time 

The second main type of bad data that you may encounter is fluff. These are hypotheticals. These are generic statements. Whenever you're in the middle of a user interview and you start getting onto this hypothetical, you know, "Oh, here's what the  product  may look like in the future." Try to steer it back to specifics. Again, you're conducting a user interview, not to  pitch  your  product  but to learn about  problems  or issues that the user has faced in their past so that you can improve it in the  future . That's it. That was meant to be like a quick short dive into "Talking To Users." I don't know if we have any  time  for questions. Cool. Awesome. Well, I'd love to answer any questions but other than that, thank you very much. 

The other potential customer that you're talking to is the chef at one of the  Google  cafes. Unfortunately for you,  Google  gives away their  food  for free to their employees. So, that person doesn't actually stand to earn more  money  or save that much more  money  if they were to use your new smoothie technology in their restaurant. Granted there are a lot of Googlers, so there probably would be a lot of smoothies made per week. But at the same  time , again, you know, they just don't have the budget to be able to really dig into this  problem . So, you learn through the initial  customer interviews  that McDonald's is actually the best potential first customer for your  product . 

Honestly, you'll be able to get probably the best information out of say a 10 to 15-minute long first interview and that might be all the  time  you need just for that initial chat. As you move past the idea stage into testing your prototype with users, the next major kind of benefit that you can get from talking to users is figuring out who will be your best first customer. This is critical because it's possible that if you choose the wrong first customer, that you may be led down a path that constrains you or artificially traps you without actually getting paid by that first customer. So, we've created a framework that you can use to begin to identify before you begin working with them who the best first customers will be. 

Feel free to react. Like, honestly, you'll learn so much through the first 5 or 10 user interviews that, you know, your process will dramatically improve from those first interviews to the next batch. So, don't feel like you have to do 100 user interviews all at the same  time . Just start with one, start with three, start with five until you get the hang of it. The third thing is you need to be cognizant of the other person's  time . Again, going back to what I said at the beginning, you know, we love our idea. We're founders. We love talking about our idea. So, you need to keep yourself in check and make sure that you're cognizant of the other person's  time . 

Another cool hack that we've seen some great success with, actually a  YC  company in this batch is actually selling products to firefighters. And they realized that cold  email  introductions was just not working, was not a way that they could get through to customers. So, what they did was they actually just dropped by fire stations in-person. They didn't even, you know,  email  them to say that they were coming ahead of  time . They just showed up and they said, "Hey, could we speak to the fire chief? Could we talk to someone about this  problem  that we've got a solution to?" And you know what? It worked great. They managed to get dozens of in-person, you know, 10 to 15 minute long meetings just by showing up.