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

I'd like to know this also!

Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. First you'll have to learn to compel customers to talk with you, then it's all about becoming comfortable with rejection, and grinding out the numbers game.

One could write a book on this. In point of fact, there are a lot of books on this topic. I'd suggest you consult The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, the series by Jeff Thull that begins with Mastering The Complex Sale, and The New Solution Selling by Keith Eades.

As for some specific, tactical gambits you can use, here's one I've gotten some mileage out of: browse LinkedIn for people who used to work for companies you want to find out more about. Cold contact them, explain that you're researching $COMPANY and that you were hoping they could share some insights. I find that this is often better than contacting current employees, because the ex-employees don't get that defensive "guards up" thing from this kind of engagement, since you're not - by definition - trying to sell them anything.

Then, armed with whatever information you glean from these calls (which ideally will include some suggested names of people to contact!) you can make contact with the target $COMPANY.

Even better, if the call with the ex-employee goes really well, they may offer to (or be willing to, if prompted) actually make an introduction to somebody they are still in touch with at the target. This can go a long way towards greasing the wheels and getting an "in" there. It won't always happen, but it does sometimes IME. Or if they aren't willing to actually make an introduction, they may at least agree to let you name-drop their name, as in "Hey, Bob, I was talking to Susy who you used to work with, and she mentioned your name as somebody I should talk to about X..."

Just don't do the "name drop" thing without explicitly getting permission from the person in question first. Doing otherwise is unethical and if the person you ping happens to call their good friend Susy and she says "I did talk to that guy, but I certainly didn't give him permission to use my name" then you're going to find yourself persona non grata real quick.

Anyway, if you read some of the books I mentioned above, one common theme you'll see revolves around doing a lot of research on your target companies before making contact. Doing that takes more effort, but it's also more likely to pay off, since people are more likely to respond to people they perceive as offering legitimate value as opposed to people sending blast spam.

Note: but don't do the generic thing of trying to make it sound like you did your research without actually having done any! Think about how you feel when you get messages that start with something like "Hey, Centigonal, I've been researching Centigonal Inc and I love what you guys are doing in your space, and I think I could help you generate an extra 10,000 high quality leads every month..." Blah, blah, blah. To me, those things are 100% "auto delete on sight" since the person not only obviously didn't do any research, but on top of that they lied about it. Dishonesty is not the best way to initiate a relationship.

Sounds like The Mom Test could be a good read (although targeted mainly toward start ups) and Deploy Empathy by Michelle Hansen for conducting user interviews.

And yes, speak to everyone and always ask them for a referral to one (ideally two) other people if it went well with them.

Almost always, when I tell a manager the truth about what I see, he also answers me with some part of the truth about the company. But you have to be careful with this method, almost any manager is afraid that after realizing the truth, you still have to reconfigure yourself or do something about the unwitting witness.

the primary advice is to use your network. if you don't have one then that's a nigh-insurmountable headwind.

look for architects and solutions people, or CTOS/CEOS of smaller companies. someone who isn't so far up that they don't understand the day to day trouble, but someone far enough up that its part of their job to think about strategy and keep track of what's going on in the market.

market yourself. put up blogs, go to meetups, and hang around on technical forums. if you have a little bit of a rep that opens up a lot of doors. try to use these as opportunities to vet your value prop directly as well as building recognition.

know your vertical. I know you said this isn't something you can do...but this is a major handicap. consider hiring specifically for this. this isn't just product design, but knowing who to talk to, knowing what the workflows and pain points are.

work for people. I have the same issue as you, and am strongly considering taking up contracts with my potential customers to really get into it.

don't believe any single person. people come up with all kind of weird shit. look for patterns.

I would recommend that you consider going to conferences, and listen and talk; don't be pushy on sales. You'll find conversations.

If you don't have existing healthy networks, you're going to have to bootstrap your network. Have you brainstormed ideas about what value you can deliver to them in the conversation? Not promises of future products, but actual insight and ways of thinking about their problems that yield value to them.

