Yassin Bader about Customer Development

Timofei: Yassin, could you tell us about your customer development experience?

Yassin: I've had customer experience at many different levels of the customer experience itself and the customer development part. I've been involved in both the operational and ideation aspects. So, understanding the whole process of customer development is vital. You have to start from the beginning – creating the persona, defining the customer, and identifying the unique value proposition of the product you're offering.

Timofei: Can you elaborate on the importance of defining who the customer is, and how your product is uniquely valuable to them?

Yassin: Once you have defined who the customer is and the unique value your product offers, you can start building everything around it. Of course, the approach can vary depending on the product itself.

Timofei: Given your extensive experience, do you believe that the product for customer development is actually needed?

Yassin: Absolutely. Having a tool that guides you through the initial stages of customer development is crucial. Defining who your target audience is and how you want to reach them can be challenging with the plethora of platforms available nowadays.

Timofei: Could you elaborate on the process of defining the ideal customer and building a relationship with them?

Yassin: Initially, it's a bit of a guessing game. You start with broad demographic parameters. Once you have that, you can understand their habits, interests, and struggles. Then, you tailor your product to solve their problems and meet their needs. It's about understanding all the potential problems these people could have and how you can help them.

Timofei: How critical is customer development in marketing and product development?

Yassin: Customer development is the foundation of everything. Before starting any marketing initiative, you have to identify who your ideal customer is, how you want to reach them, and their interests and pain points. Once you have that, you can start building a community and create content tailored to that audience. It's a feedback loop of customer development, ideation, product definition, and response evaluation.

Timofei: Have you faced any obstacles during this process? If so, how have you overcome them?

Yassin: The biggest challenge in customer development is that you don't really know your audience until you interact with them. It's a full-time job to stay connected with your audience, understand their activities, and keep them engaged. It's especially challenging to keep the product interesting and user-friendly over time.

Timofei: What tools do you usually use for customer development?

Yassin: I typically use Google Forms, MailChimp, CRM, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Google Meets for various aspects of customer development. For data analysis, I primarily use Google Analytics.

Timofei: What tools do you use for conducting and interpreting interviews?

Yassin: Initially, I did this manually with Excel sheets. Nowadays, there are many tools like Riverside that provide complete transcripts. However, interpreting interview results can be challenging and errors can occur. Thankfully, with modern tools and AI like Whisper and ChatGPT, these processes are becoming much easier and efficient.

Timofei: Can you share more about these tools and how they have helped you?

Yassin: Whisper is a website that I use for transcriptions. It can be connected to Notion, which can then be connected to #ChatGPT for summarizing texts and extracting important talking points. It's like having a personal assistant.

Timofei: So, did you follow a manual, or did you figure things out yourself??

Yassin: I watched a video tutorial, actually. It was on YouTube and presented the whole process step by step.?His tips are practical and save a lot of time. I've also found a tool called Instapaper helpful for saving things I want to watch later or for ideation.?

Timofei: Interesting. Lastly, could you describe your dream customer development tool? What features would it have to enhance the process??

Yassin: My ideal tool would integrate a CRM and survey tool so that Google Forms wouldn't be necessary. It would also include analytics and testing tools. Data visualization would be fantastic, along with scraping Google Analytics. The tool should record video in high definition and transcribe everything at the same time. It would be great if it could analyze the customer based on their speech or behavior and categorize them according to personality types. There's a tool called Clay that can pull together all your contacts and show you the last contact and what was discussed. If we could add that functionality, it would be ideal.?