3 Customer Interviews + 1 Problem

SAMPLE INTERVIEW PAPER

Your Name

Interview with: CEO/Business Executive/Leader’s Name

Company Name:

The Company

[Start with an overview of the company.

Explain what they do, how long they have been in business, what is their business model (B2B, B2C – how they make money) who their customers are, the size of the company (Estimated # of people who work there, yearly revenues).

It should give a simple overview of what they do, who their customers are and how they make money.]

The Leader

[Tell us about the person you spoke to. Who are they? What is their role at the company? How long have they been at the company? Give us a little background on the person. How did you connect with them/set-up the interview? Did you meet them face-to-face or over the phone?]

The Day-to-Day Operations

Here are a sample of questions you can ask. Feel free to add any of your own questions.

• How does your business make money?

• How do you make/deliver your product?

• What errors happen?

• What are some of your headaches about the business?

• How do you get new customers?

• How do you hire, train, fire?

• What is your biggest challenge?

• If someone could fix one thing about your business, what would that be?

• From a scale of 1-5, how valuable would it be to you if someone could fix this problem? (1 being a little and 5 being I would buy it on the spot!)

You can summarize the answers here in this section. It should give us a sense of how their business runs. Give us a sense of what the day-to-day business is like.

The Problem

What is a big problem they have? What is their toothache? What is hurting them now that they would love to fix? What is something, that if someone could come up with a solution, they would buy it!

Describe the problem. How is this impacting their business? Try and figure out how much this problem is costing them. What is the impact on the company?

• From a scale of 1-5, how valuable would it be to you if someone could fix this problem? (1 being a little and 5 being I would buy it on the spot!)

For example, if they pay their employees $20/hr. and this problem wastes two hours of time every day for 100 employees:

$20 x 2 hours wasted a day = $40 x 100 employees = $4000.

The company is losing $4000 a day by not fixing this problem.

$4000 a day x 5 days a week = $20,000/week

$20,000/week x 52 weeks = $1,040,000/year

This problem is costing them over a MILLION dollars a year!

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