If you already have a business idea, you need validate the idea. You can validate a business idea by interviewing companies and people. If you don't have a concrete business idea yet, you can use interviews to find new business ideas!

How to find people to interview?
How to reach potential users (B2B)
I will add another article on how to find persons to interview for a B2C idea.

Interview Script

Introduction:

Greeting the potential customer / business partner and explaining the reason for this call. Shortly mention the duration of this call. Maybe ask whether the business partner agrees/consents.

Reason / Goal: 

To calm down the interview partner / create trust, which can lead to him divulging more information. The question, whether the interview partner consents to the discussion, leads to, that he doesn’t gain the impression to waste his time with the interview.

Step 1: Questions

  • What are typical tasks during your day?
  • Which activities are most important in your job?
  • What are the first 2 or 3 things that you do every morning?
  • Which tasks do you like to get done with i.e. excel, that you would prefer to automate? 

Reason / Goal: To get the interview partner to think about his daily tasks. People are not often asked what they do during each hour of their day. That’s why this step can sometimes take more time. During this phase we get the interview partner used to talking. 

Step 2: Check-ins

  • Repeat the answer to questions shortly, in order to confirm that you have understood everything correctly. 
  • Subsequently ask for every task / activity, if there are aspects about it, which the business partner is not content with. (Go through the tasks step by step) 

Reason / Goal: It can be difficult to remember all the tasks. That’s why it is important to go through the tasks step by step. At some point you will recognize here a problem / or an aspect of a problem, where software could help → ATTACK


Step 3: Understand

It is about getting to a problem and to get to know as much as possible about the problem or pain. That’s how it can be classified to what extent the problem is suitable for a business idea. More possible questions could be: 

  • How does the existing process connected to this problem work currently?
  • Why is this a problem?
  • How do you currently handle this problem? (current solution) 
  • What do you NOT like about the current solution? 
  • What is the most important aspect about this problem, which needs to be solved first? 
  • What would your dream / ideal solution for this problem look like?

Reason / Goal: Primarily this is about understanding the problem in detail. Subsequently it is about solving the problem with the existing information. The focus for this would be software ideas and so forth.