Lecture 16 - How to Run a User Interview (Emmett Shear)

Key Takeaways

• Don't build for yourself exclusively: While being your own user can work in niche cases, most successful startups need to talk to actual users because the founder is rarely representative of a broad market, as learned from Kiko Calendar's failure to engage with calendar users 1:45.
• Identify the right users to interview: The most critical step is determining who you are truly building for, which often includes not just end-users but also decision-makers or purchasers (e.g., college IT for a student app), as well as competitors' users and non-users to understand the full market landscape 5:09.
• Focus on problems and current behavior, not features: When conducting interviews, avoid asking users what features they want or showing them your product, as this often leads to requests for "faster horses" (incremental features) instead of revealing the underlying core problems that a truly innovative solution could address 17:13.
• Interview different user groups for diverse insights: Twitch's success stemmed from talking to current Justin.TV broadcasters (who often asked for minor feature fixes), competitor broadcasters (who highlighted major pain points like revenue share and video stability), and non-broadcasters (who revealed fundamental barriers to entry, like technical difficulty or strategy concerns) 28:22.
• Validate ideas beyond interviews: While interviews uncover problems, validating a proposed solution requires more than just asking if a feature is good; ideally, build a minimal, hacky version of the feature (e.g., a browser extension) and observe actual usage, or use the "money test" by getting people to commit to paying for it 24:01.
• Record interviews for internal alignment: To get buy-in from your team, record user interviews (with consent) and play them back, as direct exposure to user feedback is more powerful than summarized findings and helps the team understand the "why" behind product decisions 37:00.
• Prioritize interactive interviews: Conduct interviews in person or via video calls (like Skype) to allow for real-time probing with "tell me more" questions, which uncovers unexpected insights; email interviews are largely ineffective due to their non-interactive nature 37:47.
• Focus on competitor users for early wins: When resources are limited, prioritize interviewing users of competing products first, as they are already engaged in the desired behavior, and convincing them to switch is often easier than creating entirely new behavior among non-users 42:12.