What I Would Tell Myself Before My First Customer Discovery Interview

My first customer discovery interview lasted 38 minutes. I had a doc with 14 questions color-coded by priority. I asked maybe four of them. The rest of the time, I was nodding too hard, talking too much, and quietly panicking that I was wasting this person’s time. I came out of it thinking: that went well. She seemed interested.

It had not gone well. I had learned almost nothing. And “She seemed interested” is, I now know, the most useless sentence a founder can walk away with.

I was building The Neuroverse, a platform and community for neurodivergent people, and I was conducting discovery interviews on a topic I lived inside of. I thought that made me more qualified. It actually made me more biased. I wasn’t there to learn. I was there to be validated, which is basically the opposite of the job.

Here’s what I wish I’d known.

1. You’re Not There to Pitch. You’re There to Be Uncomfortable

The moment someone says “That sounds really interesting” or “Oh I totally get that,” your brain releases a little hit of dopamine and you start selling. Don’t. That moment is actually the most important one in the whole conversation, and you’re about to blow it by talking.

I learned this in the UAE specifically, where people are warm and polite and genuinely don’t want to make you feel bad. Agreement here doesn’t mean what you think it means. People will affirm your idea and never use your product. The signal you're looking for isn’t enthusiasm. It’s specificity. When someone stops being polite and starts being specific, that’s the data.

The signal you’re looking for isn’t enthusiasm. It’s specificity. When someone stops being polite and starts being specific, that’s the data.

2. Your Questions Are Probably About the Solution You’ve Already Built in Your Head

Look at your question list. If any of them start with “Would you use,” “Would you pay for,” or “Do you think people need”, delete them. You are asking people to predict their own future behavior. They will say yes. Humans are optimists about hypotheticals and disasters about follow-through.

The version of me that went into those early calls was asking: “Would a platform like this be useful to you?” The version of me that learned something useful asked: “Tell me about the last time you tried to find support for this. What happened?” Same topic. Completely different data.

3. The Most Important Thing They Say Will Probably Be the Thing You Didn’t Ask About

One of my best discovery conversations started as a conversation about community-building and ended with someone crying in a coffee shop in JLT because she had spent three years not knowing there was a name for the way her brain worked. I had not planned for that. I had no question on my list that would have gotten us there.

The framework, the questions, the structure — all of that is just a way to get the conversation started. After that, your only job is to shut up and follow the thread. The person in front of you will tell you exactly what they need if you stop trying to steer them toward the answer you came in hoping for.

4. “No” Is not a Failure. Silence Is

I spent too long in the early days avoiding conversations I was scared would disconfirm my idea. Every week I didn’t have a hard conversation was a week I was building on assumptions instead of reality. The calls where someone pushed back, challenged my framing, or told me “Honestly, I wouldn’t use this” — those were the ones that made the product better.

Politeness is the enemy of discovery. You need people to tell you the truth. That means you have to make it safe to do so, which means actively inviting the hard feedback, sitting in the discomfort when it comes, and not rushing to explain yourself when it lands.

What Changed When I Actually Understood This

The conversations got shorter. Not because I was cutting them off, but because I was getting what I needed faster. The noise dropped out. I stopped leaving calls with three pages of notes and walking away with nothing actionable. I started leaving meetings with one clear thing I hadn’t understood before.

And the product — the actual thing I was building — changed. Not because I was told what to build, but because I finally understood what was missing. That only happened because I got out of my own way long enough to hear it.

To you, Before Your First Interview

You are going to walk in there with a version of your idea that you’re slightly in love with. That’s fine. But leave it in the car.

Your only job in that room is to understand this person’s life — specifically the part of it your idea is supposed to make better. Not to explain your idea. Not to check whether they like it. Not to see whether the timing is right. Just: what is their actual experience of the problem you’re trying to solve, in their words, on their terms.

Go in curious. Come out with one thing you didn’t know before. That’s a good interview.

Everything else is just practice.

May Ali is the founder of The Neuroverse, a platform and community for late-diagnosed and self-identified neurodivergent adults in the Arab world. She is a creative director, multidisciplinary artist, and FRWRDx Cohort 2 alum based in Dubai.

May built The Neuroverse inside the FRWRDx IDEA Program. Rolling cohort applications are open. 14 weeks, 7 milestones, AED 3,000 — and you keep your company.

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