How to Gauge Someone’s Interest in a Product Without Them Realizing It

Gathering market research and customer interest is a tedious and complex part of the early stages of product development. When interviewing members of your target customer demographic, it’s easy to stray from asking valuable experience-oriented questions and toward those that yield misleading, subjective answers. But how can you tell whether you’re asking the right questions?

The Problem With Opinions

When collecting customer data, there are such things as “good data” and “bad data”. Good data is the stuff you can apply directly to validate (or invalidate) an idea, change your design approach, or guide you toward another demographic. This good data often comes in the form of concrete experiences, like what problems the customer has faced, whether they tried to solve the problem, and whether they paid money to solve the problem. By knowing that customers are willing to pay to fix the problem that you may have a solution for, that’s clear evidence of future demand.

Bad data on the other hand is that which gives you misguided, ambiguous thoughts or feelings. This can come in the form of opinions or compliments. Say you mention your idea to someone, and they say “Wow, that’s such a great idea! I would definitely buy that!”. That might make you feel amazing and validated–they’re clearly willing to invest money into your future product, right? Don’t be so sure. They might show interest now, but have they actually spent any effort into solving the problem your product will solve? In other words, do they even care enough about the problem to put effort into solving it (i.e. buying your future product)?

If you hand someone a solution without them needing to put in any effort, of course they’re going to be happy. But your future product likely won’t be free, so don’t accept validation from customers complimenting your “free” idea. There’s a better way.

Don’t Let Customers Know You’re Interviewing Them

The Mom Test, published by tech entrepreneur Rob Fitzpatrick in 2013, is a book that outlines a simple but invaluable way to interview potential customers without even needing to tell them about your idea. Fitzpatrick’s mom test is so named because with it you can get good data even from your own mother (we all know that mothers are notorious for validating even some of our worst ideas, like that awful hairstyle you tried out in your early teen years). Its basic principles are these:

1. Talk about the person’s experiences, not your idea
2. Focus on specifics in their past rather than generalizations, opinions, and the future

The brilliance of this method is that it produces the realization that the good data you need doesn’t come from the customer’s evaluation of your product idea, so you don’t have to mention it at all. And by not discussing your idea, you can avoid misleading opinions and compliments altogether.

This also means you can have much more lighthearted conversations since your interview doesn’t feel like a sales pitch (to you and your interviewee). With some planning and opportunity, you can gather good data even from a quick conversation with a stranger in the elevator. Ask about their work or activities, lead them toward your area of interest, then ask what problems they’re facing and what solutions they’ve tried. Bam! Valuable data. And from their perspective, they were just making small talk. It really is as easy as that.

A Method for Success

Once you’ve used this simple idea to revolutionize your approach to customer research, there are steps you can take to further optimize your process. After all, your goal in the exploratory phase of product development should be to get the data you need as quickly as possible to make confident design decisions and move on to the actual development of your idea.

First, make sure you have an effective target demographic. Too specific and you can miss out on a lot of good data and useful validation. Too broad and your web will catch way more data than you need, while also risking not having enough to cross-reference for validation.

Before going out and interviewing people, make sure you have a plan on what data you actually want to collect. Fitzpatrick recommends having a list of three goals for your interview. This is a good number because you can internalize the goals and recall them when you get an unexpected opportunity for an interview.

Know how to frame the conversation to lead the interviewee to answer the questions you want answered. If you let them, people will talk on and on about things that likely lead you no closer to validating your idea. Subtly lead them to your topics of interest so you can get your data as fast as possible.

Lastly, consider that you might not need an interview at all to get the information you need. The internet is a big place and probably has the answers to most questions you’ll want to ask. Be efficient–reserve interviews only for data pertaining to personal experiences and obscure knowledge.

The Mom Test goes into more depth about these ideas and more, so I can’t recommend it enough. It’s short, and a must-read if you’re at all involved with market research.

Seeing the Results

After an interview, you should have a clearer idea of how to move forward with development. Did the person tell you about how they spent hours searching on Google to find a fix for their issue? Will your product solve that issue? You’ve just found a potential customer. Maybe instead they told you that they’ve been dealing with the problem for years but never put in the effort to look for a solution. In this case, you can assume the problem isn’t that big of a deal to them and they probably wouldn’t pay to solve it.

At the end of the day, customer research is about getting the right data to move development along and getting that data as fast as possible. Invest in learning processes like the mom test, and you’ll be on the fast track to start developing your product with precision and confidence!


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