Why this matters
Most startups die building something nobody urgently wants. Ten focused conversations cost you a week and can save you a year. The goal is not to hear "nice idea." It is to find out whether the problem is frequent, painful, and already being paid for in time or money.
What "done" looks like
- 10 conversations with people who match your target persona
- Notes for each: how often the problem occurs, what it costs them, what they do today
- At least a rough pattern: the same pain described in similar words by multiple people
- A written decision: pain confirmed, pain weak, or wrong audience
How to do it
- Recruit from where the pain lives: communities, LinkedIn, your network's network. Use modest incentives when needed, but do not tie them to positive feedback.
- Ask about the past, not the future. "Tell me about the last time X happened" beats "would you use…" every time.
- Dig for the workaround. Spreadsheets, interns, duct tape: an existing workaround is proof the pain is real.
- Ask what it costs. Hours per week, deals lost, fines paid. Look for evidence of meaningful consequences or motivation, even when the cost is hard to quantify.
- Write notes immediately and tag each interview: strong pain / mild pain / no pain.
Common mistakes
- Pitching your solution and counting polite nods as validation
- Interviewing friends who want to encourage you
- Stopping at 3 conversations because the first ones were enthusiastic
Real-world examples
- Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test is the standard playbook here: the whole point of talking to prospects is to confirm the problem is real by asking about their actual past behavior, not to pitch your idea and fish for compliments, which produces false confidence.
- Y Combinator's most-repeated advice to early founders is "talk to users." The two things that matter at the start are writing code and talking to the people who have the problem. Stripe's founders famously took this to the extreme, setting up early users on the spot rather than emailing a link later.
- Pair these conversations with structured sessions like interview 10 potential customers and run 5 solution interviews so you separate "is this problem real?" from "is my solution right?".
From a founder's point of view
The hardest part of this step is resisting the urge to sell. Ten honest conversations about how someone already handles the problem will teach you more than a hundred people politely saying your idea sounds great. If nobody has tried to solve this for themselves, no workaround, no spreadsheet, no money spent, that silence is data, and it's cheaper to hear it now than after you've built the thing.
Rule of thumb
Treat ten interviews as an initial signal, not a fixed validation threshold. Look for repeated, specific evidence in people's past behavior that the pain is real. If you do not find it, keep searching because you may not have found the burning pain yet.
