Are you launching a start-up? Then I bet you have hundreds of questions about your potential product and your target audience.

From conceptualization to market sizing and scaling, innumerable questions must be answered in order to build a solid foundation for a successful business.  Fortunately, a full range of qualitative and quantitative research, primary and secondary research, and data analytics solutions exist to help you discover actionable answers to those questions throughout the entire process.

During the initial conceptualization stage, you’ll need to gain a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of the problem and potential solutions. You’ll also need to understand the tangents, side-conversations, and unspoken truths and myths that people won’t necessarily share with just anyone. To gain these types of insights from your target audience, qualitative research will be your go-to method.

Numerous qualitative techniques can help you at this point so let’s start by learning about in-depth, individual interviews.

What are individual interviews?

As the name suggests, individual interviews are in-depth conversations between a trained moderator and one other person. If the product or service is specifically designed for 2 or 3 people to use together, dyads or triads with colleagues, best friends, children, partners, or spouses may be used as well.

Key to this technique is working with a trained moderator. Although everyone has experience chatting with consumers, customers, or clients on a one to one basis, a research interview is completely different from a “chat” or “conversation.”

Trained moderators have unique skills which include understanding and responding to the body language of the person they’re interviewing. They have learned how and when to use specific language to encourage someone to share more detailed and personal insights. And, most importantly, they actively strive to prevent bias from unconsciously creeping into a conversation.

Interviews are an excellent way to deeply connect with your target audience and get a first-hand look into their emotional and physical real world. Interviews will allow you to:

• Spend meaningful time with them such that they open up about their personal habits, behaviors, needs, drivers, emotions, and opinions.
• Watch and listen to them struggle using unsuitable, existing products and services in their real world, whether that’s in their home, school, office, or gym.
• Watch and listen to them as they attempt to shop for alternative products using both online and offline channels.

These observations will guide you towards a thorough and unbiased understanding of what the problems and required solutions really are.

What follows are key questions that an interviewer might address during the initial, conceptualization stage.

How are people emotionally connected to the problem?

• How do you feel about this situation? What types of emotions do you have dealing with this situation? How strong are those emotions?
• How does this situation interact with different aspects of your life – at home, at work, with your kids or parents?
  
• How do you feel about the available alternatives or lack of alternatives? How do you compensate for the lack of easily accessible alternatives?
• What is your emotional state when you really need an alternative and can’t find one?
• How do your personal finances and resources fit into finding alternatives?

Who are the primary and secondary stakeholders?

• Who uses or needs the product? Who else might use it if they saw it lying around? Who would do the shopping for it? Who would approve and pay for it? Who would ensure the product gets used? Who would help you use the product and how would they help you use it?
• What frustrations and pain points do you have during the situation? What are the pain points of people who must find alternative options and pay for alternatives for you?
• Who is negatively and positively affected by this situation being unresolved?

What alternative solutions are being used now?

• What compromises do you make regarding this situation?
• What do you wish you could do? How would you solve the situation?
• How do you find and learn about potential alternatives?
  
• How do you physically manipulate or use current products? What other items do you use the product with? What do you buy to support using the current product?
• Where do you use current and alternative products? How do you use them?
• Where do you store current products and packages? What are your fears about storing them?

What’s Next?

During the conceptualization stage, your main goal is to listen and understand the problem without bias. You need to truly hear people and learn about their personal experiences so that you can identify both major and minor problems that may need to be solved. Individual interviews are the perfect solution for understanding people’s most intimate perceptions and behaviors. You’ll build a broad and deep baseline for what the key problems are and the range of major and minor issues that need to be resolved.

If you’re ready to deeply understand your target audience with individual interviews, please get in touch with us. We’d love to help you grow your start-up into a successful business! Email your questions about gathering information to support your startup to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com.

Learn more from our case studies

• Building a Strategic Business Plan Grounded in Industry Data – A pharmaceutical data analytics case study
• Creating a Beverage Launch Strategy in a Competitive Market – A beverage desk research case study
• Developing a New Nutritional Pasta Product – A survey + desk research case study
• Identifying Optimum Price Corridors to Predict Volume Share – An advertising price simulator case study

Podcasts You Might Like

• Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman
• The Tim Ferriss Show
• Business Wars with David Brown
• How I Built This with Guy Raz

Books You Might Like

• What It Takes: How I Built a $100 Million Business Against the Odds Hardcover by Raegan Moya-Jones
• The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: It’s Your Turn to #Jointheride Hardcover by Darren Hardy
• What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 – 10th Anniversary Edition: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World by Tina Seelig

Conferences You Might Like

• CES Consumer Technology Association (January)
• AWE (June)
• Collision Conference (June)
• The Startup Conference (May)
• SaaStr Annual (September)

Confession time.

I’m addicted to TikTok.

What is TikTok?

TikTok is used by more than 1 billion people each month and, including me, they watch more than 167 million videos every minute. Wow!

If you haven’t used TikTok before, I’ll give you a quick explanation. Anyone, not just the tweens and teens, can set up an account to watch or post videos of up to 1 or 3 minutes.

“Creators” are people who make videos of themselves talking, walking, dancing, or of the world around them. Creators can be regular people with 3 followers, influencers with millions of followers, small business owners, or companies with large social media teams.

