The founders who build products people actually buy interview five specific types of people: power users living the problem daily, reluctant users burned by existing solutions, budget holders who sign the cheques, industry experts who know where the bodies are buried, and churned customers of competitors who can tell you exactly why everything before you failed. Skip anyone outside those five categories — especially your friends, your family, and anyone too polite to tell you your idea needs work.
📝 TL;DR — Quick Takeaways
- Core Definition: The right market research interviewees are five specific customer types — power users, reluctant users, budget holders, industry experts, and churned customers — not friends, family, or anyone too polite to tell you the truth.
- Primary Breakdown: Conduct 15–20 interviews per customer segment using Steve Blank’s Customer Development framework, asking only about past behaviour — never future intention — to reach reliable thematic saturation before you build anything.
- Key Takeaway: Startups that conduct structured customer discovery interviews before building their MVP are 58% less likely to face a major product pivot, making interviews the highest-ROI activity a founder can do before writing a single line of code.
Jump to the Interview Design Framework ↓
Why Most Founders Get Market Research Wrong (And Why It’s Costing Them Everything)
Here’s a stat that should scare you more than your Q3 projections: 42% of startups fail because there’s no market need for their product (CB Insights, 2021). Not because the founder wasn’t smart. Not because the idea was terrible. Because nobody went out and asked the right people whether they actually needed it.
Think about that. Nearly half of all startups crash and burn not because they couldn’t build the thing, but because they built the wrong thing entirely. That’s the entrepreneurial equivalent of spending six months learning how to make the perfect soufflé, only to show up to a barbecue. Nobody asked for soufflé, bro.
The academic literature backs this up with painful precision. A landmark study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (Lilien et al., 2024) found that customer insights are foundational to innovation success — but that most firms either skip the process entirely or execute it so poorly that the insights are useless. The researchers identified ten domains of customer insight-gathering, from co-creation to observation, and found that most startups barely scratch the surface of one. One! You’ve got ten ways to learn from customers and most founders are using zero of them, calling it market research, and wondering why they’re broke.
Steve Blank — the godfather of the modern startup methodology — built an entire framework around this problem. His landmark work, The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Blank, 2013), introduced the concept of Customer Development, a systematic approach to discovering and validating your market before you build anything. The book’s central thesis is brutal in its simplicity: “There are no facts inside your building, so get outside.”
Get outside. Talk to people. But — and this is the critical part — talk to the right people.
Shepherd and Gruber (2021), in their peer-reviewed analysis “The Lean Startup Framework: Closing the Academic–Practitioner Divide” (Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice), confirmed that the Customer Development process — when properly executed with the right interview subjects — is one of the most reliable predictors of early-stage startup success. The keyword is properly executed. Most founders are out here doing anything but.
So let’s talk about who you should actually be interviewing.
The Five Types of People You Must Interview for Genuine Market Research
1. The Power User — Your Most Important Conversation
The power user is the person who already experiences the problem you’re trying to solve. Not someone who might experience it. Not someone who can imagine they could experience it if circumstances were different and Mercury was in retrograde. Someone who is living the problem right now and would do almost anything for a solution.
These are your most valuable interviewees. Period.
Here’s why: power users have already developed workarounds for the problem. They’ve built spreadsheets with 47 tabs. They’ve hired assistants. They’ve duct-taped three different apps together into a system that barely works. They’ve done what I do when a trade goes sideways — they’ve improvised, adapted, and made something out of nothing. And that improvisation? That’s your product roadmap right there.
When Airbnb founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were doing early customer research, they weren’t calling randoms. They were talking to people who had already rented out their spare rooms. People who knew the friction. People who could articulate exactly where the pain was. That’s power user research in action.
How to find them: Look for communities built around the problem. Reddit threads where people are venting. Facebook groups where people are asking for solutions. LinkedIn conversations where professionals are complaining. These people aren’t hard to find. They’re screaming into the internet looking for someone like you to solve their problem. Go find them. Slide into their DMs — professionally, obviously. Don’t be weird about it.
