Understand your customers
Talking to customers & user research
Learn the truth without leading the witness.
How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear?
Stop pitching and start interrogating their past. Ask about what they actually did last time the problem hit, what it cost them, and what they trie...
What questions should I actually ask in a customer interview?
Ask about the past and the concrete, not the future and the hypothetical. 'Walk me through the last time you dealt with X', 'what's the hardest par...
How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the signal?
There's no magic number, you're done when you can predict roughly the next answer before they say it. In practice that's usually 15-30 conversation...
Where do I find people to interview when I have zero audience?
Start with the person you already know who has the problem, then ask each interviewee for two intros. Go where the customer already hangs out, nich...
How do I run customer discovery as an Indian founder building for Indian users?
The frameworks are global but the field is local: Indian buyers often say 'yes, nice' to your face and never pay, so watch what they do, not what t...
How do I show a prototype to users without biasing their reaction?
Hand it over, give them a goal, and shut up. Don't narrate or explain, watch where they get stuck, what they ignore, and what they say out loud. Th...
How do I get honest answers when the person I'm interviewing is a friend or someone in my network?
Friends want you to succeed, so they will soften everything, which is the opposite of what you need. As a starting point, frame the conversation ar...
What's the difference between a customer saying they'll pay and actually pulling out a card, and how do I test the real one early?
Verbal commitment is close to worthless because saying yes costs nothing, so people say it to be nice. The truth shows up when you ask for somethin...
Should I do customer interviews live over a call, or is survey data good enough at the start?
At the start, surveys are a trap because they let you skip the messy, contradictory human detail where the real insight lives. You cannot ask a fol...
How do I run good discovery calls in India when the person keeps saying yes to be polite but never converts?
Politeness bias is real, and in many Indian conversations a warm yes is social lubrication, not a purchase signal. As a starting point, stop asking...
I've done 20 interviews and every person described a slightly different problem. How do I know if there's a real pattern or just noise?
Scattered problems usually mean your target group is too broad, not that there's no signal. As a starting point, sort the transcripts by who the pe...
How do I do user research when I'm building something nobody has seen before and can't describe what they want?
People are terrible at imagining products, but they are excellent at describing their current struggles, so research the struggle, not the solution...
What are the questions that quietly ruin an interview by leading the person to the answer I want?
The killers are hypotheticals and pitches disguised as questions: "Would you use an app that...", "Don't you hate it when...", "How much would you ...
How do I recruit and interview my competitor's customers without it getting weird or them shutting down?
Competitor customers are gold because they've already paid to solve the problem, and their complaints are your roadmap. As a starting point, approa...
How many customer conversations should I do before I start building versus building a rough version to learn faster?
There's no magic number, but the honest rule is: keep interviewing until you can predict the answers, and switch to building the moment talk stops ...
As a solo technical founder who hates sales calls, how do I do user research without it draining me every week?
You don't have to become an extrovert, you have to make research a small, repeatable habit instead of a dreaded event. As a starting point, batch t...
How do I tell the difference between a nice-to-have problem and one people will actually change their behavior to fix?
A real problem shows up in what people already do about it: they've cobbled together a workaround, they're paying for a bad substitute, or they've ...
How do I keep learning from customers after launch instead of only doing research once at the start?
Research isn't a phase you finish, it's a channel you keep open, because your customers and their problems keep moving. As a starting point, wire f...
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