7 Keys to Insightful User Interviews

What’s more important for a founder than understanding your users?

Nothing.

Without it, you won’t be able to solve their problems or win the market. But a lot of founders don’t actually know how to talk to users.

• How do you get them to open up to and be honest with you in conversation?

• How can you determine what their most painful problems are?

I learned the ins and outs of running actually insightful user interviews when I was building products at Uber and Airbnb.

Then when I started Launch House, I did over 100 interviews in 3 weeks to deeply understand what our ICP was looking for. A year later we’d gone from $0 to a $12 million Series A.

So this week I’m sharing:

• What nailing user interviews is critical

• 8 keys to running a helpful interview

• Where most founders go wrong

• How I do my user interviews for Megaphone

Why User Interviews Are So Important

Shipping product is useless if you don’t get feedback about what to ship from your users.

The more you know about them and how they perceive your product, the better you can solve their needs.

Here’s a good example from my time at Uber.

In late 2018 I joined our research team on a trip to London. We wanted to figure out how European eaters perceived our pricing vs. competitors like Deliveroo.

We already knew that our delivery fees were lower, but Deliveroo was growing quickly despite this.

When we talked to users we showed them how we had one simple delivery fee, while Deliveroo broke their fee up into multiple components. Each component was less than our delivery fee, but in total it was more expensive on average.

The interviewees got upset. They (correctly) felt like Deliveroo was intentionally tricking them by being less transparent.

However, despite being aware of and upset about this, they still said they’d be more likely to convert on the Deliveroo checkout page.

The insight that this type of drip pricing worked even when users were aware it was more expensive was depressing! But getting the insight let us innovate in other ways, and we wouldn’t’ve gotten it without a robust set of user interviews.

Now, I’m always doing user interviews. I keep constant contact with Megaphone users, and set up individual shared Slack channels with each of our first 50 paying users last summer.

For this newsletter, I talking to members every week during office hours and with 1:1 intro chats. I prioritize 3 questions there:

1. What’s the most valuable topic I could write a newsletter issue about?

2. Where are you getting the most value from the membership and what’s missing?

3. How did you find the membership? What made you subscribe?

7 Keys to a Good User Interview

User interviews (should) take up a lot of your time, and you should be hyper-aware during each one by paying attention to not only what your interviewees say but also their intonation and body language.

Here’s how to make sure you’re getting the most of the time:

Make Them Like You

Make them truly believe that your mission in life is to solve their problem.

If you’re building something you’re passionate about this shouldn’t be an issue because it should genuinely be true. If you find yourself struggling with this then you either need to open up a bit more yourself in these conversations, or perhaps there are issues with your excitement about the product too.

Once they believe this, it completely breaks the ice and makes them like you more. At the very least it makes them want to spill their guts and explain all of their problems so that you solve them.

Interviewees are a mirror for yourself. If you’re open and authentic, they will be too. If you’re stiff and cold, they won’t trust you.

Be Nimble

If you’re doing a user interview at a big company there’s a level of certainty around what you’re building, or at least the broader problem space you’re building in.

Founders don’t have that. Nothing is set in stone.

So be nimble based on the feedback you get. Don’t be married to your vision for the product, or the structure of the interview. Your goal is to make something people want and will pay for. Sometimes that isn’t what you initially envisioned, and sometimes the insights you get from an interview won’t be what you expected.

It’s up to you to strike a balance between sticking to the questions you prepared for the interview ahead of time vs letting the conversation organically go down rabbit holes.

I recommend following the rabbit holes until they stop offering unique value. Often the best insights that remain relevant for a startup the longest come from those moments of spontaneous candor where the interviewee is driving the conversation.

Use Open-Ended Questions

This is interviewing 101: don’t frame the question in a way that implies a specific answer. All that will get you is biased data.

Instead, ask open-ended questions. Many founders struggle with this because the questions may seem vague at first.

Here’s what I mean:

• “Did you download our app to [solve x problem]?” instead becomes “Why did you download our app?”

• “Would you say that our product has made you more productive?” instead becomes “How has our product impacted your productivity?”

• “Does the fact that we’re cheaper than competitors make you choose our service?” instead becomes “How do you feel about our pricing?”

By starting with an open-ended framing, you can learn more about who you’re talking to and drill down on their specific perspective, rather than trying to overgeneralize their opinions. Just be sure to keep the conversation focused if these lead to rambling answers.

Asking users to tell stories is another great way to do this:

Pay Attention to Body Language

How an interviewee answers a question is just as important as what they say, arguably it tells you more.

Be prepared to go off script and dig deeper when you spot an opportunity to. You’re there to learn about the user, not to check off questions like a to-do list:

Let Them Speak

This is where founders go wrong most often.

We get it, you want to explain how your product is going to solve all their problems and change their life.

Do NOT do this in (or before) the interview.

Talk as little as possible. Let there be awkward pauses. Don’t jump to the next question when they stop talking. Give them a few seconds after they’re done talking to make sure their thought is complete.

You’d be surprised how many times someone stops talking then adds something a few seconds later after thinking. Most of the time, these additional thoughts are way more insightful than what they just said. So, be comfortable with awkward pauses. Let the silence linger 2 seconds longer than you think it should.

The only time you should cut them off is if they’re going off the rails. Other than that, stay neutral.

Iterate Between Interviews

Don’t just ask the same questions in each interview. You might think that getting more datapoints on these questions you came up with is inherently a good thing, but what’s better is working to get some level of conviction quickly and updating your questions accordingly for the next interview.

It’s a fine line, you shouldn’t assume that one datapoint means something is universally true, but you also need to learn as much as possible.

Fine tune your internal level of conviction needed to move on from a question by getting a sense of how generalizable the datapoints you’re receiving are.

If someone tells you they’re willing to only pay $10/mo for your product when you wanted $100/mo, but you think based on their other answers that they represent only a small subset of your potential userbase, consider asking about pricing to more people.

Don’t Stop Interviewing

You should still be doing user interviews even if you’ve had success. Sam Altman says that until you’ve created a product that users share organically with other people, you should be focusing on figuring out what users want.

Reserve a certain amount of time each week to talk with 3 groups of people: current users, prospective users, and churned users (if possible).