All the Resources You Need to Master Customer Interviews

Arun Agrahri
Lean Startup Circle
4 min readApr 25, 2017

We recently launched Nucleus in public beta. At Nucleus, we do fast iterations. And the best way to iterate is to ship fast and get early feedback.

We have implemented loads of awesome analytics tools in our product. But there is no substitute for getting deep insights by directly talking to our users. You’ve probably heard of Steve Blank comment

“There are no facts inside your building.” So, you need to get out and talk to customers.

This is a great advice but knowing where to start can be a little difficult. What questions do you ask? What questions to avoid? And what do you do with all the answers you receive?

As we’re going through this process, I’ve compiled a list of resources to help you get started. Effective customer interviews are vital for product development. I hope these resources help to nail your next customer interviews.

How to Find Customers to Interview

We know we need to “get out of the building”, but where do we go? If you have a working product, you start with existing users. If you’re in ideation phase, you need to first define the customer persona.

The process of finding customers to interview is a preview of what it’ll take to sell to your customers. You may need to stand out on the street, do cold emails, create meetups. There is no silver bullet, tactics like these can work depending on your idea and market. Even for good channels, a 10–20% response rate is normal, so don’t get discouraged. Here are some resources to help you find customers to interview.

  1. Getting Customer Interviews with Cold Emails

2. 95 Ways to Find Your First Customers for Customer Development and Sales

3. How to Find Customers to Interview

Interviewing Customers

The first rule of user research: never ask anyone what they want.

— Erika Hall, Just Enough Research

The key to doing effective customer interviews is to ask the right questions and avoid leading questions. For example, “Would you use this product” or…

Arun Agrahri
Lean Startup Circle

Builder: Products, Teams, Companies. I write about entrepreneurship, team building, and my intellectual curiosity. https://timeback.so