How to Talk to Users

Migicovsky says founders should keep talking to users throughout a company’s life, even when they are CEOs or engineers. He frames building the product and talking to users as the two core tasks of starting a company. User interviews are for learning, not pitching.

Drawing on The Mom Test, Migicovsky warns against pitching an idea, asking hypothetical questions, and talking too much. He recommends asking about specific past events and the wider context around a problem. His five example questions cover what is hardest, the last time it happened, why it was hard, what the person tried, and what they disliked about those solutions.

At the idea stage, founders can start with themselves, then speak with a few friends, coworkers, or people reached through introductions. Migicovsky describes visiting fire stations and meeting potential users at CES as ways to find interviewees. When testing a prototype, he suggests assessing a customer’s cost of the problem, how often it occurs, and their budget or authority to solve it; his smoothie example ranks McDonald’s ahead of The French Laundry and Google Café.

Migicovsky describes product-market fit as hard to measure in real time and shares Superhuman’s weekly question: how users would feel if they could no longer use the product. The team tracked the share who would be very disappointed, with 40 percent presented as a signal associated with growth. He also recommends collecting phone numbers, testing demand for features with an upgrade or payment flow, and steering interviews away from compliments and hypotheticals.