Hi there -
Here is this week’s “1 principle, 2 strategies, and 3 actionable tactics” for running lean…
1 Universal Principle
“Customer interviews beat surveys, landing pages, and building every time.”
Most founders get customer learning completely backwards.
When they want to understand what customers want, their first instinct is to create a survey, build a landing page, or start coding a product.
But these popular approaches often do more harm than good in the early stages.
After coaching founders for over a decade, I’ve found that carefully scripted one-on-one customer interviews consistently outperform every other learning method.
Here’s why everyone else has it wrong, and what actually works.
2 Underlying Strategies at Play
I. Discovery must come before validation.
Surveys and landing pages are validation tools—they help you test hypotheses you already have. Customer interviews are discovery tools—they help you generate new insights.
The problem? You need breakthrough insights before you can test them.
Surveys assume you know the right questions to ask, but true innovation comes from non-obvious insights. When you don’t know what you don’t know, surveys either confirm surface-level insights that were already obvious, or worse—they create false positives that send you down the wrong path.
Landing pages turn into expensive guessing games. You’re trying to solve a puzzle while blindfolded, split-testing variables without understanding why people aren’t converting.
II. Problems create space for innovation, not solutions.
Starting with a solution—no matter how small—is like building a key without knowing what door you’re trying to open.
In customer interviews, you can ask “why.” You can dig deeper. You can explore unexpected directions. When someone mentions using a competitor’s product, you can uncover the story behind their decision—and that’s where breakthrough insights hide.
The build-first approach might help you create products faster, but customers already have too many choices. Their patience for half-baked solutions is near zero. Unless you nail their top problems exactly right out of the gate, they won’t become helpful beta testers—they’ll just leave.
3 Actionable Tactics
I. Don’t target “early adopters” yet.
Your early adopter definition should be an OUTPUT of customer discovery, not an input.
When you start with your best guess of who your early adopters are, you risk falling into the local maximum trap. You might find validation in a narrow segment while missing the 99% mountain of opportunity elsewhere.
Instead, run customer discovery in two phases:
- Broad-match interviews: Cast a wider net to map the overall market
- Narrow-match interviews: Home in on your identified early adopter’s specific problems
II. Don’t target specific use cases yet.
Getting stuck in solution-context is dangerous. Consider the drill bit example: customers don’t want quarter-inch drill bits or even quarter-inch holes—they want what comes after the hole.
Focus on the bigger context by asking “why” questions before “how” questions. Features and benefits live in solution-context, but jobs and desired outcomes live in the bigger context where real innovation happens.
III. Don’t target active shoppers.
This seems counterintuitive, but active buyers make terrible interview subjects because they haven’t bought yet—and maybe never will. What they tell you is factual only up to their current point in the buyer journey. Everything else is hypothetical.
Instead, interview customers of the closest existing alternatives you’re competing with. Talk to people who recently spent time, effort, and money on these solutions.
Happy customers who’ve completed the journey can tell you what worked, what didn’t, and where they got stuck. This information helps you understand how to reach others earlier in their buyer journey.
10 good interviews beat 100 mediocre interviews every time.
The secret isn’t quantity—it’s knowing WHO to interview and WHAT to ask them.
That’s all for today. See you next week.
Ash
Author of Running Lean and creator of Lean Canvas
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P.S. This week's video:
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P.P.S.
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
1 - Shortcut your startup with my free Just Start email course
2 - Take my 30-day Business Model Design Challenge
