Ask HN: How do you get companies to talk to you about their problems?

258 points

3 years ago

I do product development for a team that's creating solutions for life sciences & pharmaceutical companies that work with real-world data. This is a new industry vertical for us, so we don't have a bunch of existing customers we can go interview to understand what to build.

It's already a reasonably crowded space, but the few pharma teams we've talked to express frustration with the speed and price of existing offerings. That said, I need much, much more information from users of existing offerings in our space to be able to form a product strategy that I have strong conviction in.

I was reading Airbyte's company handbook[1] the other day, and it mentioned the co-founders did 45 discovery calls with customers using existing ELT tools in 3 months! I would kill for that kind of access to teams in our target market.

How did they do that? Is that just the power of the YC network, or is there something I'm overlooking? My background is not in sales or BizDev, but I can pick up that skillset (or hire for it) to get these calls. Should I just start finding people in the pharma space, add them on LinkedIn, and request an informational interview? Are healthcare conferences good for getting these kinds of calls?

Open to any advice or guidance - thank you!

[1] https://handbook.airbyte.com/company/our-story (Fantastic doc, BTW)

86 comments