Know what your customers actually need before you build it.
Nine real conversations beat a hundred survey responses. We run the interviews, write up what people said, and tell you plainly whether the idea holds. Sometimes the answer changes the plan. That's the point.
Three situations where this pays for itself
You have an idea and a deadline
You've been carrying a product idea for months and someone is now ready to fund or build it. You want to hear from the people who would use it before that money moves, and you don't have time to learn interviewing from scratch.
Your team disagrees about the customer
Sales says one thing, the founder says another, and the roadmap keeps flipping. A short round of interviews with the actual customer settles the argument with quotes instead of opinions.
Something shipped and nobody used it
A feature or a whole product went live and usage is flat. Before you build the next version, you want to know whether people didn't need it, couldn't find it, or didn't trust it. Those are three different fixes.
Findings you can act on, in words your customers used
Every deliverable traces back to a recorded conversation. If a persona says someone spends six months searching for a room, that came from an interview, and you can read the transcript.
The question set we use, tailored to your product and segment. Open questions about past behaviour, not hypotheticals. You keep it and can reuse it for the next round. Our article on product discovery interview questions shows the shape of it.
A clean write-up of each conversation, with the moments that matter pulled out and quoted. Names and details anonymized where the participant asked for that.
Three to five people, each built from what real participants told us. Not a marketing archetype. Each one names the friction that person feels today and what they do about it right now.
What we heard, how often, and what it means for the plan. Where interviews contradicted the original idea, we say so and show the evidence.
A written call: build as planned, change the plan, or stop and look elsewhere. With the reasons and the open questions the next round of research should settle.
Two weeks from first call to written recommendation
A research sprint typically runs two weeks. Week one is recruiting and interviewing. Week two is analysis, personas, and the findings deck. You're in the loop throughout, and you can sit in on interviews if you'd like.
Scope and script
A working session to agree on the question we're trying to answer, the segments to interview, and what would change your mind. We draft the interview script from that and you review it before anyone is contacted.
Recruit
We find participants who match the segment. Some come from your own contacts, some from communities and channels we reach out to directly. We screen for people who have actually lived the problem, not people who find it interesting.
Interview
Six to nine conversations of thirty to forty-five minutes, recorded with permission. We ask about what people did last time the problem showed up, what they tried, and what it cost them. We listen for the answer that breaks the plan.
Analyze
We go through every transcript and tag what came up, how often, and from whom. Patterns become findings. Individual people become personas. Anything that contradicts the original brief gets its own slide.
Recommend
A readout call and a written recommendation. Build, change, or stop. If the answer is change, we say what changes and why, in the participants' own words.
Dwell: two interviews rewrote the product
Dwell is a marketplace concept for newcomers to Canada who arrive with no credit history and get turned away by landlords. We ran nine customer interviews. Two of the nine confirmed the core need in a way that changed the plan: one added a whole product pillar, and another put the pricing model on hold before anything got built.
Read the Dwell case study →Straight answers before you book
How many interviews do I actually need?
For one clear question and one segment, six to nine is usually enough to see the same themes repeat. On Dwell, the two interviews that changed the plan were the first and a channel interview with a realtor. More interviews help when you have several segments or the early answers disagree with each other.
Can't I just send a survey?
A survey tells you how many people ticked a box. It can't ask why, and it can't follow up when someone says something unexpected. Surveys are useful after interviews, once you know which questions are worth asking at scale. We'll tell you if a survey is the better tool for your situation.
Who finds the participants?
We do, with your help. Your customer list and contacts are the fastest route. Where those don't exist yet, we recruit directly from communities, forums, and local channels where your segment already spends time. Recruiting is included in the two weeks.
What if the interviews say my idea won't work?
Then you've saved the cost of building it. The recommendation will say what people did need, and whether there's a version of the idea worth pursuing. Dwell's pricing model was flagged as unresolved for exactly this reason, and that was a cheaper lesson than a launch.
Can I sit in on the interviews?
Yes, as a silent observer. Most clients find one or two live sessions more persuasive than any deck. We ask that you don't sell during the call, since that changes what people tell us.
What happens after the sprint?
You'll have a recommendation and a clear list of open questions. Some clients go straight into a prototype to test the answer with users. Others take the findings to their own team. Both are fine. See engagement shapes for the options.
Tell us the idea and who it's for. In thirty minutes we'll say whether interviews are the right next step, which segment to start with, and what a two-week sprint would look like. Pricing is quoted after the call.