Customer Interviews: Research Your Idea & Validate Your Startup with the Right People

7 min readNov 28, 2018

You need to find customers and talk to them so that you build a marketable solution that sells.

If you don’t believe this than this article is not for you. This one is.

True Customers Make Your Startup a Business

I assume you’re already interested in doing customer interviews. I’m not here to convince you interviews are important. You should know that.

No matter the size or maturity of a team, talking to customers is difficult for a myriad of reasons. Hiten Shah wrote in his newsletter earlier this year, “we’re constantly challenged with who to talk to, what to ask them, how to analyze the feedback and hot to best communicate learnings to our teams.”

“Who to talk to?” is your first step for any research activity and where I see most startup founders mess up.

At first sight of a problem, most people get very excited by jumping to the solution. “Eureka! By George, I’ve got it!” We pitch our ideas to friends & family to get their validation. We get their support because they love us and support us.

But, they are not our target customers. Their validation doesn’t actually mean anything. We talk to a few strangers and log those conversations as customer interviews. Yet, we really only listen to the feedback that tells us we’re right.

We believe that some version of everyone is our target customer. And, this vague description is why our attempts at customer research & interviews never provide the value we seek.

Founders give me a variety of excuses when I tell them they need to further define their niche:

“I want to be inclusive and don’t want to leave anyone out,”
“I’m concerned I won’t find enough people that fit this target,”
“Everyone experiences this problem!”

Sure, but not everyone experiences it the same way, finds it painful enough they will pay for a solution or values your approach to solving the problem.

The Handy-Dandy “Who do I interview?” Guide

Your startup’s stage and product maturity are two key important factors to decide “Who do I interview?” Below, I consider 4 scenarios and discuss your main approach along with who you should be interviewing.

No Existing Product, No Existing Customers/Users

Congratulations, you have an idea that’s exciting enough you’re considering building it into a business. Most likely, you’ve experienced this problem yourself or seen it second-hand. You are in the initial idea phase.

The biggest danger to your future success right now is the belief that “If I solve this problem, then I have a business.” The #1 reason startups fail is that there’s “No Market Need.” What does this really mean? You didn’t solve a problem the customer (or any customer) wanted to be solved.

Approach: Spend a significant amount of time doing research on how potential customers perceive the same problem you have identified. You should do so much research and collect so much data that their views of the problem, slightly different than yours, have forced you to change your original vision.

Assume you’re wrong about everything and they are right. Look for a niche you really care about.

Main Question: How do other people experience this problem?

Selecting Customers: At the beginning, you want to interview a wide range of people because you have to identify a niche market that has so much pain with this problem they will pay for a solution.

Identify 3 types of potential niche markets
Interview 3+ people in each of these niche markets until you stop learning new things
Analyze the data & insights.
If none of the first 3 markets have a great pain, rinse and repeat with 3 new markets

No Existing Product, Yet Has Existing Customers/Users

Cool, so you are probably a service based business looking to increase your offering by designing a product that’s more scalable. Most likely you have a pretty solid manual process down for serving your existing customers. You just need a tool that will help increase the number of concurrent customers you can serve at the same time.

The biggest danger for you is building every feature and capability right away. You do not want to overbuild only to find out it’s something nobody wants. If you built it, there’s no guarantee they will come.

Instead, break your product idea into smaller milestones and define the smallest version that delivers enough value some of your customers will use it and pay for it.

Approach: Triage your existing customer base to find the specific type of customer that will be an early adopter of your new product. This smaller niche will let you know what pain they have in the existing solution and how the new one can be incrementally better.

Main Question: What does my initial product need to do in order to convince (some subset of my existing) customers to move to this new solution?

Selecting Customers: If you‘re in business already, you have different types of customers. There are the ones that need high touch and the others that are fairly self-directed. There are the ones that really go with the flow, happy with what you offer, and there are the ones that are consistently critical. Some use your services for one purpose, and some use your services for another.

Identify the 2–3 distinct customer groups you have
Interview 3+ people from each distinct customer group until you stop learning something new

Existing Product, But No Existing Customers/Users

So you have a product but you have no idea who is going to buy it, love it and shout from the mountain tops about it. I’m sorry to say you jumped the gun. I hate this situation more than most because it means you’re out an upfront investment with no sites of revenue on the immediate horizon.

You built a product and now you’re trying to back into who will pay for it. You’ve already launched to “No Market Need,” so you’re also at risk of running out of cash.

There are three big dangers for you, so I’m going to list them out:

Marketing to too many different customer segments at the same time
Giving up on market research too early (“It’s too hard! I just can’t find anyone that will buy this!”)
Then, thinking that you should spend more time & money building more features (“Well this guy said he would only consider me if my product can do X.”)

Do not build any more product until you figure out your super small, niche market that will be your early adopters and evangelists (“early-vangelists”).

You need to put your product aside for right now because you do not yet know if it’s a good or bad idea. If you only try to get feedback on your product, you may only learn that your idea stinks. This doesn’t get you anywhere.

Approach: You should approach interviews similarly to someone just starting out. You need to spend time understanding the problem from potential customers’ perspectives in order to define a niche that you can uniquely help. Ideally, that niche could be interested in your existing solution with little modifications. You do not want to spend much more on product development until you have this niche.

Main Questions: How are different customer segments experiencing the problem I identified? Is there any one group for which my as-is product solves their problem?

Selecting Customers: I’m sure you have several customer segments that you had in mind when you built your solution, so start with those.

Identify 3 customer segments
Interview 3+ people in each of these customer segments until you stop learning new things
If none of the first 3 segments is a match, rinse and repeat with 3 new markets

Existing Product, AND Existing Customers/Users

Congratulations! You have people that are using your product and paying you with time and/or money for your solution. You may find yourself overloaded with data from quantitative feedback loops but something still isn’t working. Growth isn’t happening fast enough or you have too much leakage in your acquisition funnel. Most likely, you have a values gap.

Briefly, a values gap is a discontinuity between “when the customer experiences the problem” and “when the customer feels fulfilled by the result/solution”.

Your biggest danger is continuing to make decisions only on quantitative data without talking to your customers. This sets you up for a pivot gone bad or making your product worse instead of better. You need to interview customers so you have a human vision — understanding the “why” behind customers’ activities.

Approach & Main Question: You can bifurcate your efforts here.

First, do usability testing on your entire acquisition funnel from Awareness through Acquisition and Retention. Are there any major or minor usability errors that are keeping customers from moving forward?

Second, do user interviews to map your customer-activity cycle. You should know what’s happening before, during and after using your product.

Any discontinuity (value gap) that you do not cover is an opportunity for your customers to jump ship and go to a competitor for help. [Read this article “How Increasing Value to Customers Improves Business Results,” circa 2000. Old but stands the test of time!]

Who do you need to interview?

Still not sure who you should start with? Put your questions in the comments and I’ll happily reply. Else, schedule time to talk with me so we can have this conversation in private.