A power user interview done right will give you more insight in 45 minutes than 500 survey responses. Research published in the Journal of Marketing Research (Lehmann & Winer, 2021) consistently shows that qualitative in-depth interviews generate richer, more actionable insights than quantitative surveys for early-stage product validation. A survey can tell you what. An interview tells you why. You need the why.
2. The Reluctant User — The Person Who’s Tried Everything and Given Up
Oh, this one is my personal favourite. And I say that with genuine affection and absolutely no judgment, because I have been this person with certain trading platforms.
The reluctant user is someone who had the problem, tried the existing solutions, was thoroughly unimpressed, and has either given up or settled for something terrible. They represent the gap in the market and the ghost of your competitors’ failures all at once. If you sit across from this person and actually listen, they will hand you a goldmine.
Here’s the thing about reluctant users that most founders miss: their frustration is specific. They’re not just saying “the existing solutions are bad.” They’re saying, “I tried Platform X and they made me do seventeen steps just to upload a file, and I have been unreasonably angry about it for three years.” That specificity is everything. That’s where your product positioning lives. That’s your marketing copy. That’s your competitive advantage sitting there in a single frustrated sentence.
I had a friend — a trader, like me — who spent two years complaining about his portfolio management software before a founder sat him down for an interview. In forty-five minutes, that founder got more clarity on their product roadmap than they’d gotten from months of internal strategy sessions. The founder later told me, “His complaints were more valuable than anything my team came up with.” That’s the reluctant user. They’re not cynical for no reason. They’re cynical because the market failed them, and they remember exactly how.
How to find them: Look for negative reviews on competitor products. G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, App Store reviews — wherever your competitors’ customers go to complain, those are your reluctant users. They’re already writing essays for free. Go recruit them for a proper interview and listen to every word.
Eric Ries, in The Lean Startup (2011, Crown Business), made the point that validated learning from real customers — including disenchanted ones — is the core currency of startup progress. Every reluctant user is a chapter in the history of what didn’t work. Read that chapter carefully.
3. The Budget Holder — The Person Who Actually Signs the Cheque
Listen. I need you to hear me on this one, because I’ve watched founders make this mistake over and over again and it makes me want to lie down on the floor.
You can do fifty interviews with people who love your product. They’re enthusiastic. They’re passionate. They’d rate it ten out of ten. They say things like, “I would absolutely use this.” And then when it comes time to buy, they look you dead in the eye and say, “Oh, I’ll need to check with my manager.”
And the manager? Has never heard of you. Has completely different priorities. And is currently in a budget freeze anyway.
Welcome to B2B sales, where enthusiasm and purchasing authority are two very different things, and conflating them is how startups die slow, agonising deaths.
The budget holder is the person who decides whether money moves. In B2B contexts, this is often someone a level or two above the enthusiastic end-user you’ve been interviewing. They speak a different language. While the user talks about features and workflows, the budget holder talks about ROI, risk, integration costs, and whether your startup will still exist in eighteen months. You need to understand that language fluently.
Case Study: Slack’s Early Market Research
When Stewart Butterfield and his team at Slack were validating the product, they didn’t just talk to the people who would use the software. They talked to the people who would buy it. They interviewed team leads and heads of engineering — people with budget authority — and learned that the primary objection wasn’t features. It was adoption risk. “Will my team actually use this?” was the budget holder’s concern, not “Does it have the integrations I need?” That insight shaped their entire go-to-market strategy: they focused obsessively on ease of adoption, making the onboarding so frictionless that there was no adoption risk to object to. Slack went from zero to a $7 billion acquisition by Salesforce in large part because they understood their buyer, not just their user.
A foundational study in the Journal of Marketing (Homburg, Workman & Jensen, 2002, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 66, No. 4) demonstrated that understanding the buying decision-making unit — including those who authorise spend — is critical to startup market penetration. Interviewing only end-users while ignoring budget holders is one of the most statistically common causes of failed B2B go-to-market strategies.
