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YC's five questions for talking to users

Question bank of the five Y Combinator questions for user interviews, from the hardest part of the task to what people disliked about the fixes they tried.
All five ask about the past, so you hear what people actually did, not what they think of your idea. Source: Eric Migicovsky, How to Talk to Users, Y Combinator
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The five questions from Eric Migicovsky's Y Combinator talk How to Talk to Users, set out as a reusable question bank for early validation interviews. The first three find the problem and the last time it happened. The last two find what people already tried and why it fell short. Use them before you mention your own idea. You can run the same questions as an AI-moderated interview in Koji to reach more people.

Where this appears

What's in this question bank

The problem

  1. What is the hardest part of doing [the thing you are targeting]?
  2. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem.
  3. Why was that hard?

What they tried

  1. What did you do to try to fix it?
  2. What did you not like about the solutions you tried?

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<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/yc-how-to-talk-to-users-five-questions">YC's five questions for talking to users</a>, Koji</p>

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