How To Talk To Users | Startup School
The canonical 17 minutes on user interviews; everything the AI helps with builds on this.
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How do founders run and analyze customer interviews with AI?
Do your first 10 to 15 interviews yourself using Mom Test rules (past behaviour, not opinions about your idea), then let AI take over the mechanical work: drafting non-leading question guides, transcribing, and clustering themes across transcripts. Claude and ChatGPT are excellent at turning a pile of raw transcripts into themes, quotes, and contradictions in minutes, and AI-moderated platforms can then run hundreds of consistent interviews once you know what to ask. Treat AI's themes as a first draft to check against the recordings, not as the conclusion.
Go deeper
20 resources.
[The Mom Test] AI can't run your customer interviews (but it *can* help in other ways)
The Mom Test author himself draws the line between what AI should and should not do in discovery.
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Ailyze Tutorial: Turn Interview Transcripts Into Themes & Visuals Instantly
Watch transcripts become themes and visuals, the core analysis move this question is about.
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This AI Transcribes & Analyzes Interviews in Minutes
End-to-end demo of the transcribe-then-analyze loop founders can copy.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →How to Talk to Users with Gustaf Alströmer | Startup School (podcast)
The same essential material in audio form for commute listening.
Listen on Spotify open.spotify.com →60 Customer Discovery Questions (Mom Test-Approved)
A ready question bank that keeps your AI-drafted guides non-leading.
Open getperspective.ai →The Mom Test for Customer Interviews: How to Ask Questions That Get Real Answers
Updates Mom Test practice for the AI-moderated interview era.
Open koji.so →How to Scale the Mom Test with AI Interviews
The hybrid model: humans build intuition first, AI scales the interviewing after.
Open prelaunch.com →Using ChatGPT and other LLMs to analyse interviews and qualitative data
An honest technical account of what LLM qualitative analysis gets right and wrong.
Open skimle.com →AI User Research Skill 101: A Claude Skill That Turns Raw Interview Dumps Into Themes
A reusable Claude workflow that converts messy transcripts into themes and actions in 90 seconds.
Open sidsaladi.substack.com →Analyze Transcripts with Claude AI (Free Prompt)
A copy-paste transcript analysis prompt to start with before building anything fancier.
Open genaiuniversity.com →AI Customer Interview Analysis: Mining Discovery Calls for Intel with Claude Code
Shows Claude Code processing many interviews in parallel, the power-user version of this workflow.
Open marketbetter.ai →A Market Researcher's Review: Claude
A professional research firm's assessment of Claude for qualitative analysis, limits included.
Open cascadeinsights.com →How a UX Researcher Uses AI in Their Daily Workflow
A working researcher's real AI workflow rather than a tool vendor's pitch.
Open userinterviews.com →Introducing Anthropic Interviewer
Primary research on AI running interviews at scale and feeding results back to humans.
Open anthropic.com →How to Scale User Interviews to Large Panels
How AI moderation removes the depth-versus-scale trade-off in discovery.
Open listenlabs.ai →Customer Discovery Interviews: The Founder Guide
A full founder reference for discovery interviews with AI assistance woven in.
Open userintuition.ai →How to Talk to Users (YC Startup Library)
The written companion to the video, easy to excerpt into your AI question-drafting prompts.
Open ycombinator.com →Outset: The AI-Moderated Research Platform
A leading AI-moderated interview platform for when you need dozens of interviews this week.
Open outset.ai →MomTestAI: Validate Customer Discovery Questions
Paste your interview questions and it flags the leading ones before you embarrass yourself.
Open momtest.ai →More in Market Research
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- How do I use AI deep research agents (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) to produce a market research report? 19 →
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- How do I mine Reddit, reviews, and online communities with AI to find real pain points? 18 →
- How do I define my target audience and ideal customer profile (ICP) with AI? 17 →
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- How do I test pricing and willingness to pay before launch, with AI's help? 14 →
- How do I run surveys and collect customer feedback at scale with AI? 18 →
- How much should I trust AI market research, and how do I verify it before betting on it? 17 →
- What does a lean AI market research stack look like for a bootstrapped founder? 20 →
Also in Starting Up
The same ground, over in Understand your customers, our Starting Up track.
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