Customer Research in Small Startups: Practical Tips and Ready-to-Use free Templates
Step-by-Step Guide for the Product Managers and Founders starting doing their fist customer research
When I joined Sitly, as Interim Head of Product, the first question I asked was, "Where can I read customer feedback?" The reply was... oh, here and there, and the reality was that there was almost nothing substantial.
Most of the research was from years ago and outdated, lacking structure, and contained some quantitative data but zero qualitative data.
My main goal was to build a product strategy and roadmap, and the lack of user insights was the biggest roadblock I had to fix first.
If you find yourself in the situation when you need to build Customer Research muscle in your startup, or need to do Problem Discovery in a startup, I have prepared a 5-step guide with major areas to start with:
1 - Collect In-Product feedback
A great way to start is to analyze your in-product feedback. In my situation, the company had a custom-built feedback popover with the question "Do you enjoy the product?" If the user answered yes, they were forwarded to submit a review, and if it was no, there was an empty field to enter the reason for their disappointment. It was really beneficial that the company had been gathering negative feedback over the years, and I was the first person to read it.
That was the monumental file with thousands of replies provided me with a baseline understanding of the users' major problems.
If you don't gather in-product feedback right now, please start doing so ASAP and connect it in real-time to a dedicated Slack channel [ e.g. #user-insights-from-product] to ensure it doesn't remain abandoned in some CSV file. And don’t forget to popularize this channel internally.
2 - Do Customers Interviews
I am a Product person who believes in customers centric product development. For me, speaking with customers - is what gives me energy and insights. Since our startup operates in 14 countries, we started by focusing on the major market [Italy] and selected people who speak ENG, so the whole team could participate.
After interviewing 20 users, we needed to continue the same research in the next 3 prioritized markets. We wanted the data to be reliable, so the conversations were held in local languages. To achieve this, we found 3 bright international students with experience in research principles for their study. They were quickly onboarded into the product, equipped with structure and tools, and continued interviews in all major markets.
Here are 2 documents I want to share with you:
User Interview Canvas - Not a single interview should start without clear goals and hypotheses to test. Here is an example of how I structured it: [User Interview Setup Google doc].
User Interview card - All user interviews should be recorded and have a full transcript. But for future synthesis sessions, you need a summary of each interview in a visual format. Each interviewer after the interview did a summary in this template: [User Interview card in Miro].
This is how it looked after 30+ user interview cards were on the board and later synthesized frames - massive!
Miro Board for collecting all user cards and later doing remote synthesis Tools I used:
3 - Watch User sessions recordings
Sessions recordings are a great complimentary way to gather insights. For me, it feels like you are secretly watching unmanaged user behavior and seeing where the user puts their attention. If you have the budget to use tools to record them, you should definitely do so. We used HotJar, and it served 100% as needed.
4 - Try User journey testing
In case you have some specific flows to test fast, my favorite service, which we used in Miro and I also brought to Sitly, is UserTesting.com. This is such a great time-saver for Product Managers and Product Designers. Usertesting has a massive user base in almost all major markets for our product, and we can precisely target Parents with certain children age clusters. Usually, we received replies in 2 hours, once even within 20 minutes! In our case, we mostly tested major user flows to identify existing friction.
5 - Start Insourcing ideas
I believe that companies usually underestimate the internal workforce and the insights they can bring. Especially the Customer Support / Success team - they are the front liners constantly receiving inbound user feedback and ideas. To structure this inflow of user feedback from all teams, I used Airtables to build a simple form to submit everything new coming from users, and later to add tags and prioritize. Here's what it looks like:
To summarize, I believe that starting from customers is always the right approach. If you are joining a company where this practice is not yet developed or you are just starting to develop it, you should dedicate as much effort and attention as possible to customer research and gathering insights. This will benefit everyone involved, as it not only provides valuable information but also fosters a strong connection between your team and your users.
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