Why You're Talking to the Wrong Customers (And How to Fix It)
If you have ever finished a customer interview feeling great, you almost certainly learned nothing. Useful customer conversations are uncomfortable. They surface mismatches. They shorten the list of people you should be selling to. The pattern of avoiding them is so common that most early-stage companies operate on customer evidence that consists of polite encouragement from people who would never actually buy.
The friendly-customer trap
The default move is to interview people who are easy to reach: friends, advisors, warm intros from your network. They are kind. They want you to succeed. They will tell you the product sounds interesting and that they could see using it someday.
Someday is not a buying signal. It is a politeness signal. The interview produced a feeling, not information. Repeat this twenty times and you have a deck full of "customer love" and a sales pipeline full of nothing.
Recruit for fit, not for friendliness
The right customer to interview is the one who is currently spending money or time on the problem you solve. They have a budget. They have a deadline. They will not pretend to be polite because they are too busy.
Find them by asking existing customers "who else in your network has this exact problem?", by searching for the job title in companies that match your ICP, and by being willing to do cold outbound. Ten interviews with people who have the problem are worth a hundred interviews with people who do not.
Ask about behaviour, not opinion
The Mom Test is the canonical reference here, and the rule is simple: ask about what they have already done, not what they think they would do. "Would you use this?" produces lies. "Walk me through the last time you tried to solve this" produces evidence.
Behaviour is harder to fake than opinion. If they have not tried to solve the problem, the problem is not as urgent as they say. If they have, the workarounds they have built are the truest description of the market you can get.
Read the silence
After the interview, ask: did they offer to introduce me to someone? Did they ask when they could start? Did they push back on price? Did they follow up unprompted? Silence on all four is a no, regardless of what they said in the meeting.
Most founders count interviews as positive unless the customer explicitly said no. Flip the default. Count interviews as no unless the customer took an action that costs them something — a referral, a pilot commitment, an introduction to their boss.
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