When can I stop interviewing users?

To validate my SaaS idea I've interviewed 15 people. I posted the whole process out in the open including:

• how I was approaching it

• the questions I was asking

• how I found people

• what I learned from them

The most amazing thing about posting that was having a few people reaching out to me. Some were asking to practice their user interviews with me. Some wanted some guidance on how to approach user interviews.

I wasn't expecting that and it was awesome. I met so many cool people this way.

I'm not an expert but I'm more than happy to help out as much as I can.

One question came up in pretty much any conversation:

When I can stop interviewing users? 

Is not a bad question but shows the wrong approach to building a business.

But before I tell you about this, let me give you some context:

• I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day today is day 23.

• I'm adding lessons from my mistakes and learning from current events.

• I'm live-sharing as I build holding nothing back.

• If you're interested, you can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

The answer to that question is simple:

You should never stop interviewing users. 

The more you talk with people the more you'll find out about their problems and get more input on how to solve those problems.

But as your product evolves and grows so will your interview process.

You will go through 3 main phases:

Validation

This is the phase I've just finished. You have a problem you want to work on and you want to validate it. You find as many people as possible to talk about it and after 10 or 15 you'll have a pretty good idea on what to build.

Building

This is where I am right now. I have done enough interviews that I know I'm solving a real problem. But the more people I talk to the more angles or interesting "things I didn't think about" are coming up. Here you'll do fewer chats than in the initial phase but don't drop them thinking "I've got enough data". You never have enough data.

Launch

After launching and getting customers you will transition. You'll go from talking to any user, to your customers. If you can, talk with your best customers. To ensure that you can still provide them with a great product that solves their problems.

Growing

If you get here you're doing great, you launched, you have customers and everything is amazing. This phase is where great entrepreneurs show their greatness. They won't stop improving their product and won't stop talking to people.

No matter how big they get, they will find time to talk with their users or best customers. That's how they keep the business growing and thriving.

Don't think I made this up. 

The best founders keep talking to their users and use their products.

The most famous example is one of the founders of AirBnB Brian Chesky.

AFTER AirBnB IPOed he:

• listed his own home in San Francisco's Mission District on Airbnb

• spent six months in 2022 staying in Airbnbs

While doing that he wanted to speak with as many hosts as possible to understand how they were using his product. He wanted to know how to improve it.

The legend says that the 6 months of learning led to the development of 50 changes to the platform and a few new features.

He didn't have to do any of that. He "made it". But he wanted to create the best possible version of this product. He kept getting first-hand learning from his users.

Here's my plan for my SaaS:

• I have no customers for now. I'm still aiming to get 3 people every week to talk about their experience in building landing pages

• Once I have customers I'll try every week to speak with at least 3 of them. Won't be about my product but more in general about the problem I'm solving and how to best provide them with value.

• Once I have lots of customers, I'll try to do the same but for my top customers, how I'm going to score them I have no idea.

• If I get very big and important, I'm hoping somebody will send me this post. It will ensure I don't think I've done enough customer research.

Over to you now:

• Are you still doing customer interviews even after launching?

• How often are you talking with your customer?

• What's the impact of talking with them?

Please leave a comment and let me know!

My progress

So far

• I started a SaaS 2 years ago. I failed at making it take off.

• I had a problem: I wasted tons of time and money in creating landing pages that sucked.

• To make it worse, I wasted tons of money on ads that would send traffic to terrible landing pages.

• I decided to get all the learning from my failure and build something new in public

• I'm documenting the journey and the actions I'm taking every day. Also adding learning from my experience

• After I picked the problem I wanted to solve. I formulated a hypothesis: "People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

• I did a few user interviews to confirm the hypothesis.

• After doing enough interviews I had enough confidence to build an MVP.

• I shared the initial MVP with a few people and I got positive results.

• My business model will be a monthly subscription starting at £10 a month for the first 10 customers.

• Once I've onboarded the first few customers I'll have a better idea for pricing.

Latest

• I'm making the MVP ready to onboard customers.

• Yesterday I added auth using supabase. Magic links for the win

• Today and probably tomorrow I'm adding a stripe payment link and all the bits needed for that to work. Granting people access, allowing them to cancel, add T&C, etc etc

• After that is done I can do an e2e run and see what's missing to onboarding customer

• And finally go on the hunt for some customers, fun times ahead

Celebrations

More and more legends joining the ranks!

• I was worried the newsletter wasn't growing anymore. Overnight went from 38 to 42 subscribers! 8 more to go for a 50 pushups video!

• The LinkedIn newsletter is unstoppable, 160 people subscribed so far!

• If you're on X, come say hi, there are so many wonderful people there.

I cannot thank you all enough for your help and support, you're all legends!