You don't go in cold, you go in warm. Building a product in an industry you aren't familiar with is very difficult and even if you can get companies to talk to you, you're not going to be well positioned to truly understand what they're saying. You need to start with the relationships (either by developing them, or hiring people who already have these relationships). Pick any startup in your target industry and look at who they've hired: they'll be filled with industry stalwarts who provide the domain knowledge and relationships required to understand what's needed. If you want to sell into life sciences, time to hire some experienced VPs from your competitors.

Airbyte isn't a great example for you because businesses using ELT tools are radically different to pharmaceutical companies: pharmaceutical companies are working in a very slow moving industry that requires a great deal of careful consideration. As people in technology, we get caught up in the belief that because we can build incredible masterpieces that we're owed the time and expertise of others that we need to realise these incredible masterpieces... We're not. You have to approach this from a much more humble position, you're going cap in hand, you're not a hero, you're begging for scraps.

To be honest, if you have hard time companies to talk to you as an established org. You will have a hard time selling too.

When you are creating something like this from scratch, then you have to do outbound just like a sales guys.

Yes as you suggested you want expertise in sales. Sales is all about relationship building, meeting with clients, showing them what you have and discussing what their biggest pain points are.

If you want expertise in this you want expertise in sales. I co-founded a company years ago with myself as the tech lead and my partner in sales. The sales was what actually drove the founding "Hey i speak to so many companies that need tech expertise in Y".

What you're asking is the very basic element of the profession of sales and that's what you seek. Hire away!

Why not work WITH one or more of those companies?

Partner with some firms, and you get the testimonials you need, and the expertise. At the "cost" of less profit upfront.

What does partner mean? It could be as little as telling them they can give input into the new product so it meets their needs better, to some discounts. But I have seen this approach used from the other side of the table, and it CAN work. Just make sure you are ready to back your side.

But I'm just an engineer. What do I know about marketing?

You don’t talk to companies about their problems.

You talk to people about theirs.

Decision makers if you want to solve problems people will pay to solve, even though these may not be the important problems.

Spending too much money is not a good problem to try to solve.

You want to solve problems where cost is not an issue.

Good luck.

Go to tech meetups. Heck, host a tech meetup. Build those connections and work them.

Put another way: Take advantage of the power of free beer.

It's a ton of extremely hard work figuring who you know that knows someone and so on, trying to get someone to intro you to someone else, failing most of the time, and so on. The nice thing is once you get the ball rolling a little bit, it seems to roll a little bit easier.

Now, another difficult thing is that if you are at a company as a product manager(etc), spending a couple months stalking people on linkedin, writing emails, taking fruitless calls etc, and making no discernable progress, it is unlikely to be tolerated by your manager, the CEO (if small company), dev team (if folks are already staffed etc). So, set expectations, figure a way to show work even if it's not "progress", keep reminding people on a day to day basis, pull some people in for random calls and hit them up for folks in their network, and so on.

Good luck. This problem (the org one) is the reason most products don't work. There isn't sufficient work done up front because it's messy work which doesn't yield progress in a predictable way so otherwise good product people write awful PRD's (or equivalent), they know they are awful, but they just aren't given the time to do all the work. On the flip side, if you have domain knowledge and experience in the target industry, you might well be able to write out a doc describing the exact right thing to build in about 3 hours.

Find a group of employees all around the same level, get them drunk, sit back and listen. Now the problem is reduced to the more general case of how to befriend strangers, idk, partner with someone gregarious and attractive

I'm not with Airbyte, but in previous companies we interviewed customers, and asked them to refer us to other people they know — "the crankiest, most opinionated, most unfiltered domain expert you can think of, please" was more or less how we phrased it, which often elicited a chuckle and an immediate recognition of who that person is in their life. Those are the best people to talk to — opinionated experts with no reason to sugar coat it for you.

If you don't have customers, you have to prime the pump. If you have a board of directors, or investors, ask them for referrals. If you have a mailing list or newsletter, that's a great place to look too. If you have people who attend conferences, that's another place.

