Author: Khang Trần Hoàng

Lead trainer: Phan Hoang Lan

Program Manager: Nguyen Vi Hoa

Advisor: Phuong-Linh Le-Nguyen

Day 1 of the Fulbright Innovation Bootcamp 2025 is over! Let’s look back at what our students learned today.

Summary

• Understanding your exact customer group is crucial for startup success, as emphasized by trainer Ms. Phan Hoang Lan.

• The Lean Startup mindset encourages failing fast by quickly testing mock products to learn and adapt efficiently.

• Key customer questions include identifying the problem they want solved and verifying if it fits their real-life needs.

• Creating a detailed Customer Persona helps narrow down the ideal buyer by focusing on specific traits and behaviors.

• The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework reveals why customers “hire” a product, covering functional, personal-emotional, and social-emotional jobs.

• Mapping the Customer Journey highlights pain points and touchpoints from problem recognition to temporary solutions.

• Interview techniques like the Snowball method and asking “Why?” repeatedly uncover deep insights about customer needs.

• Practical advice includes making your customer persona highly specific, experiencing the customer journey firsthand, and preparing for real interviews to refine problem statements.

Key Learnings: Identify Customer & Problem 

On the first day, our student teams explore why understanding their customer is important and how to visualize them effectively. Our trainer, Ms. Phan Hoang Lan, especially emphasizes the importance of identifying the exact customer group, highlighting how it impacts startup success.

Opening a startup is hard. An innovative startup is harder. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of startups fail after their first year. This opens an interesting way to think about startups: if failure is inevitable at times, why not fail faster and learn sooner by quickly testing mock products/services, making any failures easier to manage?

• [Concept] Lean Startup mindset: focus on the build-measure-learn feedback loop to create a product that someone will buy.

In this bootcamp, the teams will focus on how to conduct the Research phase efficiently and effectively, which involves answering the questions, “What problem does the customer want to solve?” and “Does the problem you discover actually fit people’s reality?” The goal of the first day is to help you envision your first customer—the one who buys your product when no one else does. Here are the key points that need to be answered when looking for a potential customer:

Take the example of our trainer, Ms. Lan, who downloads a dance app because she feels overweight. From the framework, we can analyse that:

1. This is a clear health-related problem. 

2. She is aware of her problem.

3. She is actively looking for a solution, which is a critical step since some people might realize they have a problem but never seek to fix it. 

4. An important factor is that she has a budget to spend on addressing the issue (i.e., she pays a reasonable amount for the app through a monthly subscription), which suggests she would be willing to pay about the same amount for another potential solution if she likes it.

5. Finally, whether she is already using a temporary solution matters: if Ms. Lan wants to lose weight but isn’t taking any action, she isn’t a good customer; but if she is at least doing something, like practicing meditation to help her health—even if it’s not the most effective option—it shows real “pain” and makes her a better potential customer.

After answering all the key points, we need to make a clear picture of the particular person:

• [Concept] Customer Persona: a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research and data about your existing customers, which can be visualized by filling up a board like below:

An excellent Customer Persona board contains:

• Customer Description: The main characteristics of the buyer. It should be specific to scale down your circle of potential customers later on.

• [Concept] Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD): Helps us understand what customers truly hire a product or service to do (Clay Christensen’s video explanation). Asking “What do they buy this product or service for?” allows you to go back and design your product to fit that purpose precisely. Even if customers share similar profiles, each group can have different JTBDs—so it’s important not to make your product too general in an attempt to serve everyone. The key is to identify and focus on the right JTBDs.

• Pain Points: The negative emotions or inconveniences when they are trying to solve the problem. Focus on each and every step and click of their timeline (or Customer Journey).

• Temporary Solutions: The key word here is actually “Temporary.” What “did” your customer do to try to ease the problem? These actions could be on a regular basis or instantaneous, but they all serve the same jobs that you identified.

• Gains/Goals: What do they dream about? Can overlap some points with JTBD, but not all, so find the opposite of the pain points.

