Early in the process of figuring out my product, I conducted a series of customer interviews. I started the business to build a product I personally wanted, so I had a pretty good idea about how I would use it, but I really wanted to know whether my experience was common with anyone else.

To that end, I did some brainstorming on the types of people who would be at all likely to use my product (not necessarily just those I was aiming for to start with), and then went through my LinkedIn connections for colleagues who fit into those categories. From an initial list of close to 30 people, I narrowed it down to six people who gave me a very widely diverse group in terms of professional training, day-to-day responsibilities, and industry.

Next, I wrote down a set of questions I wanted to ask each person. The overall structure was to start by asking questions to see if the person felt the pain my product attempts to solve, proceed into questions which try to discover how they solve it today, and finally to find out how well they like that solution.

At this point, I stopped with my questions, and give the pitch for my product. At the time, I didn’t have a live demo or even mock-ups, but I definitely would have used them if I had them. I let the interviewee ask as many questions as they liked, and then proceeded to the next batch of questions:

• Does my product sound like something they could use?
• What would be the biggest obstacle to adopting it?
• What could I do to make adoption as easy as possible?
• How much would you expect to have to pay for this product?

The information I received from these interviews was highly informative, and while it didn’t change my core vision for my product, it definitely changed a lot of my thinking about the details, and how to get it to my customers.