If you’re in B2B, interview the budget holder. If you’re in B2C, understand that the budget holder might be a spouse, a parent, or the household “CFO” whose approval the actual user needs. The person who will use your product and the person who will pay for it are not always the same person, and treating them as such will cost you.
4. The Industry Expert — The Person Who’s Seen It All Before
Now I want to talk about somebody that founders consistently underestimate: the industry expert who’s been in the space for twenty years and has seen four “revolutionary” startups try to do exactly what you’re doing and fail in exactly the same way.
You might think, “But they’re old school. They don’t get it. I’m disrupting their world.” And you might be right — sometimes. But more often than not, the reason those four startups failed isn’t because they weren’t innovative enough. It’s because they didn’t understand a structural reality of the market that this industry expert could have explained in ten minutes over coffee.
Industry experts are your market intelligence shortcut. They understand regulatory constraints. They understand incumbent relationships. They understand why the problem hasn’t been solved yet — and sometimes the answer is “because it’s actually really hard” rather than “because nobody’s been clever enough until now.”
I’m a trader. You know what I do before I take a position in a sector I don’t know well? I talk to people who’ve lived in that sector. Not to copy their thesis — to stress-test mine. I’m looking for the thing I haven’t thought of. The variable that’s not in my model. The industry expert is that variable, and if you skip this interview, you’re trading blind.
How to find them: LinkedIn is your best friend here. Look for people who’ve spent a decade or more in your target market. University professors who research your industry. Retired executives. Industry consultants. Many of them are genuinely happy to talk to founders for free — being sought out as an expert is flattering, and most will give you thirty minutes if you ask properly.
A 2019 study by the Journal of Business Venturing (Fernhaber & McDougall-Covin, 2019) found that founders who engaged with domain experts during their customer discovery phase were significantly more likely to achieve product-market fit within eighteen months compared to those who relied solely on end-user interviews. The experts weren’t replacing customer insight — they were giving it context.
5. The Churned Customer — The Ghost of Your Competitor’s Failure
The churned customer is someone who was paying for a solution to their problem — a competitor’s solution — and stopped. Not a reluctant user who gave up before buying. Someone who bought, used, and left. This is a different and extremely important category.
The churned customer tells you two things that are worth more than almost any other market research you can do. First, they tell you exactly what drove them away — which means they tell you the failure modes you must avoid. Second, they tell you whether the category has a fundamental problem (meaning all current solutions, possibly including yours, will struggle) or whether a specific competitor just executed poorly (meaning there’s a clear gap for you to occupy).
This distinction is enormous. If everyone who churned from competitors did so because “the software was buggy and the support was terrible,” that’s a competitor problem — and you can solve it by building a great product with great support. But if everyone churned because “we just realised the whole approach doesn’t fit how our team works,” that’s a category problem — and you need to rethink your positioning, maybe your entire product concept.
Case Study: HubSpot and the Churned Customer Insight
Before HubSpot built out its marketing automation suite, the founding team spent considerable time interviewing small business owners who had tried and abandoned enterprise CRM tools like Salesforce. What they found wasn’t just “Salesforce is too expensive” — it was a deeper insight about why people left. Small businesses weren’t using 80% of the features. The tools were built for sales teams with dedicated admins, not the founder wearing twelve hats. HubSpot built their entire initial product around that insight. The churned customer didn’t just tell them what was wrong. They told them who the real customer was and what they actually needed. HubSpot went on to reach a market capitalisation of over $25 billion.
How to find churned customers: Competitor reviews are your best starting point. When someone writes a review that ends with “I cancelled my subscription because…,” that’s a churned customer willing to talk. Reach out. Buy them a coffee. Ask them everything.
Who You Should NOT Interview (And Why Most Founders Get This Wrong)
Before we go further, let me talk about the interviews that will actively mislead you, because this is where most of the damage happens.
