The Biggest Mistake Early-Stage Founders Make in Customer Interviews
By: Ben Lindsay
Tags: Startup Lessons, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Startup Life, Product Development

Talking to customers is a cornerstone of early product development; in fact, it can be the fuel for your startup. It can help you:

identify an unmet customer pain or frustration

develop clear design inputs for your product build

give insights into the perceived value of solving X problems across multiple customer segments.

However, when in the very early stages of your business, you are excited. Perhaps you watched the famous Alec Baldwin “Always Be Closing” scene, and you don’t want to miss your chance to turn every conversation into money, internally chanting “carpe diem.”

But, as good as it would be to get a signature on the dotted line before you have a product ready, the reality is, you’re not ready to ask.

Without anything to sell, startups ask what they believe is the next best thing, “If I built this — would you buy it?”

Here is why that is a problem.

People are too nice

This is one of the rare circumstances where being nice is a problem. When asked direct questions about someone’s idea, most people avoid confrontation and reply positively.

“Yeah, sure, buddy, I would love to use that…”

“That sounds like a good idea!”

“Of course! Keep me in the loop.”

Startup founders come back after hearing this feedback ecstatic! They stream into the weekly INCUBATE updates, “Oh Ben, they loved it!”

While my duty is not to make things sour, it is to keep startup founders in reality. After helping numerous early-stage teams, I inevitably highlight to the founders that these conversations rarely result in a sale.

To be frank, the customer was just trying to say the right thing to get the startup founder to leave them alone or they haven’t really thought it through.

This is demonstrated further in Robert Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test. Let us quickly set the scene: you walk into the kitchen and ask your mum, “is my business a good idea?”

Fitzpatrick highlights that the problem here isn’t that you asked your mum if your product is a good idea or that mums are usually supportive to a fault, but that you shouldn’t ask anyone that question.

2 Ears > 1 Mouth

A famous INCUBATE slide taken from our workshop on customer interviews!

The focus of early-stage customer interviews is listening.

The customer should always be doing the majority of the talking. As a founder, your job is to:

ask the right questions

the right questions listen to the customer’s emotions towards certain things

to the customer’s emotions towards certain things learn how they currently attempt to solve particular problems

how they currently attempt to solve particular problems (most importantly) not make the conversation a hypothetical product pitch.

This is about them, not you.

Heading into these early-stage interviews, you need to set the goal to learn as much as possible about your potential customers. If you find yourself rattling off too much about your idea, you are at risk of losing the opportunity to hear insights.

Additionally, you may accidentally lead them down the wrong path. Talking too much about yourself tends to incorrectly bias the conversation.

🔮🧙‍♀️ Avoid future speculation, focus on specifics in the past

A considered structure is essential to a good customer interview. Without it, you are at risk of talking and hearing fluff.

Specific details are essential when understanding your customer — generic claims and hypotheticals don’t provide the information you need to develop a product and understand your customer’s behaviour.

The best approach is to focus interview questions on past behaviour. Understand what they are doing and how they currently solve certain problems; don’t be afraid to get them to walk you through it.

Asking if someone might potentially use your product isn’t that clear cut. Instead, utilise specifics in the past to identify the potential value for your product. Ask questions like: