Interview a Startup Entrepreneur

Find a local startup that’s still in the early stages of development (preferably pre-revenue) and interview the founder about their target customer. Use the following questions as a guide when interviewing the entrepreneur and come up with some additional questions of your own:

  1. Who are the target customers? Please be specific.
    1. Where do you find groups/lists of these people?
  2. What is their problem (the customers’)?
    1. Is it a migraine?
  3. What are they currently doing to fix the problem?
  4. On a scale of 1-10 how much does this problem affect their lives?
  5. What are some of the bigger problems they are dealing with?
  6. Do they have a budget allocated to fix this problem?

 

Next, find 3-5 target customers the entrepreneur described and interview them, asking the same questions, to determine whether their answers line up with the entrepreneur’s assumptions. I would recommend not telling the entrepreneur about this second step because it seems to make them nervous and puts them on the defensive (and that’s not our goal).

 

Make a PowerPoint (Prezi, or other visual) presentation comparing the entrepreneur’s predictions (remember they are in the early stages of development) with what you discovered when talking to actual customers.

 

Lastly, synthesize the information to respond to the following questions:

  1. Why do the entrepreneurs have mistaken assumptions about their customers?
  2. Are they solving a real migraine problem?
  3. Why is it important to engage with customers directly at the very beginning of your startup, before you commit to a specific direction?
  4. Why is it important to have a very specific customer target vs. trying to sell to everyone who could benefit from the product?
  5. How interested were customers in a potential solution to minor, headache type problems?
  6. How interested were customers in a potential solution to serious, migraine type problems?
  7. Do you think the entrepreneur interacted with their customers enough at the beginning of their idea before starting to build the product? Explain.

 

1 visual

2 pages

3 sources

APA format

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