How can you use online platforms for customer discovery?

Extend your customer discovery efforts by analyzing your competitors' online presence and customer interactions. Examine their social media channels, reviews, and community engagement.

Use public platforms: X.com, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. People talk about their problems publicly online. People ask others for recommendations publicly online Use the platform's search functionality to search for keywords and topics related to your industry and product. You will get the answers you need and learn new insights as well.

To use online platforms for customer discovery, start by choosing the right platform. This means selecting a platform (like Linkedin or Instagram) where your target audience is active and conducting research, surveys, or engaging in conversations to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. Tailor your approach to the platform's dynamics and user behavior to gather valuable insights for your business.

One thing that has not been mentioned yet is combining in-person and online customer discovery. This can be especially beneficial if we target sensitive problems and customer populations (e.g. what we do in mental health), and they prefer to talk to a human privately, either in person or video calls. We can then direct interested individuals to the best online survey, social media, community, or automated data collection platform. The initial in-person meeting can build trust, and actual data collection can be done anonymously if privacy is important.

The most important factor for choosing the right platform is to understand where are your potential customers are. If you are targeting 30y+ audience, you are most likely to find them on Facebook in various discussion groups. If you are targeting gamers- think Discord. If you are truly interested to understand your target market, the first step is to be where they are.

Making this as simple/quick as possible is also important in today's busy world. In that regard, yes/no and quantitative questions can be helpful at times. The extra benefit is that we can easily analyze and graph the results and look at the larger picture.

Craft questions that revolve around empathy and understanding. Rather than solely focusing on the practical aspects, delve into the emotional side of your customers' experiences. Ask questions like "Can you describe a time when this problem caused frustration or stress?

Questions matter but being prepared is more important. Be concise, don’t be scared to express your vision. A great entrepreneur isn’t defined by a sale of a product, it’s defined by your purpose and your objective.

Gaining access to potential customers to understand their needs and pain points should not be taken lightly. It is not simply about the questions you pose, but about your preparation. Research, research, research. Preparation time is never wasted time, it shows you care, understand the importance of time, demonstrates respect and that you are engaging for a purpose.

The answers you will get are as good as the questions you will be asking, so make sure you are focused on the right ones. In general, your goal should focus on better understanding the problem you are aiming to solve, and the way your target audience is currently dealing with it.

In addition to individual feedback, open forums and group discussions can also be helpful to engage with customers. This can be in the form of webinars with intense Q&A, creating a discussion forum on the company's website, or social media groups. This way, customers can also engage with each-other and improve their solutions further based on collective advice.

Beyond the immediate conversation, aim to build holistic customer profiles. Collect information about their preferences, challenges, and feedback over time.

When you've gathered information through appropriate channels and posed the right queries, you'll probably reveal valuable hidden treasures and insights. This is where the importance of data analysis becomes evident. Remember to employ a structured method for analyzing data so that you can harness the discoveries made during your customer exploration and apply them effectively.

If you are serious about finding what the business problems really are, have an OPEN MIND when talking to customers. Don't ask questions that skew the answers in a certain way. Don't fish for compliments. If you are not getting the insight you need, ask your questions differently and show them that you are really interested in knowing what the real problems are.

Great emphasis on the art of questioning. It's essential to remember that the quality of insights drawn from customer discovery is often proportional to the quality of questions asked. Crafting unbiased, open-ended questions can unearth genuine pain points and needs. Additionally, the emotional aspect shouldn't be overlooked. Capturing the emotional drivers can be the key to creating a truly resonating solution. Always be an active listener and let the customer lead the conversation. They often provide insights in unexpected ways

I always like to emphasize the importance of doing this BEFORE any major step in product and business development, to survey NEEDS not only outcome and satisfaction. With the help of AI tools these days, we can also make comparisons with already existing, large datasets.

Data analysis in this area doesn't have to be complex but it can be. The key is to NOT over-engineer a solution. I've seen organizations so focused on collecting this kind of data that their business development folks spent more time staring at spreadsheets than actively selling.