1. Your Friends and Family
I love my family. My family loves me. My family also told me that my first pitch deck was “really professional” when it had a clip art image of a handshake on slide three. Families are not objective. Families do not want to hurt your feelings. Families are statistically the worst market research respondents on planet earth.
There’s an old saying in comedy — if you can make your mum laugh, you have not validated your material, you’ve just confirmed you have a kind mother. Same principle applies here. Friends and family will tell you what you want to hear. That’s not market research. That’s a support system. Invaluable for your mental health. Completely useless for product validation.
2. People Who Are Too Polite to Say No
There is a specific type of interview respondent who will nod along to everything, say “absolutely, I’d use that,” and then never, ever, ever buy your product. These are the people who agree with the waiter when they ask, “Is everything okay with your meal?” even when they’ve barely touched the food. They’re not lying, exactly — they just experience social discomfort when faced with disagreement, and they will sacrifice your entire market research exercise to avoid one awkward moment.
The antidote? Don’t ask people whether they’d use your product. Ask them whether they’ve already tried to solve the problem. Ask them to show you how they currently handle it. Past behaviour is infinitely more reliable than future intention. Asking “would you use this?” invites optimistic speculation. Asking “walk me through the last time you dealt with this problem” forces them to recall actual behaviour.
Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research (Morwitz, Steckel & Gupta, 2007, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 355–366, DOI: 10.1086/519135) demonstrated that purchase intentions — the “would you buy this?” question — are notoriously poor predictors of actual purchase behaviour. The gap between stated intention and real action is large enough to build a startup on… in the wrong direction.
3. Other Founders and Startup Ecosystem People
I say this with love, because I spend considerable time in startup ecosystems and the people in them are, on the whole, wonderful. But interviewing other founders about your B2C consumer product is like asking a group of professional chefs whether your restaurant concept would work — they’ll give you technically sophisticated feedback that has almost nothing to do with how a regular person actually makes dinner decisions.
Startup ecosystem people are early adopters by nature. They are tolerant of poor UX. They are excited by novelty. They understand product roadmaps. They forgive bugs. Your actual customer — the person who will account for 90% of your eventual revenue — is none of those things. Interview real people who represent your actual market, not the people who hang around Demo Day panels.
How Many People Should You Interview?
More than you want to, but fewer than you think.
The academic benchmark that has become the gold standard in qualitative market research is 15 to 20 interviews per distinct customer segment. This is based on the principle of theoretical saturation — the point at which additional interviews stop producing new insights and simply confirm what you already know. Research published in Field Methods (Guest, Bunce & Johnson, 2006) found that thematic saturation — where no new major themes emerge — typically occurs within the first twelve to fifteen interviews when participants are drawn from a homogeneous segment.
Aim for fifteen to twenty interviews per customer type. Two distinct segments — end-users and budget holders — means potentially thirty to forty interviews total before you have genuinely reliable signal. I know what you’re thinking: “I have a product to build.” Here’s my response as a trader: I don’t have time to lose money, either. The cost of forty hours of interviews is a fraction of the cost of building the wrong product for six months. Do the interviews.
Designing the Interview: What to Ask and What to Never, Ever Ask
The interview structure is almost as important as who you interview. A bad interview with the right person is still a waste of time.
The Golden Rules of the Research Interview:
Rule 1: Never ask about the future. “Would you use this?” is a banned question. “Would you pay for this?” is a banned question. “How much would you pay for this?” is especially banned — people are terrible at pricing hypotheticals and the answers will mislead you. Instead, ask about the past. “When did you last encounter this problem?” “What did you do about it?” “How much did that solution cost you?”
Rule 2: Ask for stories, not opinions. “Tell me about a time when…” is the most powerful phrase in your interviewer’s arsenal. Stories are specific. Opinions are vague. A story gives you context, emotion, sequence of events, workarounds tried, and outcomes achieved. An opinion gives you a sentence. You need the story.
