Product Validation #1 - Customer Interviews

Validate a product before you build it. That advice is easy to nod along to and easy to skip — right up until you've spent six months and a funding round on something nobody wanted.

So what exactly is product validation, and how do you actually do it?

What product validation actually means

Product validation means checking whether your idea can become a real business: whether it solves a problem customers genuinely have, and care about enough to pay to fix. Find a real problem people will pay to solve and you're on the road to product-market fit.

Getting it right saves time, money and effort. More importantly, it spares you the particular pain of shipping something nobody values.

How do you validate a product idea?

There are plenty of techniques, and they differ in effort, in how strong a signal they give, and in the quality of what you learn. None of them is conclusive on its own, so startup discovery works best as a combination of several rather than a bet on one.

Technique #1: customer interviews

The first and most fundamental piece of user research is the customer interview. It's simple to describe and hard to do well. You find a handful of potential customers, reach out, and talk to them — to learn whether your idea solves a problem for them, and whether the problem exists at all.

Here's the catch. People want to be nice. They avoid confrontation, especially with someone who is visibly excited about their own idea. So they'll tell you it's great and that they'd absolutely pay for it once it's ready.

Until they actually pay you, none of that is real. Stated intent is about as reliable as a pre-election poll.

How to get honest signal out of an interview

Four things that separate a useful interview from a pleasant one:

1. Watch for the moment they light up. Energy is a better signal than agreement. If naming the problem doesn't change their face, it isn't their problem.
2. Ask what their biggest pain actually is — not whether yours is painful. If the answer isn't the one you built your plan around, that's not a failed interview. That's the interview doing its job, and it may be telling you to pivot.
3. Ask how they solve it today. Everyone has a workaround, even if it's a spreadsheet. If they name competitors, dig into what those competitors get right and where they fall short.
4. Ask them to pay, right now, and watch what happens. Then tell them it isn't available yet and that you wanted to gauge how serious they were. The pause before they answer tells you more than the answer.

This is a starting point, not a complete method — and interviews alone won't validate anything. They pair with smoke tests, surveys and behavioural data, which is where the rest of this series goes.

What it looks like in practice: on one fintech engagement, 20 interviews across three user segments surfaced a comprehension problem the analytics could see but not explain — and fixing it lifted same-day conversion 23%. If you'd like a hand running that kind of research on your own product, let's talk.