9/8/20255 min

Dónde hacer tu salida de campo

Authors

Santander X Explorer

Places to observe

However, you don’t always need to leave home to find your first potential customers. A highly effective technique is locating spaces (mainly online) where people talk spontaneously about their difficulties. A good observation site is one where people are already investing time, effort, or money to achieve a result.

For example:

Communities online (on Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp…)
Forums specialized.
Groups of social networks.

Of course, you can always apply this technique to physical locations and attend professional events, associations, fairs or workspaces. The best observation site is usually where the behavior occurs, not where it’s discussed.

The goal is the same in both cases: observe in a real context, not by participating. People tend to explain their problems better when they’re immersed in them than when asked to recall them, which is why this is so valuable studying conversations, tools, behaviors, and find tangible evidence (payments, hacks, homemade automations...) in the environment where the pain occurs. Naturally, you’ll discover:

Problems they face:

Qué suelen usar para solucionar esos pains o fricciones.
What they buy (and don’t) and why.
Beliefs.
Questions.
Products they wish existed.

In most cases, the first place you find will only be the beginning: a community will lead you to another; a forum, to a tool; a conversation, to an event. A technical term may reveal a process you’re unfamiliar with. Each observation generates new clues and brings you closer to people who experience the problem intensely.

Bonus tip: although we already know that your best friend isn’t your customer, you can still use your network of contacts to find users. Communities you belong to, coworkers, LinkedIn, or professional associations can help you gain access to relevant conversations. 

The undercover entrepreneur

By adopting this role, you’ll be able to noticing the frictions that take place around you… being you yourself or someone who experiences the pains.

Suppose you’ve identified a problem in a community or a specific business sector. If you don’t belong to them, infiltrating could be difficult, but you can try to interact firsthand with the friction you believe you’re observing: Is there software that slows down processes or is too complicated? Get your hands on it to observe their weak points and possible solutions. This way, you’ll become an operator, employee, or member of a group that faces a series of very real pains every day. You’ll learn:

The language that your target audience talks about.
What are the urgencies that need to be resolved… and which ones don’t.
If there are willingness to pay for a solution.

The advantages of this method are elimination of false feedback and the confirmation (or lack thereof) that a problem exists. You may even find that the solution isn’t the one you expected… but that will also be useful to you.

What to look for in observation settings

As you analyze these situations, don’t look for opinions about your idea: remember that your goal isn’t validation, but to access the context in which the pain takes place. You must examining behaviors. ¿Por qué? Porque en una investigación como esta, lo que hacen realmente las personas suele ser (bastante) más fiable que lo que dicen que harían.

So, write down all the frictions that appear repeatedly and the questions or complaints frequent (inefficient processes, unresolved or poorly addressed needs, etc.). Also pay attention to improvised solutions created by users to solve the problem, the tools they use, and the time (and money) they invest.

Goal: understand the problem before the solution

Many people buy a product or use a service to make progress toward a result they want to achieve. So instead of focusing on your solution, you must go out into the field and ask to understand:

What your potential customers are trying to achieve. Focus on the progress they seek and the context. In a business environment, for example, the triggers that should alert you include job changes, new roles or regulations, a crisis, etc.
What obstacles they encounter. Observe moments of frustration or failed attempts to make progress. 
What they’re doing today to make progress. Look for and examine possible improvised solutions.

Remember: fieldwork isn’t about convincing, but about understanding. If, after finishing your research, you can explain who lives with the problem, where it appears, how they try to solve it today, and what cost it generates for them, you will have a much stronger foundation for designing your first experiments. If, after your fieldwork, you haven’t found repeated behaviors, current solutions, or people investing resources to move forward, you probably haven’t yet identified a relevant pain.