Understand your customers

What founders use for understand your customers, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

1. A companion piece to the article above, this one focuses on the practical am I done yet moment inside a single discovery... Customer Dev Labs Article When Are You Done Interviewing Customers? Justin Wilcox
2. This is the academic study behind the qualitative research idea of saturation, the point past which new interviews stop adding... Field Methods (Sage) Article How Many Interviews Are Enough? An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability Greg Guest, Arwen Bunce, Laura Johnson
3. A concise, practical primer on structuring an interview, from writing questions to avoiding leading language to taking useful... Nielsen Norman Group Article User Interviews 101 Maria Rosala and Kara Pernice
4. Zhuo, former Facebook VP of Product Design, gives seven specific questions for interviewing a prospective user, moving from... The Looking Glass Essay The Looking Glass: You Cannot Teach Wisdom Julie Zhuo
5. This is a straightforward, tactical rundown of where to source interviewees when your customer base is zero: relevant... Grow and Convert Article · ~12 min read How to Conduct Customer Interviews (Even When You Don't Have Customers) Thomas Carney
6. Once you've found someone willing to talk, this thread collects the actual questions other founders use, crowdsourced from... Indie Hackers Thread · ~5 min read Top Questions to Ask Customers During Their Interviews Indie Hackers
7. A specific, first-person account of finding an audience on Reddit from nothing, including which subreddits worked and how the... Indie Hackers Thread · ~8 min read How I Got My First 100 Users via Reddit Indie Hackers
8. This is the most exhaustive single list we found of concrete channels for sourcing interviewees, from personal network to... mfishbein.com Article · ~15 min read Customer Development: 14 Best Ways to Find Customers to Interview Mike Fishbein
9. This book documents how Indian and other emerging-market entrepreneurs build with severe resource constraints and turn... naviradjou.com Book Jugaad Innovation Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone Ahuja
10. A concrete case study of a founder team that got out of the metro bubble and found a market (women resellers in smaller towns)... YourStory Article UpClose: How Meesho Turned Housewives Into Entrepreneurs YourStory
11. Savoia's pretotyping approach forces you to define, before you show anyone anything, exactly what a real reaction would look... pretotyping.org Book · ~80 pages Pretotype It Alberto Savoia
12. If a cofounder or teammate is going to sit in on the session, this is the two-minute brief you send them beforehand. It spells... Nielsen Norman Group Article Observer Guidelines for Usability Research Nielsen Norman Group
13. This names biases beyond the obvious one: task-selection bias (users assume whatever you ask them to find must exist), social... MeasuringU Article 9 Biases in Usability Testing Jeff Sauro
14. This lays out the practical mechanics of a feedback session, including being neutral when you present the prototype and... Interaction Design Foundation Article Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximize Learning Interaction Design Foundation
15. Useful once you've run a few in-person sessions and want to test with more people than you can personally sit with. It's honest... Maze Article Moderated vs. Unmoderated Usability Testing: Which One is Right for You? Maze
16. Written for solo and early founders rather than VC backed teams, this is blunt about why family and friends are usually the... Indie Hackers Article How To Validate a Business Idea Indie Hackers
17. Kahl argues that half of good customer discovery is ignoring the wrong people, and he is explicit that supportive friends and... Arvid Kahl, The Bootstrapped Founder Essay Problem Validation: Making Sure You're Talking to the Right People Arvid Kahl
18. This thread is a candid, unfiltered discussion of a question every founder eventually asks out loud: how do you actually get a... Hacker News Thread Ask HN: How to Actually "Talk to Your Customers"? Hacker News
19. Nick Swinmurn tested whether people would actually buy shoes online by photographing shoes he did not own and buying them at... Alex Ponomarev Article · 8 min read How Zappos Built a Product By Faking It Alex Ponomarev
20. The book's central case study of an entrepreneur with six beta commitments and zero dollars spent on development is a direct... Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom Book · ~230 pages Nail It Then Scale It Nathan Furr, Paul Ahlstrom
21. Young's method pushes you past what people say they do and toward the reasoning underneath it, the guiding thoughts and... Rosenfeld Media Book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior Indi Young
22. This article names the specific ways a survey misleads you: people rush through it, answer the way that feels acceptable rather... Harvard Business Review Article Customer Surveys Are No Substitute for Actually Talking to Customers Graham Kenny
23. Cohen has run this exact process since before he sold his first company, and he is unusually candid about the mechanics: write... A Smart Bear Essay The Iterative-Hypothesis Customer Development Method Jason Cohen
24. A checklist you can run your actual call script against before you place the calls. It catches the specific phrasing habits,... Nielsen Norman Group Article · ~8 min read 6 Mistakes When Crafting Interview Questions Maria Rosala

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