How to Talk to Customers
Getting the truth — not compliments — from the people you're building for
Continue:Read it online chapter by chapter, or grab the PDF below. The Lean Canvas stays free forever in LEANSpark; the Business Model Design course comes with Starter.
The fastest way to build something nobody wants is to ask people if they’d want it. They’ll say yes — they’re being polite, imagining a better version of themselves, and they have no idea what they’ll actually do until the moment arrives. Opinions are free, and they’re worth exactly that.
A customer interview isn’t a survey, a focus group, or a sales call. It’s a structured way to get past what people say and into what they actually did — because past behavior is the only honest predictor of future behavior.
This playbook walks the whole arc: who to talk to (recent switchers, not opinions), what to ask (the three-act interview, the four forces, and the switching trigger), how to make sense of it (one Customer Forces Story per conversation, then the pattern across them), and how to turn a good conversation into a real commitment — the only signal that costs something.
At each step you get a short thing to type into LEANSpark and a full prompt you can hand to any AI assistant, so the grunt work — transcription, synthesis, structure — comes off your plate and your scarce energy goes into the listening and the judgment.
The chapters
- 01 Why you can't trust what customers say What people say and what they do are different things. The interview is how you get past the say to the do.
- 02 Who to talk to A precise target beats a long list. You're hunting recent switchers, not opinions.
- 03 What to ask Mine the last time it happened. Map the forces. Don't pitch, don't lead, don't hypothesize.
- 04 Making sense of what you heard One messy conversation becomes one Customer Forces Story — and the pattern emerges across them.
- 05 From conversation to commitment A 'yes' isn't evidence until someone gives something up for it.
- 06 Love the problem The founders who win don't fall in love with their solution. They fall in love with the problem.
- 07 Resources Run your discovery on LEANSpark. Go deeper on the method.
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