Using GrowthMentor for customer research

If founders and marketers are who you sell to, you're already in a room full of them. The community is a good place to test an idea, get honest reactions to something you've built, and hear how people describe the problem in their own words.

The trick is using the right part of GrowthMentor for it.

The difference between a mentorship call and customer research

These two get mixed up a lot, so it's worth separating them.

A mentorship call is a mentor giving you their time to help with your challenge. That's what they signed up for. A call that turns into a customer interview about a product you're building is a different thing, and it usually doesn't give either of you much.

Customer research is you collecting evidence from people who look like your buyer. The community is the better place for that, and honestly it works better anyway, because the people who show up have opted in.

What mentors are genuinely great for here:

• 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 hang out, 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 actually changes about what you build next.
• Pressure-testing your read before you act on it. Plenty of mentors have run this exact process at their own companies and can tell you where it usually goes sideways.

Book a mentor to learn how to run the research. Use the community to actually run it.

Give first

Before you ask anyone for time, spend some being useful.

Answer questions in the Slack channels where you know something. When your name is familiar, an ask lands differently than a cold DM does. Apply to other people's help requests when you can actually help them.

Don't message a stranger out of the blue asking to pick their brain when the only person who benefits is you.

Post a Feedback help request

Help requests come in six categories now, and Feedback is the one built for this. Fresh eyes and honest reactions on something you've made: a landing page, an ad, an onboarding email sequence, a pricing page, a demo flow.

How it works:

1. Go to Help Requests in your dashboard, choose Feedback, and answer the prompts for that category
2. Once it's approved, your request goes out to the GrowthMentor Slack community, which is over 3,000 members
3. Mentors and other members apply, each with a short note on why they're a good fit
4. You browse the applicants from your dashboard, look at profiles, start a chat, or book a call with whoever fits

Everyone who applies has opted into helping with exactly the thing you asked about, which is what makes this work so much better than cold outreach.

Post in Slack

#feedback-wanted is the channel for this. Lower stakes than a help request and faster. 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 the 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.

Win-win

Show up, help people, ask clearly, and you'll get more product feedback than you know what to do with. If you're not sure which channels to join, ping support on live chat and we'll point you to the right ones.