Your Business Questions
Where are you now?
You might be in the throws of your venture and generating revenue, looking to pivot or just at the beginning of your journey. Regardless, you’re likely facing a number of unknowns. Is this the right course of action? Should I keep going? Is this the right customer profile? Is this too expensive or not expensive enough?
Entrepreneurship is navigating the unknown with the best of intentions, the knowledge you have available, and luck.
You should always be asking questions. Some of the questions you’re asking will be more important than others and will have a greater impact on your business.
But it’s important to know what questions you need to ask.
What do you want to know?
Some of the questions you want to know the answers to will have a much bigger impact on your business than others. Some questions only matter if certain conditions are true. For example, your pricing might not matter if the problem you’re trying to solve doesn’t exist.
These more critical questions are the ones that can make or break your business.
A few examples of these are:
Who is my target customer?
Does my target customer recognise this problem?
What should my business model be?
Don’t ask
An important aspect of these business questions is that you should almost never ask your customers directly. We’ve spoken about it before, but these can lead to biased answers. Many of your customers or potential customers will be trying to please you. It’s called acquiescence bias. This is where people being interviewed are more likely to be agreeable.
“Would you pay £9.99 a month for this service?”
Most people might say yes, just to be nice. Or just because they imagine a world in the future where they would pay for it.
A better way...
First, plan out your business questions. What do you want to know and why?
Let’s take the business model question:
What should my business model be?
Okay, so what kind of questions would you need to ask in order to find out this answer?
What do you currently pay for that solves this problem and why?
How much do you spend trying to solve this problem and why?
How regularly do you encounter this problem?
How regularly do you pay for this solution?
Etc…
By asking your customers questions like these, you’re more likely to get honest answers from them, and you can use the answers to determine what the best solution might be.
The end result
By focusing on getting the answers to your business questions, and asking unbiased interview or survey questions, you can make evidence-based decisions for marketing, product development, customer retention, and in fact your whole business.
We believe in this so much that we’ve introduced the business questions concept in our new digital service – Shift. If you’d like to get text, audio and video insights from your current or potential customers email our Product Manager, Phil.