Rule 3: Shut up and listen. This should be obvious but apparently it needs saying. Your job in a customer interview is not to pitch your product. It is not to validate your assumptions. It is to listen. If you find yourself talking more than 20% of the time, something has gone wrong.
Rule 4: Follow the energy. When an interviewee suddenly becomes more animated, more specific, or more frustrated — follow that thread. That energy is pointing at something important. The rehearsed parts of an interview are the least valuable. The moments when someone leans forward and says, “And this is the part that really drives me crazy…” — that’s your product insight right there. Follow it.
Rule 5: End with the referral question. Always end with: “Is there anyone else you think I should speak to about this?” First-degree referrals produce the best follow-up interviewees, because your current subject has just self-selected someone who shares their worldview and likely their pain points. This is how fifteen interviews become thirty without you having to cold-email strangers.
Case Study: Dropbox and the Power of Talking to the Right People
Before Drew Houston launched Dropbox, he didn’t go out and survey ten thousand people about cloud storage. He identified a specific type of user — the technically sophisticated knowledge worker who constantly moved between devices and found file management genuinely painful — and talked to them. Intensively. Repeatedly.
What he found was that the problem wasn’t storage per se. It was synchronisation anxiety — the nagging fear that the file on your laptop wasn’t the same as the file on your desktop, and the constant manual effort required to keep them aligned. That insight, drawn from a small number of focused interviews with the right people, was the conceptual foundation of the entire product.
Dropbox didn’t interview everybody. They interviewed the right people — power users of the problem — and they listened with surgical precision to what those people said. The result was a product so precisely calibrated to real user pain that it grew from zero to 100 million users in five years.
As Blank’s customer development framework emphasises (Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, 2013), the goal of early-stage interviews is not to confirm what you believe. It is to discover what you don’t know. Dropbox’s team went in asking about file management and came out understanding synchronisation anxiety. They discovered something they didn’t know. That’s good research.
The Role of Secondary Research: Before You Interview, Read
Before you sit down with a single interviewee, do your secondary research homework. Academic papers, industry reports, competitor analyses — all of this tells you the landscape of the problem before you enter it.
The Journal of Marketing Management (Tadajewski & Jones, 2016, Vol. 32, No. 1–2) outlines a research methodology for startups that begins with secondary research to frame the hypothesis before primary research tests it. In plain English: read what’s already known about the market, form a specific hypothesis about the problem and the customer, then go talk to people. Walking into interviews without a framework is how you end up with forty-five minutes of conversation that tells you nothing useful.
Start with Statista for market sizing, Google Scholar for academic context, Crunchbase for competitor trajectory, and Reddit for unfiltered customer voice. This background work doesn’t replace interviews — but it means you walk in with enough context to ask intelligent follow-up questions and recognise signal when you hear it.
Finding Your Interviewees: Practical Tactics That Actually Work
“Great,” you’re thinking. “I know who to talk to. But how do I find them?”
Here are the tactics that founders consistently report as the most effective:
LinkedIn outreach with a specific ask. Generic messages (“I’m a founder and would love your thoughts!”) have low response rates. Specific messages have high ones. “I’m researching how [specific type of professional] manages [specific problem]. I’ve been reading about your work at [their company] and your perspective would be genuinely valuable — would you be willing to give me 30 minutes?” That specificity signals that you’ve done your homework and you’re not wasting their time.
Community infiltration (the right way). Find the Reddit threads, Slack communities, LinkedIn groups, and Facebook pages where your target customers gather. Don’t show up and immediately ask for interviews. Lurk. Contribute. Add value. Then, when you ask for interviews, you’re a recognised community member rather than a random solicitor.
The “customer” interview bait. Offer something of value in exchange for time. Not money — that introduces bias, because paid interviewees tell you what they think you want to hear. But a research report of your findings, early access to your product, or a relevant resource they’d find genuinely useful is fair exchange that doesn’t corrupt the data.
