This is why we make people do problem interviews.

We live for emails like this one. Thanks for sharing and for giving us permission to post, Michael! We are also helping the next entrepreneur get to this level of learning, if you know anyone who matches this description — please comment below so Matt can interview them

sole proprietor, or even individual who has significant online security/privacy concerns but feels overwhelmed, under-resourced, and frustrated to a point where they don’t know where to begin. Even more ideally, would be someone who has regulatory requirements to show some cyber-security work and/or wants to purchase cyber insurance.

Hey Adam,

I wanted to give you an update and thank you for all of the guidance you provided me. After completing the 100 interviews, albeit after the 50 days, I started understanding a bit more about what you wanted me to uncover. I needed to better understand a problem/need that my solution could solve. For many of my interviews, there just was not a perfect alignment to my solution and a problem the customer actually recognized themselves as having. Within my data there was a small subset of customers, that I had not considered. My father who is visually impaired, and a few of his friends, had participated in my interview process. They talked about fraud experiences, but a consistent comment I initially dismissed, was the difficulty in actually paying for items. For visually impaired shoppers, credit cards a big pain in the neck. I dug further into the problem and found that their was a huge amount of improvement that could be made in this space and that I had a product that could do it. Since then I have expanded the concept and built a complete marketplace for the visually impaired that grabs items from a bunch of other online marketplaces, and organizes them into a text only experience. Powering it with my payment device, I now have the first fully accessible ecommerce platform. I am already connected with several local organization for the visually impaired and are a beginning beta trial.

I just wanted to drop a note, tell you it worked, and say thanks!

All the best,

Michael Vinocur

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I coach teams from the biggest (and sometimes oldest) companies on earth at www.myspinnaker.co with Jonathan and Sonja Kresojevic

I coach and invest in the smallest (and usually youngest) companies on earth at Liberty Ventures. We are currently crowdfunding $100,000 to support customer discovery, experimentation, increased access to entrepreneurship, and sharing lessons like the one above.