Video · ~50 min

How to Start a Startup: Talking to Users

Eric Migicovsky · Y Combinator Library Free Beginner

Migicovsky built Pebble on hundreds of these conversations, and this lecture is the specific playbook: how to find your first ten users, what to ask them, and how to tell a polite no from real interest. Pair it with the Alströmer talk above and you have most of what YC teaches on this in under an hour and a half.

  • Find users through your own network before running paid outreach.
  • Ask what they currently do to work around the problem.
  • Politeness is not a signal. Only past behavior is.
Open on ycombinator.com ↗

It answers 3 questions

  1. What questions should I actually ask in a customer interview?
  2. How many customer conversations should I do before I start building versus building a rough version to learn faster?
  3. As a solo technical founder who hates sales calls, how do I do user research without it draining me every week?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. A YC partner turns 'talk to users' into a repeatable 5-question interview script you can use this afternoon. It's The Mom Test... YC Startup Library Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky (YC / founder of Pebble)
  3. A short, practical field guide to customer discovery: who to talk to, how to find them, and how many. Pairs perfectly with The... talkingtohumans.com Book · ~80 pages (free PDF available) Talking to Humans Giff Constable
  4. A deep conversation on why direct questions fail and how story-based interviews surface real behaviour. Torres names the common... Lenny's Newsletter Podcast · ~75 min Teresa Torres on how to interview customers Lenny Rachitsky and Teresa Torres
  5. 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
  6. Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean, argues you can always find how a customer solves a job today, and that existing workaround... LEANFoundry Article · About a 10 minute read Find Better Problems Worth Solving with the Customer Forces Canvas Ash Maurya
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