Book · Full book, roughly 250 pages

Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

Michele Hansen · deployempathy.com Paid Intermediate

Judging whether people will actually change their behavior comes down to how well you can hear intensity in what they say, and this is the most practical book on doing exactly that. Hansen, a bootstrapped SaaS founder, walks through the specific questions and listening moves that get past polite answers to the real emotional weight behind a stated problem. It is the how-to that makes the vitamin versus painkiller judgment something you can actually do in a live conversation instead of guessing.

  • Ask about the last time someone hit the problem and what they did about it; workarounds and effort reveal true intensity better than a rating of how much it bothers them.
  • People soften and rationalize their pain, so listen for emotion, hesitation, and the stuff they already spend money or time on to cope.
  • Behavior in the past is the honest signal, if they never built a workaround or paid to escape it, the problem is likely a nice-to-have.
Open on deployempathy.com ↗

It answers 7 questions

  1. How do I keep talking to users while I'm heads-down building?
  2. What should my very first sales pitch actually say, and how long should it be?
  3. How do I get customers who don't already know me when I have no brand, no audience, and no case studies yet?
  4. How do I run a customer interview without leading them to the answer I want?
  5. As a solo technical founder who hates sales calls, how do I do user research without it draining me every week?
  6. As a domain expert leaving my industry job, how do I turn my old network into first customers without seeming like I'm exploiting them?
  7. How do I tell the difference between a nice-to-have problem and one people will actually change their behavior to fix?

Read with it

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  3. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  4. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  5. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  6. A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to win your first 10 B2B customers Lenny Rachitsky
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