Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at GV)

(instrumental music) You have done 30 years of work, and iteration, and refinement. You're here just to tell us, "Here's the most important thing you need to know and here's how to do it, based on all that time I've spent." Help us understand, what is a bullseye customer?

Every ambitious founder wants to build a product for everybody, but it doesn't start there. Amazon started just selling books or Facebook with just profiles for college students. So a bullseye customer is the very specific subset of your target market who initially is most likely to adopt your product or service.

Why this of all the things that you can focus on of a startup journey?

It helps you get really deep in understanding who are those people and understanding what they need. It helps you prioritize the feedback you're getting and it just gets everybody, as a team, much more aligned on what are we doing and what are we doing first?

So you have this bullseye customer sprint that your book describes. You basically give people a, a plan for how to figure this out in a day, which sounds like a dream.

The basic formula, the way I think about it is, is five and three and one. So it's five bullseye customers and three very simple prototypes, and then we conduct those interviews in one day while the whole team is watching and debriefing and kind of thinking about what are the key big takeaways at the end of that.

Where do you start?

So step one is... (instrumental music)

Today my guest is Michael Margolis. Michael has been a UX researcher at Google Ventures for almost 15 years where he's worked with over 300 companies to help them get unstuck, move faster, and build something that people want. He helped develop the design sprint method made famous by the book Sprint, and more recently wrote a book called Learn More Faster: How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Their Perfect Product, which essentially helps you identify and refine your ideal customer profile in a single day. I've said many times on this podcast that one of the biggest mistakes founders make, and product teams make, is not being very clear and very narrow with their initial target market. And I've been looking for a book and a guide to help people figure this out. This book is that. And also this book is completely free and available online as a PDF. Michael is not looking to sell books or drive leads to Google Ventures. He generally simply wants people to avoid pain and avoid wasting time building something that nobody needs. In this episode, we go step by step for how to identify your bullseye customer, how to interview people, how to recruit people, and how to refine your idea to build something that people actually want. This episode is both for founders and also for product teams at larger companies who want to avoid building something that nobody cares about. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Michael Margolis. (instrumental music) Michael, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.