Interviewing your Target Customers to Accelerate Product-Market Fit

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talk with Julien Verlaguet, the CEO of Skiplabs. Julien is a programming language guy, and we talked about what it means to maintain an open source programming language.

We talked about what it means to monetize a a programming language… or, as Julien says, you do not. So why does maintaining SKIP pay off for the team at Skiplabs? And how exactly do they make money?

Skiplabs builds products using SKIP, and they focus on building products that can and do take full advantage of the programming language. But ultimately, do customers care that the products are built by the language maintainers? Probably not.

“If your open source project can’t be directly monetized with a SaaS,” Julien said. “You have to get a bit more creative.”

Indeed, how do you get creative? I have to agree with Julien, that it really depends on what you’re working on. When you think about how to monetize, it’s important to think about what exactly your customers want.

He talked about the importance of doing interviews with your target market. In fact, he recommends doing two or three interviews with people in your target market, and in the first interview you don’t even talk about your product ideas, but rather listen to them talk about their problems and how they solve them or would like to solve them.

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By the way, did you know that one of the services I offer is interviewing your customers? Julien talks about how people can overstate how good your product is during interviews… this is true, and having an outside person do the interviews is one of the ways around this. If you’d like someone to interview people in your target market, including users and customers, and to help you use that information to get to product-market fit faster, reach out.