How to Build Relationships When Researching SaaS Product Ideas
saastimes.com
saastimes.com
When these conversations are positioned as interviews rather than 'research' or a 'survey' people tend to open up more about their biggest business challenges. Creating such a high fidelity connection with customers is difficult to achieve in any other way during the early days of market validation, so pick up that phone and make some calls.
Better yet, get their permission to record the calls, and then post the interview audio and transcript on your customer development blog!
This tactic has worked well for me.
If you're going to interview people in a market as part of your customer discovery and development process, then by all means do it. However, try to resist the urge to sell them your solution at the end of the interview.
You'll likely find that people drop their guard when you ask them for their opinions and ideas, which could lead to a business relationship at some point in the future (when they're ready). You won't even need to "sell them" per se. If you've discovered a real problem, they'll get back in touch with you.
The saying from the VC world applies in research as well - when you ask for money, you get advice, when you ask for advice, you (sometimes) get money.
Simply enjoy the conversation, ask them to tell you about the biggest challenges in their business, and most people will open up and give you some of the most valuable feedback you can get as an entrepreneur. It's much more valuable than sitting in your basement and running an Adwords campaign to a landing page. The depth, richness and quantity of feedback you get might surprise you. You might even consider asking your prospect if you can publish a transcript of the interview on your blog.
Publishing your customer development interviews (with your prospects' permission) will give you near instant content for SEO (get it transcribed with SpeechPad if you like), added value in the form of information for other prospects in the industry, and insight into how they express their pain points that you can inject back into your pitch and marketing messages.