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.
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, they’re 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.
When I launched USERcycle in 2010, founders told me they wanted better analytics. They meant it. But the ones who actually switched weren’t the ones with the strongest opinion about metrics — they were the ones who had just launched, watched their conversion rate disappoint them, and gone looking for a fix. The behavior told a completely different story than the survey did.
That gap is the whole reason this playbook exists. 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.
The interviewer’s first rule. Never ask “would you use this?” People can’t predict their own behavior, and they’ll tell you what flatters you both. Ask “tell me about the last time you dealt with this” — and let the story do the talking.
Done right, talking to customers answers the only question that matters before you build: is this a problem real people already struggle with, badly enough to do something about it? This playbook walks the arc — who to talk to, what to ask, how to make sense of it, and how to turn a good conversation into a real commitment — and shows where LEANSpark takes the grunt work off your plate so you can stay on the listening.