The thing you need to pay attention to the most is the Jobs-to-be-done. JTBD is often hidden, and you usually cannot identify it right away; it needs to be read between the lines of the interviewees’ responses. With that said, there are 03 types of jobs that the customer actively or subconsciously wants to be fixed:

1. Functional Jobs: The practical, task-oriented goals that customers want to get done. This is the base job that you want to focus on first before the emotionally related jobs below.

2. Personal-Emotional Jobs: The feeling that the customers get when the problem is solved

3. Social-Emotional Jobs: The image/identity that the customers want to project to others

Let’s look at a famous example: the iPhone from Apple. When a customer buys an iPhone, the “jobs” that the phone is hired to do can include:

1. Functional: serving as an expensive piece of status validation; to call, to work seamlessly with the MacBook, and to have access to apps from the App Store. 

2. Personal-Emotional: creating feelings of pride, satisfaction, and a sense of belonging to an exclusive community; boosting confidence, expressing freedom and individuality; and evoking sophistication and happiness.

3. Social-Emotional: helping the customer appear trendy, classy, prestigious, and high-end.

Above, we briefly mention Customer Journey, which, in this bootcamp, we have our own definition:

• [Concept] Customer Journey: Draw out the visualization of the journey from when your potential customer has the problem to when they have their temporary solution.

On this timeline, every minute and action counts. A click on a link on Facebook, or typing on the Zalo chat to ask more about the product, etc., should be noted down. In those lists of actions, there are important points or “Touchpoints” where the mood/satisfaction of the customer is good, neutral, or bad. Listing these out in the timeline helps you see the low points (or pain points) so you can target those low emotional points and turn them into high points in your solution later down the line.

All the items above should be filled in before, during, and after you do the interviews with people. You can find interview and data analysis tips in our pre-bootcamp blog [FIB LEARNING BLOG #0] from last weekend, along with how and why you should spend most of your remaining time developing a problem statement for your product. 

Student Progress Highlights: Taking Your First Steps

Even with all the lessons to learn on the first day, our students still shone excellently. After opening the morning with a dance lesson from our guest, the teams diligently learned from Ms. Lan about each concept above while completing every group activity along the way. In the afternoon, all teams split up to interview their potential customers and took the first steps to reassess their assumptions. Students actively asked questions to the trainers to check their answers and prepared for a night of meeting with each other to continue the interviews. It is promising that the teams will have their problem statements ready by tomorrow afternoon, which we at CEI are very excited to see. 

Reflection: Actionable Tips For You To Do 

Good job on making it to this part! For your reward, here are some major tips for you and your teams to identify your product’s customer base and problem:

• Interview: Use the Snowball method to find your interviewees. For example, ask your interviewee if they know anyone who has the same problem/interest as them; if yes, take that person’s contact information or ask the interviewee to introduce that person to you. Over time, your pool of interviewees grows from small to large. The questions should follow a semi-structured interview format (most common in innovation & startup work), which means using a guide of key questions and topics but allowing flexibility to explore interesting answers or stories behind each action. Ask the participants the “Why” question again and again to get to the bottom of their Jobs-to-be-done.

• Customer Persona: The more detailed and specific your choice of words, the better. If your description board ends up matching a lot of people you know, try again until it fits only one or two specific people. Your initial market will be small, but it’s more important that this market actually exists rather than keeping it vague to appear big and general.

• Customer Journey: The easiest way to envision the journey/timeline is to experience it yourself. Pick a product that has similar characteristics and potentially solves the same problem, then test out your journey to discover and use the product. For example, you might come across it on Facebook Marketplace, click the ad, visit the shop page, and try to chat with the admin. If you don’t chat with the admin, consider alternative paths you might take, like posting in a Facebook group about that kind of product or service to ask others about the ad, and so on. 

What’s Next? Teaser For Tomorrow! 

Tomorrow we dig deeper: real customer interviews, hidden insights, and the first seeds of a real solution. 

Reference

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2024, January 12). 34.7 percent of business establishments born in 2013 were still operating in 2023. The Economics Daily. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/34-7-percent-of-business-establishments-born-in-2013-were-still-operating-in-2023.htm

HubSpot Marketing. (2019, November 9). Clay Christensen: The Jobs to be Done Theory [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/Stc0beAxavY