Customer interview

A structured conversation about what someone actually does today, designed to produce evidence rather than encouragement.

Example

'Walk me through the last time this happened' — not 'would you use this?'

Never pitch during a problem interview. The moment you describe your solution, people become polite and the data becomes worthless.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) — The framing that people hire a product to make progress on a specific job in a specific situation.
Willingness to pay — Evidence that someone will part with money, as distinct from saying they like the idea.
Confirmation bias — The tendency to notice evidence supporting what you already believe and discount evidence against it.

Why customer discovery comes first — The cheapest way to find out you are wrong. Twenty conversations cost two weeks; building the wrong thing costs a year. (10 min)
How to run a problem interview — A specific script, the questions that work, and the ones that quietly destroy your data. (15 min)
Reading the evidence honestly — Separating what people said from what it means, and noticing when you are hearing what you hoped for. (12 min)
Testing willingness to pay — The only reliable test is asking for money. Everything else is people being nice to you. (12 min)
Problems versus ideas — An idea is a guess about a solution. A problem is a fact about someone's life. Start from the fact. (10 min)
The map of the whole journey — Problem → idea → customer discovery → validation → MVP → first users → product-market fit → revenue → growth → funding → scale. Where you are decides what you should be learning. (10 min)