Podcast · ~75 min

Teresa Torres on how to interview customers

Lenny Rachitsky and Teresa Torres · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Intermediate

A deep conversation on why direct questions fail and how story-based interviews surface real behaviour. Torres names the common mistakes founders make (leading questions, asking about the future) and how to fix them. A good listen for your commute.

  • Would you questions invite polite lies.
  • Anchor every question to a specific past instance.
  • One concrete story beats ten opinions.
Open on lennysnewsletter.com ↗

It answers 21 questions

  1. How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear?
  2. What questions should I actually ask in a customer interview?
  3. How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the signal?
  4. How do I talk to customers without getting false positives?
  5. Where do I find people to interview when I have zero audience?
  6. How do I keep talking to users while I'm heads-down building?
  7. How do I get honest answers when the person I'm interviewing is a friend or someone in my network?
  8. Should I do customer interviews live over a call, or is survey data good enough at the start?
  9. How do I run good discovery calls in India when the person keeps saying yes to be polite but never converts?
  10. 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?
  11. How do I validate an idea in an industry I have no background in?
  12. How do I do user research when I'm building something nobody has seen before and can't describe what they want?

And 9 more across the hub.

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. 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
  3. 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)
  4. The standard modern playbook for keeping discovery continuous so roadmap decisions stay grounded in real customer input, not... Product Talk Book · ~240 pages Continuous Discovery Habits Teresa Torres
  5. 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
  6. A step-by-step guide to running discovery when you have almost no data, aimed squarely at first-time founders. It is practical... First Round Review Article · 15 min read A Founder's Guide for Successful Early-Stage Customer Discovery Jeanette Mellinger
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