bullseye, which is a common, costly trap. As a bonus, prioritizing your easiest-to-win customers will make your marketing and sales efforts more targeted, efficient, and cost-effective

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to specify those detailed criteria so you can recruit your own bullseye customers for interviews.

Triggers and exclusion criteria

distinguishing traits, behaviors, and past experiences (not just demographics!) that identify the subset of customers who’ll be most likely to adopt their product or service.

more specific and precise than most personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) we’ve seen.

We emphasize two critical areas most teams forget to consider: triggers and exclusion criteria. (exclude)

Triggers are certain recent events that prime people or organizations to hunger for your product or service

A company selling an amazing new security solution might hit paydirt only with enterprise prospects who’ve recently hired a new Chief Security Officer, suffered a breach, raised new funding, or expanded into a regulated market (triggers!).

Similarly, exclusion criteria will help you winnow people or organizations who will probably be less receptive to your product or don’t represent your target customers

For example, for feedback on a new mobile banking app, avoid spending precious time interviewing people who worked in finance or app development, distrust online banking, don’t already pay bills online, don’t have credit cards, use old phones, rely on others to manage their money, and so forth

We’ve learned it’s worth spending time brainstorming less-obvious exclusion criteria.

EXAMPLE: DISCOUNT HEALTHCARE’S BULLSEYE CUSTOMERS

What might you hear in the first few minutes of an interview that would make you realize you’re talking to the wrong person?”

triggers such as:

exclusion criteria, including:

The bullseye exercise

CUSTOMER ATTRIBUTES QUESTIONS

Basic profile of target customer

New vs. existing users

B2B: Sector or industry

B2B: Scale of organization

Use of related or competitive products

Disqualifying personal experiences

might bias people against your product

Disqualifying professional experience

Be wary of input from people who know much more than your ideal customer about the industry or underlying details.

Titles, roles, and responsibilities

Geography

Buyers vs. end users

B2B: Structure and distribution of teams

Does it matter whether an organization’s teams are centralized vs. distributed across multiple offices? Will your users work together in an office, remotely, or hybrid?

Income and budgets

look at specific aspects of their lifestyle and spending habits (e.g. neighborhood, occupation, hobbies, vacations, cars they drive, where they shop, brands), which are often better signals about their attitudes and behaviors related to money.

Life and work settings

Trigger events

Changes in consumers’ personal lives (such as marrying, retiring, changing residences, becoming a parent) and organizations (such as raising a series A, hiring a new exec, expanding to new markets, adopting new tech) often signal a shift in customers’ needs and interests. What recent events or changes would make a prospect more (or less) receptive to your product?

VIPs

While all customers are valued, some are usually more valuable than others.

Who’s missing?

try to be inclusive. Understand and try to represent the diverse demographic characteristics (ethnicity, gender, race, SES, etc.) of your target market

Other disqualifying exclusions?

other core identifiers, experiences, or attributes that you would want to exclude

Can you imagine anything else you might learn in the first few minutes of a research interview or sales call that would make you say, “Oh no! This person doesn’t represent our bullseye customer.”

*CHAPTER FOUR RECRUIT FIVE BULLSEYE CUSTOMERS *

Recruit five bullseye customers

posting screener questionnaires on services like User Interviews and Respondent. The trick is investing a little energy in writing a great screener and being very picky selecting participants who represent your bullseye customers.

Why five bullseye customers?

interviewing five bullseye customers in one day with a watch party (see Chapter 8: Plan a Watch Party) for several reasons. We can fit five 60-minute sessions and debrief sessions into an eight-hour day. If we’ve recruited carefully, we start hearing the same things over and over by the fifth session, and the big takeaways are evident to the whole team. Additional sessions have diminishing returns.

How to recruit most customers

We usually write screener questionnaires with about 15 questions

If you’re struggling to find five people who meet your specific criteria from among a large number of responses, that might tell you something about how hard it will be to market your product to your bullseye customers in the real world.

Recruiting experts and hard-to-find participants

Approaching experts

No more no-shows

*CHAPTER FIVE CHOOSE YOUR VALUE PROPS AND THREE PROTOTYPES *

showing concrete examples will ground your conversations in the real world, and force you to get specific about the ideas you want to test

we use three easy prototypes with distinct combinations of possible product features, benefits, and messaging that customers can compare during our upcoming interviews.

For these prototypes, we mock up or select front pages of websites or app store pages

That’s why the pages we show should look like (or actually be) real sites, rather than sketches or wireframes

Why three prototypes?

*You will learn dramatically more by asking customers to compare multiple examples. Besides, in the real world, your customers won’t encounter your product in a vacuum. *