How to solo interviews your customers with some robotic help 🤖

My Approach

I talk to customers like I’d chat with anyone else – keeping it casual and real. No corporate interview robot mode. Before jumping into any interview, I set myself with a goal: what do I actually want to learn? Sometimes I don’t even know exactly what I’m looking for, and that’s fine. In those cases, I just focus on discovering what they use the most and what drives them nuts. You never know when building that basic customer knowledge will come in handy.

My conversations usually run between 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how things flow. And here’s the thing – some just don’t go well and that’s perfectly fine. Don’t try to force it. You’ll just end up with a tired customer and lost time. It’s all about getting to that rhythm, where you both feel comfortable enough to be transparent and give you a peak in detail about their daily struggles.

The Juggling Act

Doing interviews solo is like trying to multitask, which humans are bad at and I’m even worse. You’re trying to:

• Keep the conversation flowing in the right direction

• Throw in those open questions

• Scribble down notes

• Sketch out those user flows

• Make sure they’re comfortable

• And most importantly – actually LISTEN

Ever talked to someone who’s just frantically writing everything down and clearly planning their next question in their head? Yeah, not fun. That is not listening, that is not communicating, that is planning your next move. Other people will notice that you aren’t really interested in what they are saying.

Enter the Modern AI Toolkit

In an ideal world, you’d have one person taking notes and another doing the interview. But let’s face reality; at a start-up, we don’t always have that luxury.

Before the whole AI wave hit, I’d record conversations, then spend ages rewatching or reading transcripts. Now? I’ve got an AI notetaker, tldv.io, doing the heavy lifting. It records the session, creates a transcript and summarizes it. I still jot down key stuff and draw my stick figures and flows (because some things just need that human touch), but now I can focus on the person I’m talking to instead of trying to write down every single word.

After the chat, here’s my “secret sauce” :

1. I dump everything into my PM assistant (trained with all that good product management wisdom). I mostly used the paying version of ChatGPT, but this weekend I discovered Dust.ai – an agent that can combine multiple LLMs (Anthropic, Open AI and Mistrel AI)

2. Tell it how I want my notes structured

3. I mix in my scribbles combined with the AI notetaker summary

4. I make some tweaks

5. Done in about 10 minutes, which usually took me about an hour.

    

💡 Now, before you get too excited about AI – DON’T even think about replacing real conversations with AI-generated ones. You’re only fooling yourself if you do. Why? Because AI is trained on generic stuff that everyone else has access to. The golden nuggets of insight – the stuff that gives you that competitive edge, that is not yet available on the www – that comes from real people telling you about real problems.

Putting It All Together

You rarely get the full picture from just one chat. It usually takes a few conversations to really understand what’s going on. It’s like putting together a puzzle, piece by piece. Very few people can give you that perfect journey map that matches what most other customers experience.

So there you have it – that’s how I’ve managed to make customer interviews both more human and more efficient. The tech helps with the boring stuff, letting me focus on what really matters: understanding the actual humans using our products.

Remember: Keep it real, let the tools handle the tedious parts, and never stop talking to your customers!