Practical founder guide
Customer interview screener: find people with first-hand experience
Build a recruiting brief, separate users from buyers, and record interview evidence without mistaking compliments for demand.
A conversation with someone who has never faced the problem can tell you whether your pitch is clear. It cannot tell you whether the problem matters to the people you hope to serve. This browser-only tool turns your target customer and a recent behavior into a short screener, then gives you a place to separate what you heard from what you inferred.
Start with a task someone has actually done, not a description of the product you want to build. “People who had to reconcile supplier invoices last month” is screenable. “People who like a smarter finance app” is not.
Build a screener for your next conversation
Write a narrow group and a behavior that would show first-hand experience. Avoid mentioning your proposed solution in the screening question; it can steer the answer.
Your recruiting brief
After the conversation, record what happened
Keep the participant’s account separate from your explanation of it. Leave a field blank when you do not know.
Use the screener without turning it into a survey
The first question should establish fit, not ask someone to rate your idea. If they have not experienced the task, thank them and stop. Do not try to persuade them into a “yes.” If they qualify, ask them to walk you through the most recent time it happened:
- What was going on just before the task came up?
- What did you do, step by step?
- What did you use, and what did you try when that did not work?
- What happened because of the delay, cost or workaround?
- Who else was involved in choosing or paying for the current approach?
Follow the person’s sequence. Ask for clarification rather than presenting your feature list. Y Combinator’s user-interview guidance similarly emphasizes concrete past situations and existing attempts to solve the problem instead of hypothetical interest in a proposed feature. Read the Startup School interview recap and transcript.
What counts as a useful signal?
Do not combine these into a numeric “validation score.” They answer different questions, and no single conversation establishes market demand.
| What you heard or saw | What it supports | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| “I would use that” after you explain the concept | The person understood enough to respond politely or imagine a future use. | That they have the problem, will switch, or will pay. |
| A specific recent episode and a current workaround | The person has first-hand experience of the task and can describe what they do today. | How common the problem is across your target market. |
| Repeated effort, a documented consequence, or a step they already take to reduce it | The problem may carry a practical cost worth investigating further. | That your product is the right fix or that the person controls the budget. |
| A follow-up action with a date, access to the workflow, or a purchase decision they already own | There may be a concrete next step beyond verbal enthusiasm. | Repeatable demand until you observe it across relevant users and buying contexts. |
When the “right person” is uncertain
Separate the person who performs a task from the person who approves or pays for a solution. In a small business those roles may be the same; in a larger organization they often are not. If you do not know which role matters, interview task-doers first to understand the workflow, then recruit buyers to investigate approval, budget and procurement. Do not merge their answers into one imaginary customer.
A screener that produces no matches is information about your recruiting definition or access route. Widen it one criterion at a time and write down what changed. If you broaden the group until anyone can qualify, you have removed the test rather than solved it.
How to use X and other public sources responsibly
Public posts, discussion threads and product reviews are useful for finding language, edge cases and questions worth checking. They are self-selected samples: who posts, what becomes visible and what receives engagement are not representative measures of the whole market. A like count is not a customer count.
- Keep a permalink, author and post date with any example you use; prefer a short paraphrase to copying a long post.
- Label a social post as an individual account or anecdote. Do not turn one post into a trend claim.
- Use public complaints to write a neutral interview prompt, then test whether relevant people can describe the same problem from their own recent experience.
- Check factual and numerical claims against primary records or the named organization’s original material. Record what could not be independently verified.
- Use Search Console to understand queries and impressions already reaching your own site; it does not measure the entire market or prove that a topic is commercially viable.
This page applies that standard to the 1517 Fund example above: the post motivates a participant-fit check. It does not show that shampoo buyers generally behave a certain way, nor does it validate a shampoo business.
Limits and privacy
This tool helps structure recruitment and notes; it does not determine product-market fit or replace careful research. The fields are processed in your browser only. We do not transmit them, place them in local storage or cookies, or use them to create analytics. The copy button acts only when you select it; printing uses your browser’s print dialog. The page clears its fields when you navigate away. Browser-level autofill or session restoration is controlled by your browser, not this tool.