Sales & PMFCustomer discovery · PMF
Ten customer interviews a week, and why most of them should hurt
If every interview confirms what you already believed, you're not doing customer discovery — you're doing a listening tour of your own assumptions.
Reda Vaisvidiene
Founder, marketplace
November 22, 20257 min read2.7K reads
I run ten customer interviews a week for my marketplace idea, and I've come to enjoy roughly zero of them — which, six weeks in, I've realised is exactly the point. The interviews that feel comfortable are the ones where I'm asking questions shaped to get the answer I already wanted.
The question that changed the answers I was getting
For the first two weeks I was asking "would you use something like this?" and getting enthusiastic yeses that meant nothing — people are polite, and hypothetical enthusiasm is free. The switch that mattered was asking what they did the last time this problem actually happened to them, this week, not hypothetically. Most people couldn't name a specific instance. That was the real answer, and it was much less comfortable to hear.
- •Ask about the last specific occurrence, not a hypothetical future one
- •If they can't name a real recent instance, the problem isn't urgent enough yet — believe that, don't argue with it
- •Write down their exact words, not your paraphrase — the paraphrase always sounds more validating than the quote
“Comfortable interviews are a warning sign now, not a good sign. If I leave a call feeling validated, I go back and check what I asked.”
A rule that's saved me from myself
Any interview where I talk for more than a third of the call doesn't count toward the ten. I was pitching, not discovering, and the two produce completely different quality of data.
Written by
Pre-revenue, running ten customer interviews a week and enjoying none of them.
