Can I use GrowthMentor for customer research?

Yes. If founders and marketers are who you sell to, the GrowthMentor community is a good place to test an idea and hear how people describe the problem in their own words. Book a mentor to plan the research, then run it in the community.

Should I interview my mentor?

A mentor call is a mentor giving you their time to help with your challenge. Customer research is you collecting evidence from people who look like your buyer. Both are useful, and they work best kept apart. The community is the better place for research, because the people who answer have chosen to.

Where a mentor helps most:

• Designing the research. What to ask, how many conversations you need before a pattern means anything, how to keep your questions from steering people toward the answer you're hoping for.
• Finding people to talk to. Where your buyers already spend time, how to write outreach that gets a yes, what to offer in return.
• Making sense of what you heard. Which comments to weight, which to set aside, what it changes about what you build next.
• Testing your read before you act on it. Plenty of mentors have run this process at their own companies and can tell you where it usually goes sideways.

How do I ask people for their time?

Give first. Answer questions in the Slack channels where you know something. When your name is familiar, an ask lands better than a message from someone new. When you do ask, say what the other person gets out of it.

Where do I post?

#feedback-wanted is the Slack channel for this. Post the thing, say what kind of reaction you're after, and offer something back. Reviewing their landing page in return goes further than a free trial of your product.

#ask-the-community is good for softer questions. "How are you all handling X?" tells you a lot about how people think about the problem, and nobody has to book anything.

Not sure which channels to join? Click Help in the sidebar and send us a message. We answer by email within one business day.