Stop talking to your brother
It's Wednesday, January 22nd, and today we're talking about why "talk to your customers" is both the best and worst advice ever given, and how it can radically change your business.
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Two years ago, I was sitting in the audience for a small "demo day" where I watched a founder friend present his new idea to a room full of other entrepreneurs. His pitch was met with the standard responses:
"Interesting!"
"Cool concept!"
"Have you talked to potential customers?"
He confidently assured everyone he had. When pressed for details, he revealed these "customer conversations" consisted of asking his brother-in-law and two college friends if they'd use his product. They'd all said yes.
I cringed. Not because he was doing it wrong (though he was), but because I saw myself in him. For years, I'd nod solemnly whenever someone advised "talk to your customers," while having absolutely no idea how to actually do it effectively.
I was also scared.
The advice to "talk to your customers" is simultaneously the most given and least followed guidance in business. It's like being told to "just be yourself" on a first dateātechnically correct but functionally useless without the how.
Most of us skip this step entirely. We're either too scared of what we'll learn or too convinced we already know what people want. And I get itāthere's something terrifying about putting your precious idea in front of real humans who might tell you it's garbage.
But here's the thing: most of us aren't actually afraid of talking to customers. We're afraid of doing it wrong. Of asking the wrong questions, of not knowing how to interpret the answers, of accidentally leading the witness.
I felt this acutely until I stumbled across a book called "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick. The title comes from the idea that even your mom will lie to you about your business idea. Not because she's mean, but because she's nice.
I was then fortunate enough to take a course tought by Sara Sodine Parr called "Build the Right Thing".
It was the first time someone didn't just tell me to talk to customers, but showed me how to do it in a way that actually got useful information.
So let's break this down. Because "talk to your customers" isn't just a checkbox to tick offāit's either your secret weapon or your Achilles' heel, depending entirely on how you do it.
First, the elephant in the room:
We often love our solutions more than we love the truth.
It's a peculiar form of self-sabotage. We come up with an idea, fall in love with it, start imagining our TechCrunch feature, practice our Shark Tank pitch in the showerāand then someone suggests we validate it with actual humans.
Suddenly we're full of reasons why we can't:
"I don't want anyone to steal my idea."
"People don't know what they want until you show them."
"I already know this is needed because I've experienced the problem."
But here's what we're actually saying:
"I'm terrified this might not work."
"I've already invested so much mental energy into this solution."
"If I'm wrong about this, what else am I wrong about?"
I know this dance because I've done it. When I first started building community strategies, I was convinced I knew exactly what people needed. After all, I'd been doing this for years. I had the screenshots, the testimonials, the case studies.
But my mentor at the time asked me a simple question that stopped me cold: "If you're so sure about this, why are you afraid to test it?"
Ouch.
Here's what I've learned: the more precious we are about our ideas, the more likely we are to build something nobody wants. We end up optimizing for our ego instead of our customer's reality.
Which then becomes a career we don't want. Becase pushing a boulder uphill stops being fun almost instantly.
And let's be honestāit's way easier to build in isolation, protected by the warm blanket of our assumptions, than it is to face the cold reality that we might be solving the wrong problem.
The thing about customer interviews is that they're less about the questions you ask and more about the environment you create. It's like being a detective, therapist, and empathetic friend all at onceāminus the crying and criminal accusations.
I learned this the hard way. While running Infuse, I had my list of questions, my need to extract specific information, and about as much warmth as a February morning in Boston. :)
The results were exactly what you'd expect: stilted conversations, surface-level answers, and people telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. In fact, I build an entirely new arm of the company based on false positives. I lost money and it failed. Spectacularly.
Here's what most "talk to your customers" advice misses: humans are weird about feedback. We're conditioned to be nice, to avoid conflict, to want to be helpful. The moment someone senses you're invested in a particular answer, they'll start unconsciously shaping their responses to please you.
Building the right rapport isn't about being their best friend. It's about creating a space where they forget you have skin in the game.
Some ways to do this:
Drop the founder/CEO energy. The moment they sense you're the "idea person," they'll start sugarcoating. I often introduce myself as someone doing research to understand [problem x], not as someone with a solution.
Listen for what they're not saying. When someone tells you "Yeah, I could see myself using that," but their tone sounds like they're reading a phone book, believe the tone.
Get comfortable with silence. People will fill awkward pauses with truth if you let them. After they answer a question, wait a beat. It's amazing what people will add when you don't rush to fill the void.
Make it a conversation, not an interrogation. If someone mentions they tried three different solutions last year, don't barrel forward with your next question. Get curious about why those solutions didn't stick.
The goal isn't to be their friendāit's to be someone they don't feel the need to protect with little white lies.
Another important nuance: talking to customers before you launch is completely different from talking to them after. It's like the difference between dating and marriageāthe questions, stakes, and acceptable levels of brutal honesty are worlds apart.
Pre-launch, you're hunting for problems worth solving. Post-launch, you're measuring how well you've solved them. Mix these up, and you'll end up with garbage data and a false sense of security.
This is where The Mom Test comes in (shoutout to Rob Fitzpatrick for writing the book that finally made this click). The core idea is simple:
Talk about their life instead of your idea.
Here are five questions that actually work:
- "Walk me through the last time you encountered this problem."
- "What solutions have you tried?"
- "How much time/money are you currently spending on this?"
- "What's the hardest part about [specific activity]?"
- "What else have you tried to make this better?"
Notice what's missing? Any mention of your solution. Because the moment you bring up your idea, people switch from sharing their reality to managing your feelings.
What you're listening for:
- Problems they've actively tried to solve (not just complained about)
- Money or time they're already spending
- Workarounds they've cobbled together
- Specific details about their last encounter with the problem
If they can't give you specifics, they probably don't care enough about the problem to pay for a solution.
Post-launch conversations are trickier because now you have something to defend. Your ego is involved. Your time and money are invested. But here's where you need to channel your inner Buddhist and detach from outcomes.
Five questions that get real feedback:
- "What's the main reason you [signed up/bought/started using] this?"
- "If this disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss most?"
- "What's still frustrating you?"
- "How does this fit into your daily/weekly routine?"
- "What made you almost not [buy/sign up/use] this?"
The gold is in the gaps between what you intended and how they're actually using it.
Here's where most people mess up: they do all the interviews, get great insights, create beautiful docs summarizing their findingsāand then promptly ignore all of it because it doesn't match their vision. Or they don't know what to do with it.
Create a simple framework for action:
- Must Have: Problems mentioned by >80% of interviews
- Should Have: Problems mentioned by >50% of interviews
- Nice to Have: Everything else
Then actually use it. Your roadmap should read like a greatest hits album of your customer interviews, not your product team's wish list. Or what that one guy said on the internet.
The truth about "talk to your customers" is that it's not really about talkingāit's about listening. And not the nodding-while-thinking-about-lunch kind of listening, but the kind where you're genuinely trying to understand someone's reality.
It's the difference between building something people might want and building something they're actually willing to pay for. Between having a good idea and having a good business.
So go forth and talk to your customers. But maybe love the truth more than your solution.
Because at the end of the day, your customers don't care about your idea. They care about their problems. And if you really listen, they'll tell you exactly how to help them-- and pay you for them š
Onward,
April