The next step is analyzing things well beforehand. One can do this by talking to their customers or seeing their feedback. This will help to improve considerably and make you progress more in comparison to others who are in the same competitive space. This is an unimportant step and should not be missed out in any case

Assuming you collected information using the correct platforms and asked the right questions,you are likely to uncover some hidden gems & insights! That's where data analysis comes to play. Keep in mind to use a systematic approach to data analysis so you can leverage the findings from your customer discovery and put them to work.

Analyze and refine over and over again. The only way to effectively understand your customer is to spread the research out in that initial discovery. Coming in too narrow can lead to confirmation bias. Being able to take the journey of your product or service to different places leads to better entrepreneurial decision making.

Iteration is really about two things: 1. Qualitative feedback: What do you hear when you talk to your prospects and customers? What are some commonalities? 2. Quantitative feedback: What does the data say and what hypotheses can you form? My favorite exercise is to run the data. Look at website traffic, time on sight, bounce rates, conversion rates, etc. Identify any areas that seem low/poor and form hypotheses. For example, if visitors are spending less time on your site, that could be for several reasons: 1. Information overwhelm 2. Poor UX/UI 3. Wrong messaging Etc. You can't fix all of those things because you'll lose isolation of the problem. Instead, rank them as best as you can, choose one, and activate it. Then measure!

Customer discovery can be done either periodically, e.g. once a quarter or every other quarters, or whenever needed. We use some of the same quantitative surveys repeatedly to track progress and compare stages easily.

The biggest trap I see startups falling into with customer discovery is to focus on, or listen for, the problems 'they think' they're solving for customers - which are often the ones they raised funds to solve too. Then instead of pivoting on the problems to solve, they too frequently revamp their value proposition in the hope more customers will bite. An antidote to this is: a) Radical candour - co-founders need to encourage employees, friends, and investors to poke holes in the product/market fit narrative. Not to protect it at all costs. b) Extremely simple value propositions - lofty and ambiguous value propositions can be great for branding when scaling, but they're terrible for educating you target audience pre-product/market fit.

Qualitative data is key for iterating. Get on Zoom and talk to your ideal customers — ask them deep and pointed questions about what you're testing. My favorite questions to ask are: - what were you hoping to get out of a solution like this? - how did this solution meet or fail to meet those expectations? You'll gain a better understanding of what's important to them and what your solution didn't provide.

In the words of Jim Clark, show me the data or my opinion will do. So review your data and create small experiments around the points you are trying to improve. And keep it simple.

Online Review and Feedback - Pay close attention to what customers are saying about your brand or products on review sites, forums and feedback sections.

Customer discovery can be performed on any social media platform. I believe "I don't guess I test". X(Twitter) I try titles and tag retweet bots. I get immediate feedback. Facebook ad, I ran an ad for 7 days and let Facebook tell me the demographics. I did that test for my brand. I took my assumptions and made a Facebook ad. It came back 60% women and 40% men and it told me their interest. Here's a test I'm running on LinkedIn with newsletters. A bi-weekly newsletter focusing on personal branding and agile digital marketing. My analytics tell me who is reading my content. Important analytics is the "best time to post". I was shocked to see Sunday 6 p.m. for executives on Linkedin. It makes sense for executives to prepare for Monday.

In my experience as innovation facilitator of 100+ projects, the best way for customer discovery is: “GO OUT AND TALK TO THEM YOURSELVES”! 4 concrete tips for you: 1. Immerse as an anthropologist among your potential customers without being judgmental. 2. Find out what really relevant for them in their lives at this moment. 3. Identify their jobs-to-be-done and issues related to the context of your scope. 4. Do customer discovery before your ideation process YOURSELVES with your whole tam, as the experience is as important as the results. When as immerse in your target group yourself you will understand their situation, and their jobs to be done more profoundly than any other method. You will never forget your customer vists ?????.

1. Find where your customers are (which platform). 2. Dedicate some time to identify their problems. 3. Talk about the solutions to their problems (content creation). 4. Network with decision makers. 5. Show how you can solve their problem.