Your first interviews will be experimental. During these, you’ll develop your interview format and refine your questions.
After the interviews, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- How does the user currently solve the problem?
- If a product that could solve the respondent’s problem existed, would they spend money on it?
- Does your solution fit into the respondent’s lifestyle? Will they use it?
If you don’t have answers to these questions, try modifying your questions.
After 4-5 interviews, you’ll start to see if the problem truly exists. If no one gets excited about your idea, the problem might not be significant, or you might have the wrong target audience.
In this case, try shifting to a different audience segment. If this still doesn’t validate your hypothesis, congratulations! You’ve gained valuable insights with minimal risk. What's next? Move on to testing the next hypothesis!
After 10 interviews, you’ll notice similar behavior patterns. You’ll start to understand in what situations your target audience encounters the problem and why it happens.
There’s no exact number of interviews you need to conduct. When you stop hearing new information and start forming a clear idea of what to include in your MVP, you can wrap up CustDev.