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Soumil Rathi

Do you actually end up talking to users first?

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I've always found it tougher to talk to people before building something, just because you don't have a good idea of what you're building and for whom. Personally, I tried solving this by building a project to simulate those initial customer interviews with AI. I'm launching this soon, if you're interested, but was curious—what do you do now to solve this problem?

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Luka Brzin
Hi, I'm starting a new project soon and I will start by talking to users first but they are all people I know. I feel like that is going to make things a bit easier for me. Do you have any advice on how to do this?
Soumil Rathi
@luka_brzin I think that can work, but you need to ask non-biased and non-leading questions, especially considering that these people are likely to be positive towards you. Try to not mention the solution and try to figure out what problem the customer actually wants to solve. I'd recommend reading the Mom test and reading about the Jobs-to-be-done framework. Both of those have helped me a lot.
Zhiqi Shi
Try to relax a bit and approach conversations without a clear agenda. Reflect on them afterward. Sometimes, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Carol Leung
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but indirect insights are also just as helpful in the super early stages while you're still forming your idea. It's 2025, people aren't shy of writing (Reddit) and talking (TikTok) about their experiences, both positive and negative. A quick keyword search around the general topic you're pursuing will pull up thousands of people expressing their unfiltered thoughts and pain points. Then, once you see a general pattern or trend, refine your idea and direction and share your idea with a few users. Iterate and repeat as needed. I think the problem you've identified is very real and the solution seems super neat! Curious what you're using to train the AI to mimic the precision of actually talking to users who's experiencing the problem - would be really cool if it somehow was pulling from social media as mentioned above.
Carol Leung
@roy_khan2 there's a huge underrated benefit to it too. It removes all underlying bias variables that you'd have to be cautious of in a live user interview (e.g., there's no leading questions that you may unintentionally ask that could skew answers).
Soumil Rathi
@carol_leung Hi! For now, I'm using multiple AI agents with different personalities and information to simulate a conversation. I've personally used social media a lot for refining my idea. So, I agree that the ideal solution would integrate the AI with any insights and preferences picked up from social media—that's probably something I'll look into doing when expanding the project!
Nick Anisimov
Any AI will help you prepare for a conversation now, based on your tasks and situation, AI will easily make you a conversation plan and a list of questions. But the most important thing is to start. It's often scary and may not go very well at first, but then with each call it will get easier and better.
ata
That sounds like a game-changer for anyone struggling to approach real users.
Soumil Rathi
@atal163 Thanks!