Do you need to change your strategy?

For two decades, it has been widely accepted in the startup community that to be successful, you need to be hands-on in dealing with your customers. This means that many founders spend a significant amount of their time, early in their company’s life, talking to customers, jumping on sales calls and trying to get as much feedback as possible so that they can iterate and grow their business.

That being said, this strategy has been questioned in recent times. When it first came to prominence in the early 2000s, talking to customers was the most efficient way to gather feedback; there weren’t many other options. Today, however, a growing contingent believes that customer surveys, usage data, and trends are significantly more valuable than customer conversations.

The reality is that today, we don’t need to talk to customers to gather their feedback; we can see it by tracking how they interact with our website, product, or service. When do they fall off? When do they engage? What features are they using most? In addition to this data, the ability to send digital surveys allows data to be collected in batches, eliminating the need to track it through individual conversations.

Personally, I believe that a mix of the two is still the best path forward.

While having large amounts of data from many customers that you can analyze can provide unique insights and help inform decision-making, from my experience, the value of talking to customers isn’t necessarily their direct feedback but the ideas and inspiration that you get from those conversations.

Customers often talk about your product in a completely different way than you think about it. This shift in perspective helps you to view what you are building from a new lens, and that shift in perspective can’t be replicated by searching through data. In fact, when you do analyze the data, you will do so through your own perspective, meaning that you will end up filtering out lots of useful information because your own pre-existing biases are contextualizing the results.

By talking to customers, not only do you get to shift your perspective, but you can also better understand who is using your services. Understanding the profile of your ideal customer is crucial to developing a product that effectively meets their needs.

Overall, I’d recommend that you use the best of both worlds. Meet with customers to better understand them and their perspective then use that information to better inform yourself when you analyze the data you collect from their usage.

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