Customer discovery interviews, twelve at a time
Talk to users, everyone says. Nobody mentions that twelve discovery calls is a month of scheduling for about ninety minutes of signal.
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The scheduling is the bottleneck, not the willingness
Most people you ask are happy to help. What they will not do is find thirty minutes, install the right video tool, and be somewhere quiet at a fixed time next Thursday. That is the whole reason your discovery stalls at four interviews instead of twenty.
Send everyone a link and the constraint disappears. Twelve personal invitations take one afternoon to send and cost each recipient four minutes of a commute.
Everyone gets asked the same thing
Across a dozen live calls your questions drift. You get better at asking them, you skip the one that felt awkward, and by the last call you are unconsciously steering towards the answer you have started to expect.
A written set of questions is asked identically every time. When twelve people answer the same question in the same words, that is a finding rather than an artefact of how you asked it.
Founders who dread the call still do the research
If live calls drain you, the honest outcome is that less research happens. A lot of good product thinking never occurs because the person who would do it dreads the calendar invite more than they want the answer.
Writing the questions and reading the replies is a different job with the same output. Use both — just stop defaulting to the call.
Customer development questions worth asking
Six open questions is roughly four and a half minutes of someone’s time. Copy these straight in and edit them to sound like you.
- What were you doing about this before?
- Walk me through the last time it went wrong.
- What did you try that did not work?
- How much of your week does this take up?
- If nothing changed, what would happen?
- What would have to be true for you to switch?
Common questions
- How many customer discovery interviews do I need?
- Around twelve is where the same phrasing starts repeating. Because nothing needs scheduling, twelve is an afternoon rather than a month.
- Will people actually answer?
- The people most worth hearing from are the ones least likely to give you thirty minutes. A four-minute link they can answer at a bus stop gets replies from people who politely ignored the scheduling link.
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