How To Talk To Users | Startup School

Core Philosophy

• Founders who identify their target users should learn from them continuously throughout the entire company lifecycle, not just at the outset.
• Users are the only stakeholders who directly pay for the product, serving as the primary source of honest feedback and validation.
• The common narrative that product ideas emerge solely from "lazy Sunday" brainstorming or late-night coding sessions is inaccurate.
• The most successful founders (e.g., Brian Chesky of Airbnb) build personal, direct relationships with customers before a product exists.
• Early Airbnb co-founders lived in 50 different host properties to directly interview hosts and understand their motivations, a strategy still reflected in their personal availability to hosts today.

Identifying and Reaching Users

• Founders should interview people outside their immediate personal network and former coworker circles to avoid biased or overly polite feedback.
• Common effective channels for finding early users include LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack, Discord, and in-person industry events.
• Outreach messages should briefly introduce the founder, the project, and request a short 20-minute call without revealing detailed product specifics to avoid bias.
• Interview success relies on using video calls or in-person meetings rather than surveys, as they yield more nuanced data in less time.
• The initial goal of outreach is to verify if a specific problem is real and understand the motivations behind user actions.

Interview Technique: Questions to Ask

• Founders must avoid introducing their own product idea until the very end of the conversation or omit it entirely to prevent biasing the user.
• Effective questions include: "Tell me how you do [X] today," "What is the hardest thing about [X]?", "Why is it hard?", "How often do you do [X]?", and "Why does [X] matter to your company?"
• Users should be asked to demonstrate their current workflow via screen sharing or showing physical artifacts (e.g., PDF reports) to observe actual behavior rather than relying on self-reported data.
• Follow-up questions like "What do you mean by that?" and "Can you tell me more?" are critical for extracting deep, concrete examples.
• Founders should focus on understanding the problem space; users generally identify problems well but propose poor solutions.

Interview Technique: Questions to Avoid

• Do not ask hypothetical questions like "Will you use our product?" as users often say "yes" to be polite without intent to buy.
• Avoid asking "What features would make product X better?" because users are not product designers and should not be tasked with solving the problem for the founder.
• Do not ask "Yes/No" questions, as they fail to elicit the narrative details necessary for product design.
• Avoid asking "How would a better product look?" as this asks users to design a solution they are not equipped to create.
• Never ask two questions at once, as this confuses the interviewee and muddies the resulting data.

From Insights to MVP

• After 5–10 interviews, founders should organize notes into buckets of distinct problems to identify the most critical issue to solve.
• The next step is to formulate a hypothesis for a solution and rapidly design a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) based on that hypothesis.
• Founders must validate if the problem is economically valuable by checking if users currently pay for existing (often manual) solutions like consultants or Excel spreadsheets.
• Moving users away from entrenched tools like Excel requires a solution that is dramatically better, not merely marginally improved.
• Sales difficulty varies by audience; startups are generally easier to sell to than industries with low tech adoption like plumbing or contracting.

Testing and Validation

• MVP testing involves showing prototypes (e.g., InVision links) to users without explaining how to use them, allowing observation of natural interaction.
• Users should be asked to "think aloud" while testing the prototype to reveal confusion over specific terminology or interface logic.
• Founders can maintain engagement by creating exclusive communication channels (e.g., Slack groups) where users feel privileged to see product progress.
• Rapidly shipping new screens or updates based on user feedback builds trust and reinforces the value of the user's input.