Week 6 Customer Interviews No. 3

This exercise was my second round of interviews, and I will discuss each topic for both weeks 2 and 3 below:

Fine tune your opportunity. You began with an idea of what an opportunity might be. After your first round of interviews, what do you think, now? 

I definitely think there is an opportunity for a subletting resource for UF students.  Most of the apartments that are close to campus only offer 12 month leases, and many UF students end up paying three to four months of extra rent because they are unable to find sub-letters or do not wish to deal with the hassle of finding someone.

Fine tune the "who." Did you talk to the right customers last time? What did you do differently this time? How did you adjust your conceptualization of who your customers are?

Last time I found three our of five people who were interested in additional subleasing resources.  Two out of the five people I interviewed actually live in Gainesville as full time residents, so they were not the right customers to ask.  This time, I made sure to conduct the interviews with UF students who do not live in Gainesville full time and typically go home or another location during summer months.  

Tweaking your interview questions. You might need to ask different kinds of questions to get at a fuller, richer idea of what your opportunity is. What kind of changes did you make?  

During the first round of interviews, if I discovered that an interviewee did not have previous or current experience with subleasing, I just said "thank you" and ended the interview.  The second time around, if I discovered that my interviewees hadn't had experience with subleasing, I then asked if they knew anyone personally who had (such as a roommate or close friend) and to describe their experience.  This gave me additional insight and information from second-hand sources.

Tell us what you learned about interviewing customers. 

3 tips:

Be prepared with additional questions in case the on-paper questions do not give you any useful information

Try not to sway your questions in a direction that will only give you answers that you want to hear.  Let your interviewees be honest.

Be clear with your questions.  Some interviewees would misinterpret my questions and give me information that wasn't relevant to the opportunity in question.

Reflect on what you learned. What did you learn from the interviews? What surprised you the most? What do you expect to change as an outcome of these interviews?

Asking open-ended questions is actually quite difficult, and this surprised me.  I learned that some questions, when asked in my head, sounded unbiased and direct, but when actually asked out loud seemed less open-ended and more swayed.  I would alter my questions and clarify any ambiguities better during the interview process.

My interviews are below: