David Bland teaches founders how to run customer interviews that actually work. Ask people to tell stories and rank their problems, not to react to your solution. Aim for 15 to 20 interviews to spot patterns, use their exact words in your messaging, and test risky assumptions with lightweight experiments before you build.
Chapters
You know, if I wanted to visualize this, again, this is from Ash who actually created the canvas as well. Like, this is a structure that I just talked about in a visual way. So, set the context, like, set the stage. Who are you talking to? Make sure they're the right people. Like, you don't wanna spend your time 30 minutes in and realize they're not your customer. Have them tell a story. You can even do some problem ranking. So, when we were talking about the problems in your canvas, You might just have those listed and be like, hey, just sort these from top to bottom, which ones you care about the most. Trying to explore their worldview. Again, that's having them tell more of a story about what their environment's like, what their world's like. And then wrapping up. Sometimes it's an ask. Sometimes it's a, can you refer me to other people? Sometimes it's like, do you wanna be part of the beta when we go live? the link to my page, will you come and sign up, right? You wanna have them be proactive here a little bit. You don't wanna just interview, let's say, 40 people and then have that list and be like, these are my beta users and I just collected emails. And when I build this thing, I'm gonna give this to them an email and then they're automatically gonna love me. Very rarely does that happen. So you wanna see, are they gonna take initiative to be a part of your thing? What's great is sometimes those people in the problem interview, you can actually revisit them later and be like, hey, remember we talked to you 6 months ago? This is our MVP we built. Are you willing to try it? And you're almost like cultivating your early evangelists that way. It doesn't mean you only go back to them. You still want to go wider, but you're starting to build that community too. Questions? Questions about the interview part? How long do you interview for? How not to be boring? How not to be boring? Oh, that's a really hard question for some people. It's like, oh, I want to, no, I don't want to. Yeah, how not to be boring. Well, one, I mean, your passion's gonna shine through if you're solving, like if you're really passionate about the problem. I usually find the opposite, like startup founders just steamroll over people and don't let them talk. It becomes like a solution monologue instead of a customer interview. And then you don't learn anything, or you said, yeah, I heard what I wanted to hear and I'm gonna go build this thing now. It takes a level of patience to be like, hey, tell me a story, and then actually shut up and listen to that story, right? So it's a very interesting question cuz you're worried about being boring, whereas most of the time I see founders just completely just take advantage of the conversation and just control the whole thing. And that's totally not the point. That's just not what you're there for. You're there to listen. So that's funny that you asked that. I don't— yeah, maybe you'll do really well in these. But yeah, usually boring isn't a problem. And as far as incentives, sometimes if you're just doing a Skype or Google Hangout with somebody, a really small gift card is probably enough, or they might do it for free. If you're asking them to travel to come meet you, it's usually something a little more. Other questions? Have you all interviewed anyone yet, or have you been thinking about it? Yeah? Sure, go ahead. How many customer surveys is usually enough? How many is enough? Yeah, so that's a great question. Early on, you really don't wanna stress statistical significance. That's not the point. So let's say if you interview 15 to 20 people, and you also said surveys, so I wanna make sure. If you're doing interviews, 15 to 20 is plenty. Plenty. You're gonna hear the same problem over and over again. Or you're gonna hear like people don't care over and over again. If you want to do a survey after that, then what I recommend is using all that learning and going back through your notes and then crafting the survey based on what you learned, okay? The other thing I recommend is using the words that people used in those interviews in your landing page and in your product and in your advertising. Again, we don't wanna be super passionate about the solution and use all the words like, it's a technical algorithm that does blah, blah. Like, people just don't speak your language usually. But the language you're gonna pick up from doing the interviews, you can use in your product and you can use in your landing page and you can use in your advertising, okay? And that makes a difference. Sometimes there's nothing wrong with your product, it's just the words you're using don't resonate with your customer segment, okay? So being able to describe it in their language is really important. Any other questions? Yeah. Okay. So basically just go test your assumptions. You have all this great support. You have this great community. You're out here in Silicon Valley. So many smart people will be willing to help you. I love that about Silicon Valley. People will spend time helping you. I'm down here hanging out. You have a bunch of other people coming, helping you. But you have to turn that into action, right? You have really risky assumptions that'll make and break your entire business. You need— it's hard, but you need to get out there and start testing those. Whether it's talking to people, whether it's doing landing pages, whether it's concierging or doing some kind of Wizard of Oz thing that fakes the experience, it's really, really important that you go test those now versus later. Because that's the shift from can you build it, you can build anything, But you really, really need to be able to understand, like, should you build it at all? Will anyone care? OK.