You can also just swallow your pride and "cold-call" (or email, or DM) people, asking if you can have a few minutes of their time. If you are polite and respectful, you get a surprising number of positive responses. If the call goes well, ask them to tell you who their favorite cranks are, and go from there.

Domain knowledge is the most valuable knowledge. If you have it (or someone in your company) then you understand an industry, how it operates, its problems, its priorities, etc, and very probably you know people in it.

Without it, it would be very difficult to start a successful business.

It's like wanting to start a business to help restaurants without knowing anything about restaurants.

My (possibly wrong) opinion is that the most inspired products come from people who actually work in the business process that you are trying to improve, somehow teamed up with inspired developers and application designers.

Even this formula isn't enough without magic dust, to create something amazing.

I'm a developer and also worked as a recruiter for many years, and over the source of that time wrote three complete recruiting systems purely to serve my own needs as a recruiter. It took three full rewrites over ten years until I really both understood the problem space properly and hit on the right software design that enabled me to really fly around in my recruiting job.

Hard to imagine a team of people coming to me as a non-developer recruiter asking what my problems are and coming up with an inspired solution.

But maybe an inspired solution isn't your goal - maybe you just want do what management says: "build something".

> This is a new industry vertical for us

Words of experience: if you want any sort of business from a new vertical, hire some people (even one if you are tiny) from that vertical. These folks will have the vocabulary and the experience with the pain point and hopefully an adequate network so you can talk (with your new hires!) to some people who do or don't (also extremely important to talk wit) have actually experience the pain.

Those first interviews form the root of a tree: if you sounds sensible and like you actually understand their pain, some of your interview subjects can refer you to others to talk with.

If you try to go in cold with zero experience in the new vertical, even if you do talk to someone you won't really understand what they are talking about. You may understand the words they are saying (except for jargon you don't know) but you won't know what they are really saying.

For example "yeah, when we develop a new assay it's a pain getting our regulatory attorneys to sign off on it" but what they really mean is that the cost structure of checking with the regulator is absurd, or the regulators are nonfunctional due to congress, and so the real problem isn't something anything internal could fix. Or maybe all they mean is that the lawyers can't read LaTeX documents :-). While someone in the industry would already know how to parse the answer.

I work in a different vertical industry and I can tell the company perspective: they will die for pennies and ignore the value that comes from outside if someone important in the company will not benefit from it, one way or another. Regular people are not allowed to talk to external companies (you can get terminated for that) and the people that are in positions to talk are usually very political, very incompetent and very morally corrupt (sometimes fully corrupt, like taking paybacks or bribes). This is known by others, so external contacts are avoided in general and they try to build stuff inhouse instead, even if it is poor quality because they pay IT poorly so they don't attract and retain good people.

I was a few times in VP level discussion with huge IT companies. Our VP was basically asking for impossible things that he was willing to pay for, otherwise "regular stuff" was just a matter of money, "for free if possible".

I don't know how much it helps you, just telling why it is difficult to penetrate some of these companies and what is the thinking on the other side. Make a VP happy to bring in your solution - that is your chance. I am not telling to bribe anyone because I am completely against it, but be aware that some of your competitors will. It is a cutthroat world.

Discovery calls are the initial stage in a selling process. I am biased but "selling" to a customer provides a much more honest picture of the things they truly care about then a generic customer interview. Despite most folks aversion to sales, if you have a compelling story and can narrow in to a general area of pain (which you have already) most people are very willing to hop on a call and tell you exactly the things you need to know. Be sincere, open to their expertise but be willing to challenge and ask prodding questions. This helps test their conviction and set the weights of what will get them to influence internally to purchase - the true kpi of most products. You might feel goofy since they you don't have anything to truly sell yet. Rest assured, your buyers will be very willing to cooperate if you deliver and you will stand out from the crowded majority of those who don't.

One rule you might want to add to your book: make sure you don't talk to developers, they never pay for anything.

I think we’re doing the same thing? Want to work together?

Some documentation https://docs.biobricks.ai

A LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomluechtefeld_bioinformatics...