Many startup founders and business leaders struggle with conducting effective customer discovery interviews due to fear of rejection, personal bias, or lack of time. This often leads to poor product-market fit and wasted resources. Since customer feedback is crucial for building successful products, there’s a clear need for a solution that helps founders gather unbiased, structured insights without the emotional or logistical hurdles.

How It Could Work

One way to address this gap is by offering a service where trained interviewers conduct customer discovery on behalf of founders. Here’s how it could function:

• Signup: Founders submit their project details, target audience, and interview goals.
• Interviewer Matching: The service assigns trained professionals who use structured methods (like the Mom Test) to avoid bias.
• Execution: Interviewers reach out to customers (provided by the founder or sourced by the service) and conduct conversations.
• Reporting: Feedback is summarized into actionable insights, highlighting patterns and recommendations.

The service could start manually—matching founders with interviewers via spreadsheets—and later evolve into a platform with scheduling and analytics tools.

Who Would Benefit

This idea could serve:

• Startup founders who lack time or confidence to conduct interviews.
• Scale-ups needing unbiased feedback for product refinement.
• Corporate innovation teams testing ideas without internal bias.

Freelance interviewers could also benefit by earning income and gaining experience, while accelerators might use the service to improve their startups’ success rates.

Execution and Differentiation

An MVP could begin with a simple website and a small pool of interviewers, tested with accelerators or coworking spaces. Scaling might involve automating matching and reporting, plus offering add-ons like interviewee recruitment.

Unlike existing tools (e.g., UserInterviews.com for participant recruitment or Upwork for freelance researchers), this service would focus on end-to-end execution with standardized methodologies and structured reporting—making it uniquely valuable for founders.

By providing unbiased, high-quality feedback, this service could help startups de-risk decisions and build better products. The key challenges—ensuring interview quality and sourcing participants—could be addressed through training and gradual expansion of features.