Ideas & Opportunity

How many people should I talk to, and how do I find them?

A starting point

Aim for enough that patterns repeat, often 15-30 focused conversations before signal stabilises. Find them by going where the problem lives: your own network, niche communities, LinkedIn, relevant subreddits/Slacks, or by standing where your customers already are. Recruiting is a skill you can run in parallel with interviewing.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 1 link-checked Watch Read

Watch

▶️ Video
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it A YC partner turns 'talk to users' into a repeatable 5-question interview script you can use this afternoon. It's The Mom Test compressed into a lecture, perfect if you want the method fast before reading the book.

How to Talk to Users

On YC Startup Library by Eric Migicovsky (YC / founder of Pebble) ~25 min

  • Don't pitch your idea, you'll bias every answer.
  • Anchor on the last time they hit the problem, and what they did about it.
  • If they've done nothing to solve it, the problem may not be painful enough.
Open ycombinator.com →

Read

📖 Book
Freemium Beginner

Why we picked it A short, practical field guide to customer discovery: who to talk to, how to find them, and how many. Pairs perfectly with The Mom Test, Fitzpatrick teaches the questions, Constable teaches the logistics.

Talking to Humans

From talkingtohumans.com by Giff Constable ~80 pages (free PDF available)

  • Decide who you need to learn from before you start.
  • Recruiting interviewees is a skill, scripts and channels included.
  • Get out of the building; patterns emerge faster than you expect.
Open talkingtohumans.com →
✍️ Essay
Free Beginner

Why we picked it The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few customers. The cheapest, most honest way to validate demand is to go get it one person at a time.

Do Things That Don't Scale

From paulgraham.com by Paul Graham ~15 min read

  • Recruit your first users manually, don't wait for them to come.
  • A tiny group of users who love you beats a big group who like you.
  • Manual, unscalable effort early is a feature, not a failure.
Open paulgraham.com →

People also ask

What does 'validating an idea' actually mean? Validation is gathering real-world evidence that a specific group of people has a painful problem AND will change their behaviour (pay, sign up, sw... Beginner 3 resources → How do I know if my idea is any good? Judge it on the problem, not the solution: is it a real, frequent, painful problem for a reachable group of people, and are you unusually well-plac... Beginner 4 resources → How do I validate an idea without building anything? Replace the product with a conversation, a manual service, or a landing page. Interview people about the problem, hand-deliver the outcome yourself... Beginner 3 resources → How do I talk to customers without getting false positives? Never pitch your idea in the interview, it invites polite lies. Ask about their real life and past behaviour: the last time they hit the problem, w... Beginner 3 resources → What is an MVP and what's the smallest one I can build? An MVP is the least you can build (or fake) to learn whether your riskiest assumption is true. Often it isn't software at all: a manual service, a ... Beginner 3 resources → How do I run a landing-page / 'fake-door' test? Put up a simple page that describes the offer as if it's real, drive a bit of targeted traffic to it, and measure whether people take a costly-to-t... Intermediate 2 resources →