Stop reading about startups and start talking to real users. Learn how to find them, what to ask, and how conversations reveal truths that no analytics dashboard ever will.
You have read blog posts about building products. You have studied frameworks, filled out canvases, defined personas, and analysed competitors. You have consumed enough startup wisdom to fill a university course.
And yet there is one thing that would teach you more than all of that combined — a thing you are probably not doing, or not doing enough:
Actually talking to the people who might use and pay for your product.
Not surveying them with a Google Form. Not reading their tweets from a distance. Not guessing what they think based on analytics data. Actually talking to them. Face to face, or voice to voice, or at the very least, in a real-time written conversation where you can ask follow-up questions and read between the lines.
This is, without exaggeration, the single most valuable activity a solo entrepreneur can do. And it is the activity most solo entrepreneurs — especially developers — avoid most aggressively.
Why Consuming Startup Advice Is Not a Substitute for User Conversations
Here is a paradox: you are reading this blog post about why you should stop reading blog posts.
To be clear — education matters. Understanding business concepts gives you a vocabulary and a framework for decisions. But frameworks are maps, and maps are not the territory. The territory is your specific product, your specific market, and your specific users. No blog post, book, or course can tell you what your customers want, how they describe their problems, or what would make them pull out their credit card.
Only your customers can tell you that.
The danger of consuming startup content without talking to users is that you start building for a theoretical customer instead of a real one. Your persona document says your ideal customer is a 32-year-old project manager at a mid-sized tech company. But when you actually talk to project managers, you discover they do not care about the problem you assumed they had. They have a completely different pain point. And the language they use to describe it is nothing like the language on your landing page.
Every hour you spend reading about startups while your potential customers go uncontacted is an hour of widening gap between your assumptions and reality. Close that gap. Talk to people.
How to Find Real Users to Talk To
“But where do I find users?” This is a real obstacle, but it is smaller than you think.
If you have existing users (even a few):
- Email them directly. Not a survey — a personal email. “Hi [Name], I’m the founder of [Product]. I’d love to chat with you for 15 minutes about how you use it and what could be better. Would you be open to a quick call?” You will be surprised how many people say yes, especially from a small company. People enjoy being heard.
- Add an in-app prompt. “We’re looking for feedback — want to schedule a 15-minute call?” with a Calendly link. Put it somewhere visible but non-intrusive.
If you have no users yet:
- Go where your target audience hangs out. Reddit communities, Slack groups, Discord servers, LinkedIn groups, niche forums. Do not spam them with your product. Participate genuinely. After building some presence, post: “I’m researching how [target audience] handles [problem]. Would anyone be willing to chat for 15 minutes? I’m not selling anything.”
- Use your personal network — carefully. Friends and family will agree with anything to be supportive, which is useless. But friends who genuinely fit your target audience can be honest if you frame the conversation correctly: “I need you to be brutally honest — tell me what is wrong, not what is right.”
- Attend events (virtual or in-person) where your target audience gathers. Meetups, conferences, webinars. Introduce yourself. Ask about their challenges. Listen.
- Cold outreach. Identify people on LinkedIn or Twitter who match your target market. Send a short, honest message: “I’m building a tool to help [audience] with [problem] and would value 15 minutes of your perspective. No pitch, just questions.”
The hardest part is the first conversation. Once you have done one, the second is easier, and by the fifth, it feels natural.
What to Ask (and What Not to Ask)
User conversations are goldmines — but only if you ask the right questions. The wrong questions produce misleading data that is worse than no data at all.
Do not ask:
- “Would you use this?” (People say yes to be polite. It means nothing.)
- “Do you think this is a good idea?” (Same problem — social desirability bias.)
- “How much would you pay for this?” (Hypothetical willingness to pay is wildly inaccurate.)
- “What features do you want?” (Users are good at describing problems, bad at designing solutions.)
Do ask:
- “Tell me about the last time you dealt with [problem].” This grounds the conversation in reality, not hypotheticals. You learn how often the problem occurs, how painful it is, and what they currently do about it.
- “What did you try to solve it?” This reveals existing solutions, workarounds, and competitors you may not have known about.
- “What was frustrating about those solutions?” This reveals the gaps — the specific unmet needs that your product could fill.
- “How much time/money does this problem cost you?” This quantifies the pain and helps you gauge willingness to pay.
- “If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing about how you handle this, what would it be?” Open-ended, imaginative, and often produces insights that direct questions miss.
The listening ratio should be 80:20. You talk 20% of the time (mostly asking questions) and listen 80% of the time. The most valuable moments come when users are talking freely, describing their experience in their own words. Those words often become your best marketing copy — because they are the exact language your audience uses.
How to Interpret What Users Say vs What They Do
Users lie. Not maliciously — but consistently. They tell you they want things they would never pay for. They say they would definitely use your product but never sign up when you launch. They describe workflows they aspire to follow but have never actually established.
This is why behavioural data matters more than stated preferences. But as a solo entrepreneur in the early stages, you may not have enough users for statistical data. So you need to read between the lines of conversations:
Pay attention to emotion. When someone describes a problem with frustration — raised voice, repeated emphasis, visible annoyance — the problem is real and painful. When they describe it calmly and theoretically, it is a “nice to have.” Build for the frustrated people.
Pay attention to action. Have they actually spent money trying to solve this problem? Have they built their own workaround? Have they changed their behaviour because of it? Past action is the strongest predictor of future willingness to pay.
Pay attention to specificity. “I guess it could be useful” is a polite non-answer. “Last Tuesday I wasted three hours matching invoices to payments because my tool doesn’t auto-reconcile” is a gift. Specificity indicates genuine experience.
Pay attention to contradictions. If someone says “I would definitely pay $20/month for this” but also tells you they cancelled a $10 competitor for being “too expensive,” their actual price sensitivity is different from their stated willingness to pay.
The synthesis of five good conversations will teach you more about your market than a month of desk research. It will challenge assumptions you did not know you had. It will reveal opportunities you never considered. And it will give you the confidence that comes from building on evidence rather than speculation.
Your Action Item
Schedule Three User Conversations in the Next 10 Days. Not surveys. Not forms. Actual conversations. Use the methods from Concept 2 to find people. Use the questions from Concept 3 to guide the conversation. Take notes during or immediately after each call. After all three, write down: (1) one thing I learned that I did not know before, (2) one assumption that was challenged, and (3) one change I should make to my product or messaging. Then make that change. This is the feedback loop working at maximum speed — and it starts with talking to a real human being.
CTA Tip: Set a recurring habit: one user conversation per week. Not when you feel like it — schedule it. The founders who talk to users consistently are the founders who build products people actually want.
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End of Batch 7 — Final batch. Posts 62b through 70.
This concludes the full Solo Entrepreneur Blog Course — 70 posts covering everything from SWOT analysis to talking to real users. Taken together, these posts provide a year of university-quality understanding across every essential dimension of building a solo business: strategy, marketing, finance, product, legal, psychology, operations, and growth.
Disclaimer: The content on this website is AI-generated and should not be trusted. Always verify information with primary sources.