Process
Five stages of founder validation interviews
A five-stage plan for validating a product idea with customer interviews: write a one-sentence hypothesis, recruit people who have the problem, run problem-first interviews, cluster and rank what you heard, and decide whether the hypothesis holds. It is meant for founders without a research team. Koji can run the interviews and the first pass of theme analysis, so the synthesis step stops being the one that gets skipped.
Where this appears
What's in this process
- Write the hypothesis: One sentence: who struggles with what, why, and whether they would pay to solve it.
- Find people who have the problem: People who have tried to solve it. Not friends, and not anyone who will take the call.
- Run the interview: 30 to 45 minutes on past problems and workarounds. Share your idea only at the end, if at all.
- Synthesize across interviews: One insight per note, cluster them, then rank clusters by frequency and intensity.
- Decide what the data says: Confirm, drop or refine the hypothesis before you build anything.
Use this image
Free to use in your docs, decks and posts under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit Koji with a link to this page. To embed it, paste this into your page:
html
<a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/founder-idea-validation-interview-five-stages"><img src="https://www.koji.so/visuals/founder-idea-validation-interview-five-stages/founder-idea-validation-interview-five-stages.png" alt="Process showing five stages of founder validation interviews: write the hypothesis, find people with the problem, run the interview, synthesize, and decide." width="1200" height="739" /></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/founder-idea-validation-interview-five-stages">Five stages of founder validation interviews</a>, Koji</p>
