You can't build a useful product without deep customer insights.
The concierge technique helps you find those pearls. 💎
Here’s how you can speed run product discovery...
The concierge technique in a nutshell:
Find a real world problem
Find people who suffer with that problem
Work extremely closely with those people to better define that problem
Do whatever it takes to solve it
Productize the solution
The concierge technique is a very hands on style of product discovery. SaaS businesses are notoriously hands off. Customers often sign up without any human interaction. Concierge is different. You’re at the customer’s beck and call. And that’s the way you want it. You’ll understand their problems and experience intimately which leads to a better product.
Find participants with a problem that you want to solve. Defining the problem is really important here. You want to be pretty clear on how you’re going to help people. Although this will become crystal clear as you go through the process with the participants. Having the problem defined reasonably well up front will help you find similar participants.
You may want to run this research with a cohort of participants. Participants within a cohort will start and end at the same time. Potentially run future cohorts too. The cohort allows you to create a community feel as you may introduce participants to each other. I’d advise against having conversations with the whole cohort at the same time. Those should still be one-on-one.
Set expectations upfront that you want feedback. Let participants know that you’re going to want to have several calls with them. Also, let them know that you’re here to solve their problem by any means necessary. You’re on their team.
You’ll want to arrange a call schedule with participants. This ensures that you’ll stay on top of organising participants conversations. The most crucial part of concierge product discovery. The call schedule should involve…
Onboarding call: learn participants’ hopes and dreams, the progress they want to make, what else they have tried and get them setup in the product.
Exit call: learn if you made participants dreams come true, what they didn’t like about the solution, get a testimonial, confirm next steps.
Check in calls: learn if you are moving toward the participants vision of progress and what are they struggling with. Depending on the duration of the service you may want these fortnightly or monthly.
“Do things that don’t scale”. You’ll probably be hacking things together with no code tools, sending out emails manually, running database lookups manually. Eventually you’ll automate these tasks. This is the way.
If you’re planning on charging for your product in the long term, set a price for this concierge service. Requiring customers pay for the service is a strong data point. It can be heavily discounted from your future price. Make it clear that you’re offering the discount in exchange for feedback can persuade the participant to agree to frequent calls.
Importantly, if you can’t sign up people for your service at a discount, why would they pay full whack? Maybe their problem just doesn’t exist.
Investors love to see that your product can make money. Running a paid concierge service shows investors people are willing to pay to solve this problem.
Try out the concierge technique next time you’re wanting deep customer insights to build a useful product.