Customer Discovery & Synthetic Interviews

This approach uses AI to brainstorm features and develop a go-to-market strategy for product offerings. While real human interviews provide deeper insights, this method helps you start with educated assumptions and avoid building redundant products.

Assumptions

Thank you David Bland for the Assumptions GPT.

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-Ng8gDifwI-assumptionsgpt

Enter an elevator pitch, and you’ll get a list of assumptions.

Continue to work within ChatGPT or move over to Perplexity to move from Assumptions to Customer Discovery.

Customer Discovery

• Provide context to the AI (e.g., Perplexity) using reference books like "The Mom Test", "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation."

• Ask for example interview questions focusing on specific pains rather than future features.

• Add proposed product features and request related questions.

Output should likely look something like this:

• "Can you describe a typical day in your work as a xyz?"

• "What are some of the biggest challenges you face when … ?"

Creating and Interviewing Personas

1. Ask the AI to create or select personas specific to your niche or use an existing ideal customer profile.

2. Conduct simulated interviews with these personas.

3. Have the AI summarize interviews and rank features by user interest.

Market Analysis

1. Use an AI (preferably Perplexity) to research existing offerings and market size.

2. Focus on specific features and identify companies already providing them.

Detailed Persona Creation and Interviews

Prompt: “Use the method described in Vincent Koc's post (https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-synthetic-user-research-using-persona-prompting-and-autonomous-agents-b521e0a80ab6) for more in-depth synthetic user research.”

Thank you Vincent Koc for the fantastic post.

Next Steps

I find these Perplexity interviews to be absolute gold in thinking through jobs to be done. Use the insights gained to prepare for actual human interviews and consider additional features to research.

Follow up with market research using tools like Exploding Topics, SEMRush, or Keywords Everywhere to build a keyword plan (high search volume and low competition with commercial intent in a perfect world) and refine your go-to-market strategy.

This process is meant to prepare for real human interviews and avoid uneccessary interviews early in your idetion process.