Faster Customer Research Using ChatGPT

If you're a startup founder, I cannot, and I mean I absolutely cannot stress how important it is that you know your customer really, really well. And oftentimes knowing your customer is the actual difference between a startup idea and an actual full-fledged startup. Look, I know you're not supposed to say this, customer research, especially done the traditional way, can be boring and expensive and time-consuming. So there has to be a better way, right? Well, guess what? There is a better way. I'm Daniel from the Founder Institute, and today I'm gonna show you how to turbocharge your customer research using ChatGPT. So before we begin, you obviously have a startup idea. And with a startup idea comes an understanding of a problem and a customer who needs that problem solved. What we'll be doing today isn't necessarily like coming up with a brand new customer persona, but more so building on what we know about the problem and who we're trying to solve it for. So we'll be doing this in two parts. The first is building out a customer persona, and the second is doing customer interviews. I'll explain each part as we go through them one by one. So let's start with customer personas. Customer persona is a representation of who your ideal customer should be based on research and insights that you might have. This is essentially who they are as an individual, the challenges that they face, and what motivates them. This is often done right at the start of when you're building your startup, but as you go along and build out products and learn more about your customer, this tends to change. Also, this is a really, really great way to keep your team motivated and focused on the people who you're trying to solve a problem for.

Today what I'll be doing is creating a customer persona for a SaaS tool for hotel managers to book and manage reservations. So before I enter in the prompt, let's quickly talk about what version of ChatGPT to use. I personally recommend with just going with 4.0 because I feel like it gets the job done and it does it fairly quickly. Another option for this is using deep research, and deep research is a really, really great tool for most things, but I think this use case in particular might not be the best because what you need to do with deep research is be really specific. And with this, what it'll do is because it's kind of like very broad customer research sort of scenario, you won't necessarily get any insights that you would get if you were using, let's say, just 4.0. Well, let's get started with our prompt. And the prompt we have right now is describe a detailed customer persona for a hotel manager who uses booking and reservation management software. And once we hit enter, it'll give us an entire detailed customer persona. And the thing that's really great with ChatGPT is you can make mistakes when it comes to prompting. ChatGPT will more or less understand what you're kind of alluding to.

Okay, cool.

So we have a pretty detailed customer persona. So we begin with like an overview. There's goals and motivations, there's pain points, there's customer tools. And tech that they use, their responsibilities. There's like quotes that they might be saying in their like everyday life, their decision-making style, how they choose software, and also opportunities for marketing towards them. And I feel like this is pretty good. And what I really like about ChatGPT here, and you might notice this with a lot of other AI software, is that they personalize their answers to you. And ChatGPT, it picked up the fact that I'm based in Pakistan, so they have the customer persona for somebody based in Pakistan. I think ChatGPT has done a pretty decent job here, but you probably note that most of these points are really generic and that's kind of expected. And if you think about how you as a founder would start off with your customer research, you would kind of do it in the same way as well. The real magic really happens when you actually go out and talk to your customers and we'll get to that in a while as well. I definitely think that this could be better because I feel like there are parts that I don't need and there are parts that I want more in.

Information in.

So what I'll do is I'll enter in another prompt. I want ChatGPT to remove the quotes and marketing opportunity section and also expand on the motivations and pain point section. Maybe also localize them. Well, let's see what ChatGPT comes up with now. Okay, so now we have an expanded goals and motivation and pain point section. And I think ChatGPT here has done a pretty good job. It's a lot of points that I feel like I would have also added if I were to do this entirely by myself. And if you notice throughout this, there's also a ton of localization done because ChatGPT is now talking about cities within the country. They're also talking about behaviors of customers and staff within the country that I feel like kind of resonate with what I know and feel. Before we move on to the next section, here are two quick tips when it comes to using ChatGPT. The first one is, especially if you are using ChatGPT to work on something that's kind of like developing, just be sure to copy paste whatever you find useful to a Google Doc. It makes it a lot easier for you to kind of go back and search through and, you know, have it like organized in a single space. And the second tip is ChatGPT can be wrong. It can hallucinate. You as an individual who has experience and insight into your local market likely know way more about like the nuances. So it's always really important to make sure that you double check whatever you are being fed by ChatGPT.

So now let's get into customer interviews. And customer interviews, for us, they'll be kind of informed by the customer personas we develop because we know now exactly who to interview. And we also have a list of assumptions that we want to validate using these interviews. And with the interviews, what you're doing is gaining deeper insights into the problem that your customer faces so that you can actually build a product that addresses a real and urgent need. And I'll show you how to do that right now with ChatGPT.

So with customer interviews, here are two things that I'll be keeping in mind before I actually enter in the prompt. Number one, I do not want to talk about the idea because this is not about me, it's about the customer. And number two, I do not want to use the word "would" because that would be asking the customer to like predict the future. And that's not the goal here because you don't want to put words in your customer's mouth right? You want to be able to understand the problem that they're facing and be able to come up with a solution that works best for them. So here's our first prompt. Using insights from the persona, can you create highly targeted and insightful customer questions? We'll press enter and you'll notice the words highly targeted and insightful here. And the reason for this is I want to avoid ChatGPT coming up with generic questions. So I've really specified the type and quality of questions that I want. So we have a pretty decent set of questions here from ChatGPT, and I do like the fact that they're very specific to certain functions, but the issue here is, at least in my opinion, they're not open-ended enough. What I really want is for the customer to be able to have a conversation with me and really volunteer insights that I could use to help them out. So what I'll do is I'll enter in a prompt to fix this. Now what I want to do is I want to focus on what makes the customer's job difficult, alternative solutions, what works for them and what doesn't. And I also, of course, want these questions to be open-ended so that the customer can actually contribute with their own answers. Okay, so we have our questions refined and done. And honestly, I really, really like these now because they're a lot more open-ended and they're easier to kind of like listen to, understand, and answer because I feel like the questions that ChatGPT initially gave me, they were kind of scary, you know, they kind of felt technical. And if you are a hotel manager who's, you know, having this conversation with somebody who wants to build a tool for you, you might not necessarily, you know, be super excited to have that conversation. So I feel like something like this that's like a little more natural when it comes to questions would be much, much better. So here are two questions that I really, really like and are exactly the type of questions that I was looking for from ChatGPT. The first is, what parts of your day-to-day job as a hotel manager are the most stressful or difficult to manage? I really like this because it gives me the opportunity to possibly uncover a pain point that I might not have thought about when I was putting this together. And the second one that I really like is right at the end here, how do you decide whether a system or tool is good enough for your hotel's Needs. What matters most to you? This question is open-ended and it kind of gives the customer an opportunity to really reflect on the work that they do, on the work that their business does, so that they're able to also maybe expand on other answers that they are— they've been giving me or will be giving me.

Now that you have your customer persona and interview questions, all you have to do is go and interview your customer, gather those insights and consider your next move. Your next move might be refining your customer further, or it might be actually working on a product and launching it. The important thing here is remembering that this is an iterative process, and you're always better off when you speak to customers and know what they want. I hope you found this video useful, and remember, AI is an incredible tool to help you build better and faster, but at the end of the day, it's down to you to take the initiative. If you're ready to take the next step in your startup journey, head on over to fi.co. I'll see you in the next one.