📘 User Interviews: Entrepreneurship

What you’ll learn

1. Why User Interviews Exist: Reducing Founder RiskExplain why user interviews are a primary tool for reducing market risk in early-stage ventures and where they sit within customer development.User interviews exist to attack the single most dangerous startup failure mode: building something nobody wants. Steve Blank's customer development model frames the founder's first job as customer discovery, conducted by leaving the building to gather evidence rather than reasoning from inside. Eric Ries reframes this as validated learning, where the unit of progress is verified knowledge about real user behavior. This lesson establishes interviews as a method for testing assumptions, not for collecting praise.
2. The Mom Test: Asking Questions That Survive BiasApply Rob Fitzpatrick's Mom Test rules to convert opinion-seeking questions into evidence-seeking questions about real behavior.Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test provides three rules that make interviews resistant to the social bias that leads people to tell founders what they want to hear: talk about the interviewee's life instead of your idea, ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or hypotheticals about the future, and talk less while listening more. Compliments, generic claims, and hypothetical promises are identified as the three most dangerous forms of 'bad data.' The discipline is to keep the conversation anchored in real, recent, concrete behavior. Mastering this turns interviews from ego-soothing into truth-finding.
3. Designing the Interview: Guides, Recruiting, and LogisticsConstruct a flexible interview guide, recruit appropriate participants, and set up the session to elicit honest, in-depth responses.A strong interview begins long before the conversation, with a clear learning goal, a screened participant who matches the target segment, and a flexible (semi-structured) guide rather than a rigid script. Michael Quinn Patton emphasizes that flexibility in using the interview guide is a central feature of qualitative inquiry, allowing the interviewer to follow unexpected threads. Open-ended, non-leading question design and a comfortable, low-pressure setup are what make honest answers possible. This lesson covers the preparation that determines whether the interview produces signal or noise.
4. Conducting the Interview: Probing, Listening, and Avoiding TrapsUse live interviewing techniques, especially silence, probing, and story elicitation, while avoiding pitching, leading, and confirmation bias.In the moment, the interviewer's job is to talk less, listen more, and follow concrete stories with neutral probes. Teresa Torres advocates story-based interviewing, asking customers to recount a specific recent experience rather than describe generic behavior, because situating someone in a remembered scene unlocks far more accurate detail. Disciplined use of silence and the '5 Whys' style of laddering uncovers underlying motivation, while the interviewer must actively resist the urge to pitch, lead, or hear only confirming evidence. This lesson is the live execution layer that turns a good guide into good data.
5. Specialized Techniques: Jobs to Be Done and the Switch InterviewUse the Jobs to Be Done lens and the Switch interview to reconstruct why customers change solutions and what progress they seek.Jobs to Be Done, associated with Clayton Christensen, reframes customers as 'hiring' products to make progress in a particular circumstance, illustrated by the famous milkshake study where commuters hired a milkshake for a boring drive. Bob Moesta's Switch interview is a timeline-based technique that reconstructs the exact moment a customer switched from an old solution to a new one, surfacing the Four Forces of Progress: push, pull, anxiety, and habit. These tools give the interviewer a powerful structure for understanding causation and demand. They turn 'what do you want?' into 'what were you trying to accomplish, and what made you finally change?'
6. Synthesis and Your Mini Artifact: From Interviews to InsightSynthesize interview notes into themes and decisions, and build a mini artifact applying user interviews to a real problem you investigate.Raw interviews become useful only after synthesis: capturing verbatim notes, coding them into recurring themes, and judging whether you have reached saturation, the point where new interviews stop revealing new insights. This final lesson guides you to build a mini artifact: a small but complete interview project, from a guide and at least five interviews to a coded findings summary and an explicit decision. The artifact is assessed on interview craft and honest synthesis, not on whether the idea was validated. You will leave with a portable, repeatable practice for de-risking any future venture idea.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Steve Blank, Customer Development, https://steveblank.com/
• Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test concepts, https://www.momtestbook.com/
• Tony Ulwick / JTBD resources, https://jobs-to-be-done.com/
• NN/g, User Interviews, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-interviews/

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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