One Question Friday: What Questions Do You Ask Your Customers When Starting A Business?

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Ashwin** (1:04)
Hey, this is Ashwin. My question is for Sam regarding customer discovery.
I saw on a recent webinar that your calendar was booked with dozens of calls each day with potential customers for your new product.
I'd like to know what kind of questions you ask in those meetings and how you use their feedback to influence the business plan and product for your new business.

**Sam Parr** (1:33)
All right, so the question was basically the guy, I did like a little small talk for like a private group, and I showed my calendar about how basically on Tuesdays and Thursdays and whatever, like I'll do like 10 to maybe 10 or 13, like 10 to 20 minute calls with customers.
And they asked, what questions do I ask?
And so I do a few things. The first thing is, if you haven't read it, there's this book called The Mom Test, and it talks about like how to ask good questions. But I'm not asking questions that a lot of people ask, like, would you pay for this? I don't ask that. I don't ask like, would you use this? I never ask that stuff. So in my case, or all the time, not just in my case, but in this particular case of this business I'm starting, but in all cases, I'm not even asking them if they want the solution that I'm saying is the solution to the problem. What I'm looking for is I'm trying to get confirmation of does this person have my problem, the problem that I'm trying to solve? And then I'm trying to figure out, well, if they don't have the problem, are they even the target market that I'm going after? And who, like what type of like archetype of person, demographic, psychographic, what type of person consistently do I notice has this problem? And so I'll give you some example questions.

**Ashwin** (2:57)
I can't find this client info.

**Sam Parr** (2:59)
Have you heard of HubSpot?
HubSpot is a CRM platform. So it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.

**Ashwin** (3:09)
HubSpot, grow better.

**Sam Parr** (3:13)
I don't want to talk too much about the business that I'm starting, because I'm not ready to like reveal it yet, but it is working really well. And we've done a lot, we've done a lot in revenue in a very short amount of time, all from these calls. But I'll basically, so I'm going to use, I'm just going to like use some vague language. So sorry about that, but that's what I'm going to do. So I'll say, all right, have you ever tried to use blank before?
Oh, you haven't, but you've wanted to? Well, why haven't you?
And they'll tell me answers like, well, you know, just like no good one has ever presented itself. Or the brands that currently saw this, they seem a little old to me.
They seem a little old school. And I'll say, tell me about that. Why do you think that they seem old school to you? Why do you think they seem archaic and not like new?
And they'll tell me. They'll tell me all these types of reasons. And so in my head, I use that feedback to say, all right, I get this constant pattern of people saying, A, they want to use a product like I'm offering, but B, they haven't already because they, none of the offerings like appeal to them because they're not new and they want something that's a little, or because they're all old and they want something a little new looking. So anyway, what I'm constantly doing on these calls is I'm trying to get them to tell me if they do or do not have the problem that they're solved, that I'm trying to solve. And so the second thing that I then do is I try to close them. And when I close them, I kind of typically get them to sell me. And so typically what I'll do is, well, this product, if you used it, how much do you think it would help you?