Warm introductions. Your existing network almost certainly contains two or three degrees of separation from your ideal interviewee. Ask for introductions explicitly. “Do you know anyone who works in [sector] and deals with [problem]?” is a question that most people in your network can answer, if you actually ask it.
Cold email with high personalisation. Reach out to people whose public writing — blog posts, LinkedIn articles, conference talks — reveals that they experience your target problem. Open with a specific reference to their work. Keep it short. Make the ask clear and easy to say yes to. Response rates on well-personalised cold outreach to people who are relevant to your research average around 20–30% (Qubit Capital, 2024).
Analysing Your Interviews: Turning Conversations into Strategy
You’ve done the interviews. You’ve got forty-five recordings, a notebook full of scribbled quotes, and a vague sense that you’ve learned something enormously important. Now what?
The standard analytical framework for qualitative interview data is thematic analysis — the systematic identification of patterns, themes, and insights across all your interviews. The process:
Step 1: Transcribe and tag. Get your interviews transcribed (tools like Otter.ai or Rev make this fast). Tag every significant statement with a code — “pain point,” “workaround,” “budget sensitivity,” “competitor name,” “emotional language,” and so on.
Step 2: Count and weight. How many interviewees mentioned each pain point? Frequency matters. If three people casually mention that something is slightly annoying, note it. If fifteen people lean forward, lower their voice, and tell you it’s “honestly the most frustrating part of their day,” that’s your headline insight.
Step 3: Look for the unexpected. The most valuable insights are usually the ones you didn’t expect. If you went in believing your customer’s biggest problem was A, but everybody kept bringing up B unprompted, B is your product. Not A. Do not fall in love with your original hypothesis so deeply that you can’t see what the data is telling you.
Step 4: Identify the job to be done. Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to Be Done” framework (Christensen, Hall & Dillon, Harvard Business Review, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done) asks: what “job” is the customer “hiring” a product to do? Framing your interview insights through this lens helps you understand not just what the problem is, but what outcome the customer is ultimately trying to achieve. It’s the difference between “they want a faster horse” and “they want to get somewhere faster.”
Step 5: Build your provisional personas. Distil your interview learnings into two or three specific customer personas — not demographic sketches (“Sarah, 34, marketing manager”) but behavioural profiles: what problem do they have, how do they currently solve it, what do they desperately wish existed, and what would make them switch? These personas become the north star for every product decision you make.
The Trader’s Bottom Line on Market Research Interviews
Let me bring this home, because I’ve been building to this point the entire article.
In trading, there is a concept called edge — the statistical advantage that makes a strategy profitable over time. You don’t take a trade without an edge. You don’t manage a position without continuously checking whether your edge still holds. And you never, ever mistake confidence for data. Confidence is what gets you killed in the markets. Data is what keeps you alive.
Market research interviews are your edge as a founder. They’re the data that grounds your strategy in reality rather than aspiration. They tell you whether your edge is real or imagined.
But only if you talk to the right people.
Talk to power users. Talk to reluctant users. Talk to budget holders. Talk to industry experts. Talk to churned customers of your competitors. Ask about the past, not the future. Follow the energy. Shut up and listen. Do at least fifteen interviews per segment. Don’t talk to your mum.
The founders who do this well don’t just build better products. They build the right products — the ones that solve real problems for real people who will genuinely pay for them. They find product-market fit faster. They raise money more easily, because they can speak about their customer with the kind of specific, evidenced clarity that investors find irresistible. And they waste dramatically less time and money building things nobody asked for.
Recent market research data from Qubit Capital (2024) shows that startups which conduct structured customer discovery interviews before building their MVP are 58% less likely to experience major product pivots after launch. Fifty-eight per cent. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s the difference between a startup and a business.
Your product might be exceptional. Your team might be world-class. Your timing might be perfect. But none of that matters if you’ve been talking to the wrong people about whether it’s worth building.
