You Talked to 20 Customers and Learned Nothing

A founder told me last month: “I did 20 customer interviews. I have all the data I need.”

I asked: “What’s the #1 problem your customers have, in their own words?”

Silence.

Twenty interviews. Hours of conversations. And she couldn’t articulate the core problem in the language her customers actually use. That’s not validation. That’s expensive small talk.

The Validation Theater Problem

Here’s what I see constantly. Founders know they should talk to customers. The lean startup gospel has reached everyone. So they do the interviews. They check the box.

The problem isn’t that founders skip validation. It’s that they do it wrong. They share their idea and ask if people like it. They hear compliments and treat them as proof. They ask leading questions and get the answers they want.

Compliments are not validation. Opinions are not data. A customer saying “that sounds cool” doesn’t mean they’ll pay for it.

What Real Validation Looks Like

Real validation is uncomfortable. It means asking about their life, not pitching your idea. It means shutting up and listening.

Discover the problem before you pitch the solution. Customers can tell you what frustrates them, what they’ve tried, and why it fell short. They can’t design the solution - that’s your job. But if you skip the problem discovery and jump to “what do you think of my app”, you’ve wasted the conversation.

Test for urgency, not interest. A real problem is urgent, pervasive, and something people are actively trying to solve. “Yeah, that’s annoying sometimes” is not urgent. “I spent three hours last week trying to figure this out” is a signal. The difference between a nice-to-have and a must-have is urgency.

Look for patterns, not anecdotes. One customer saying something interesting is a data point. Five saying the same thing in different words is a pattern. Patterns are what you build on.

The Hard Part Isn’t the Interview

People love talking about their problems. Getting them to talk is easy. The hard part is analysis. You finish 15 interviews and you’re sitting on a pile of transcripts, notes and contradictions. Making sense of that mess is where most founders stall. They either cherry-pick quotes that confirm their bias or get overwhelmed and just go build.

Both lead to the same place: building something nobody needs.

The founders who get validation right treat it as a system, not a checkbox. They structure their interviews around specific hypotheses. They analyze the insights systematically. They let the evidence shape the strategy, not the other way around.

Stop Checking the Box

If you’ve done interviews and can’t confidently answer what your customers’ #1 problem is in their own words, how urgent it is, and whether the pattern is strong enough – you haven’t validated. You’ve had conversations.

At Icanpreneur, we built the system that turns conversations into actual validation. IVA runs structured interviews based on the Mom Test methodology, clusters pain points, and surfaces the patterns you need to see – in minutes, not weeks.

With synthetic respondents you can start validating before you recruit a single customer.

Founders don’t need more conversations. They need the right insights from the ones they have.