Personally, I’m a lurker. I don’t make videos (as you can see on my personal TikTok account) but I have a bunch of favourite accounts and favourite topics that I love to watch.

The topics are literally endless – whatever strikes your fancy, whether that’s cats and cheese or deep social, cultural, and political issues.

TikTok uses an analytical algorithm to decide which videos it presents to you. If you swipe past a video really fast, they’ll show you fewer of those kinds of videos. If you watch, like, or comment on a video, they’ll show you more of those kinds of videos.

The algorithm works FAST so if you ‘like’ a puppy video, you’ll be offered several more of those almost immediately. What it means is that you need to swipe past videos you dislike really fast or you’ll just get more of them – and that won’t make you happy.

Why do I like TikTok?

Even though I live in a city where more than 50% of residents belong to a visible minority community, my neighbourhood, my grocery store, and my social circle are not very diverse. I don’t see a lot of people who don’t look like me. And with the panorama (as I prefer to call it), I’ve been visiting diverse communities in my city far less often than usual.

This is why I love TikTok. I’ve found a Tok for so many communities different from my own. DisabledTok, DeafTok, AutismTok, IndigenousTok…. but I haven’t yet found “ResearchTok.”

Of course, ResearchTok is actually everywhere. You just have to listen carefully.

TikTok for insights

Naturally, TikTok can be used as any other social media channel is used for social listening purposes. Many videos come with automated or manual captions, as well as audio that can be transcribed and coded.If you want to collect opinions about brands, buyers, and businesses, you’ll get a first hand look at those opinions right here.

But TikTok is an invaluable research tool for people who design research, whether that’s quantitative questionnaires, qualitative groups and interviews, or something else. Here’s why.

People with disabilities: TikTok is where I get to actually see and listen to people who are disabled navigate their world. I see and hear first-hand the motivators and barriers they experience as they drive, shop, and consume in their everyday lives.

I see the struggles they face as cars block the sidewalks and ramps making it impossible for them to visit their favorite stores. I see how stores fail to accommodate their needs by not providing ramps or placing self-serve counters out of sight and out of reach. I watch how packages can’t be held or opened or poured because the package designers didn’t account for their user base.

I get a whole new and improved perspective on the types of issues I need to account for when I write questions about accessing and navigating stores as well as choosing and using product packages.

People of different ethnicities: Though I’m sure I’ve experienced some biases because of my specific demographic characteristics, TikTok is where I see the huge biases and aggressions experienced by people who are marginalized every single day, everywhere they go.

I see how hand driers don’t recognize darker skin, how brands frame people who are marginalized as victims, and how code switching means some people can’t be their authentic selves at work, at school, or while shopping.

It reminds me that it’s so important to ensure the research I conduct accounts for and respects people of all ethnicities. It reminds me that sticking to strict census balancing isn’t sufficient – I need to boost and weight sample for Black and Indigenous people so I can truly listen to and understand everyone.

People of different sexualities: Ever wonder what all the letters in LGTBGQIA+ stand for? TikTok has your back. People of all genders and sexualities are happy and keen to share their perspectives about the world around them and how they’re treated in it.

Listen first hand to how binary sex and gender options trivialize, diminish, and ignore their life experiences, and how relieved and heard they feel when they’re able to accurately describe themselves.

Sure, I might have decades of hard coded memory telling me that gender is binary, but I need to cancel that narrative and recognize that gender is a construct not a fact. I need to make sure demographic questions are accurate, respectful, and all-encompassing.

What’s the impact of TikTok on research?

As a relatively privileged person, TikTok has further opened my world to the rainbow of people who exist in it. My personal experiences may be common but there are millions, billions of people whose experiences I could have never imagined without the help of TikTok.

My questionnaires are better written. Not only am I far more careful and knowledgeable about how I write demographic questions, I’m more careful about how I write questions about brands, retailers, and product usage. I’ve always used my own experiences to write those questions, but now I am better able to consider a much broader range of experiences.

If you’re interested, here are a few of my favourite accounts. These folks are well-informed, educational, funny, and eager to share their personal experiences so that people like me can do better. Learn lots!

• Deaf community: patrickandbigbenv, smartguy85, djdeaftunez, deafinitlygary
• Blind community: asfvision
• People with other disabilities: peetmontzingo, laceyrichcreek, journywithcerebralpalsy, summershirtproject, colbycam722
• LGBT+ community: mrwilliamsprek
• BIPOC community: clarabellecwb, therealoverloadcomedy
• Indigenous community: brettstoise, itzeaglee, asinaabe, isapadeau

What’s Next?

Are you ready to discover top quality insights about your buyers, brands, and business? Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

Learn more from our case studies

• Face-to-Face On-Site Medical Leader Interviews – A B2B interview case study
• Communicating More Effectively with Insurance Customers | A Bulletin Board Case Study
• Sentiment and Content Analysis of Qualitative Hiring Data | A Qualitative Research Case Study

Learn more from our other blog posts

• 8 Engaging Question Types to Improve Participants’ Survey Taking Experience
• Trackers Suck. Here’s how to fix them.
• Everything You Need to Know about Conducting Effective Secondary Research