Entrepreneurship and Interviewing Customers

Suppose you have a business idea. Great. People will definitely buy or use the product, right? Wrong.

Business ideas come with certain assumptions about the customers, particularly about their problems. If these assumptions are not validated, a business will never know whether its product solves a customer’s problem or not. If yes, great, the product may have a value for the customer. If not, bad. The customer will not buy it.

The previous week in the Startup Studio at Cornell Tech was about teaching us how to deal with our assumptions about our customers. How? By talking to the customers. Listening to them. Finding out what their real problems are.

So here we are interviewing people, learning about customers. Figuring out the rights questions to ask .Talking to strangers. Listening to what the customers say. Finding out a pattern. Processing the information. Revisiting our assumptions. Doing more research.

So far, the experience has been challenging and humbling at the same time. Challenging, because talking to customers is not easy. Humbling, because there is so much to learn from those people. In any case, this is what we must do as an entrepreneur.