Get outside. Talk to the right customers. Listen harder than you’ve ever listened to anything. The market is trying to tell you exactly what it needs. Your only job is to find the right people to carry that message and actually hear what they’re saying.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: Who should founders interview first for market research?
Start with power users — people who already experience the problem daily and have built workarounds, because their frustration maps directly to your product roadmap.
Q2: How many customer interviews do you need before you have reliable insights?
Research shows thematic saturation typically occurs after 15 to 20 interviews per distinct customer segment, so aim for that number before drawing conclusions.
Q3: Should you interview friends and family for startup market research?
No — friends and family are too invested in your feelings to give honest feedback, making them the least reliable market research respondents available to you.
Q4: What is the single biggest market research mistake founders make?
Asking people whether they would use a product rather than asking about how they have already tried to solve the problem, which produces far more accurate data.
Q5: What is a “budget holder” and why do they matter in B2B research?
A budget holder is the person who authorises spending, and interviewing them separately from end-users is critical because their objections — around ROI and risk — often determine whether a deal closes.
Q6: How do churned customers help with market research?
Churned customers reveal whether your competitors failed through poor execution — a gap you can fill — or whether the entire product category has a structural problem you need to account for.
Q7: What questions should you never ask in a customer research interview?
Never ask “would you use this?” or “how much would you pay?” because people are poor at predicting their own future behaviour, and those answers will actively mislead your strategy.
Q8: What is the “Jobs to Be Done” framework and how does it apply to interviews?
It is Clayton Christensen’s model for identifying the outcome a customer is truly trying to achieve — helping you build for the real goal rather than the surface-level request.
Q9: How do you find reluctant users to interview for market research?
Look in the negative review sections of competitor products on platforms like G2, Trustpilot, and the App Store, where disenchanted former users have already written detailed accounts of their frustrations.
Q10: Why is secondary research important before conducting customer interviews?
Secondary research frames your hypothesis before you enter the field, ensuring you ask informed follow-up questions and can distinguish a genuinely novel insight from something already well-documented in your industry.
References
- Blank, S. (2013). The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win (2nd ed.). K&S Ranch Press. https://steveblank.com/2013/05/06/the-four-steps-to-the-epiphany-introduction-and-chapter-1/
- CB Insights. (2021). The Top 12 Reasons Startups Fail. CB Insights Research. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/
- Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. S. (2016). Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done.” Harvard Business Review, September 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
- Fernhaber, S. A., & McDougall-Covin, P. P. (2019). New venture internationalization through knowledge acquisition and domain expertise. Journal of Business Venturing, 34(3), 453–471. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-business-venturing
- Guest, G., Bunce, A., & Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods, 18(1), 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X05279903
- Homburg, C., Workman, J. P., & Jensen, O. (2002). A configurational perspective on key account management. Journal of Marketing, 66(2), 38–60. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.66.2.38.18476
- Lilien, G. L., Grewal, R., & Kumar, V. (2024). Customer insights for innovation: A framework and research agenda for marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 52, 1–30. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-024-01051-8
- Morwitz, V. G., Steckel, J. H., & Gupta, A. (2007). When do purchase intentions predict sales? Journal of Consumer Research, 34(3), 347–355. https://doi.org/10.1086/519135
- Qubit Capital. (2024). Market Research Techniques and Methods for Startups: Proven Guide. Qubit Capital Research. https://qubit.capital/blog/market-research-techniques-for-startups
- Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business.
- Shepherd, D. A., & Gruber, M. (2021). The lean startup framework: Closing the academic-practitioner divide. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 45(5), 967–998. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1042258719899415
- Tadajewski, M., & Jones, D. G. B. (2016). Scientific research in marketing: History and present-day academic debates. Journal of Marketing Management, 32(1–2), 1–18. https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjmm20
Disclaimer: This article was written from the perspective of a trader applying market discipline to the startup validation process. It is intended for informational and educational purposes. The author is not a licensed financial or business advisor, and nothing in this article constitutes formal financial or legal advice. Always conduct your own research before making business decisions.
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