Get Out of the Building: Structured Customer Interviews

Definition

Running Lean splits customer conversations into two distinct, sequential formats: the Problem interview, which tests whether a candidate problem is real and a must-have for a specific segment, and the Solution interview, which tests whether a specific approach (often just a mock-up or prototype) actually resolves that problem — run before any real product is built. The book leans on Eric Ries's bar for taking the signal seriously: "When 10 out of 10 people say they don't want your product, that's pretty significant."

In the Book

Chapters 5 through 8 build the full practice: finding prospects through teaser pages, cold outreach, and LinkedIn, with the tactic of "nailing their problem" to earn 20–30 minutes of someone's time; scripting the conversation itself; and, in Chapter 7, a dedicated "Preemptive Strikes and Other Objections" section that rebuts the standard excuses founders use to skip this step — "customers don't know what they want," "talking to 20 people isn't statistically significant," "I am my own customer so I don't need to talk to anyone else," "my friends think it's a great idea," and "why spend weeks talking to customers when I can build something over a weekend?" Each objection is answered directly rather than dismissed.

Why It Matters

It replaces two common failure modes — building on unexamined assumptions, or building based on flattering feedback from friends and family — with a repeatable qualitative technique for validating a problem cheaply, before the far more expensive step of building and quantitatively measuring a real solution.