Validate

Before building there's a really quiet phase that we almost always skip, me first.

And it's not carelessness. Listening looks too much like doing nothing, and when the project is yours, doing nothing is frightening. In the first days a strange urgency turns up, the sense that if you don't start now somebody will get there first. It's almost never true, and that hurry gets paid for later.

It doesn't help that this phase produces nothing you can show. No screens, no visible progress, nothing to tell anybody you did this week. Working on your own that weighs more than it sounds, because the only person measuring your progress is you.

What I'm actually looking for

In this phase I'm not looking for opinions on my idea. Opinions on ideas are almost always kind: people say it sounds good because saying otherwise would be rude. You take that sounds good home and file it as evidence, when it isn't.

What I'm after is what somebody is already doing without me. By hand, awkwardly, with nobody having asked them to. That awkwardness is the most reliable signal I've found, because nobody bothers solving something they don't care about.

The difference between the two is enormous. An opinion tells you what somebody believes they would do in a hypothetical situation. A workaround tells you what they already do, at what cost, in the real one. The first is forgotten the moment the conversation ends; the second has been going on for months.

What to ask, and what not to

The question that doesn't work is "would you use this?". It's hypothetical, it's flattering, and it comes back yes almost every time. Asking about the future isn't much better: "would you pay for this?" gets an honest answer that's still useless, because nobody really knows what they will do in three months.

The ones that have worked for me all point backwards, at what already happened. When was the last time you had this problem. What exactly did you do that day. How long did it take. What had you tried before. Why did you stop. What did it cost you, in money or in hours.

Those are questions about facts, and there's no polite way around a fact. If somebody can't remember the last time they had the problem, it doesn't happen as often as you thought, and you just found that out in thirty seconds.

Where to find those people

You don't need a representative sample or a panel. Eight or ten conversations and the pattern shows, and from there the same phrases start repeating.

The places where people already complain are the most useful: forum threads, reviews of similar products, trade groups, replies to posts on the subject. People write there without being asked, which is exactly the condition you're looking for. A spontaneous complaint is worth more than an arranged interview, because nobody writes one to be nice.

It's also worth talking to somebody who decided not to solve the problem. That's the most uncomfortable conversation and the most informative: they will explain why living with it was cheaper than fixing it, and that reasoning is exactly what you're competing against.

The problem with listening to yourself

There's a part that's hard to admit. Your own enthusiasm weighs more than anybody else opinion, and if you work alone there's nobody to offset it. This is where I trust my own judgement least, not because I can't observe, but because I want the answer to be yes, and wanting something changes what you hear.

The only thing that has helped is writing down what I expect to hear before the first conversation. If what I then hear matches what I wrote a little too closely, I get suspicious of myself. And whatever turns up that I had not anticipated is usually the most valuable thing in the whole round.

The mistakes I've made here

The most expensive was talking only to people like me. It's the comfortable option: contacts from the trade, people who get the premise immediately and improve on it while you talk. The problem is that they hand your own thinking back to you and you read it as confirmation.

The second was explaining the idea before asking anything. The moment you describe what you plan to build, the conversation stops being about that person life and becomes about your proposal, and from there all you get is opinions. I now say what I'm working on at the end, when it can't contaminate anything.

The third is subtler: writing notes up neatly. Rewriting what somebody said in your own words organises it and strips out everything that didn't fit your framing, which is usually the only part that would have changed your mind. I write the sentences down as they came out now, however untidy.

What I do with what I learn

At the end of a round I look for two things. The first is the workaround that repeats: the improvised system several people have built for themselves, almost always in a spreadsheet or a notebook. That tells me which part of the problem hurts enough for somebody to have already spent time on it.

The second is the sentence that repeats without me having suggested it. When three people describe the same situation in similar words, I have both the problem and the way to name it. That sentence usually ends up as the text on the home page, and not by accident: it's the only part written in the language of the person who has the problem.

How I know I'm done

I know I'm done when I can talk about specific people instead of profiles. Not freelance designers, but somebody with a name who last Tuesday did this in this way and lost an afternoon to it.

This phase is shorter than it looks: there comes a point where you're no longer learning anything new, you're looking for somebody to give you permission. When the third conversation in a row tells you nothing you didn't know, it's over.

And if after ten conversations nobody has the problem in any recognisable form, that's a result too. It isn't pleasant, but you found out in two weeks what would otherwise have taken six months of building.

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