026: No, don't trust self-reported data from discovery interviews.
Instead, capture ground truth.
👋 Hi, I’m Mike. This is the companion newsletter for my podcast (Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Why do founders often waste a year on a bad startup idea despite running “customer-discovery interviews”? Most founders accept low-quality data that they’d NEVER accept elsewhere. Specifically, founders “capture” data using their memory and their notes -- self-reported data that’s a recipe for getting fooled. Instead, they need recordings to actually capture what interviewees say. I believe that with the right structure and focus, founders could be decisive in days about investing time in their startup idea.
If someone told you that they met a person who is 20-feet tall, you’d probably reply: “Prove it. Show me the guy and bring a tape measure.” But I’ve worked with so many teams of founders where one says “I interviewed a customer” and their co-founder says “Yup, sounds about right.” No asking for proof, just blind acceptance. They’re falling into the trap articulated by Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Humans are wonderful people, but we’re horrible at data capture. Our memories are faulty. Our notes require interpretation, which mixes accurate and erroneous data. Fundamentally, a startup is a project in creating new, valuable knowledge. The data that a founder gathers is the basis of that knowledge. This means that a faulty process for running interviews leads to a chain of events: bad data = misunderstandings = wasted year.
Humans are wonderful people, but we’re horrible at data capture.
The bug is with the approach to capturing data, not the founder. You can use Nascent as a strategy to avoid fooling yourself, beginning with this four-part structure:
1. Gather data by “Getting Out of the Building” 🏢
2. Capture data with audio recordings 🎤
3. Categorize data like a nurse searching for Pain 👩⚕️
4. Iterate like a wildcatter making incremental investments 🛢️
Recordings are the foundation of your project. Historically, recorded conversations have been taboo, but that changed in 2020 with COVID. That year most of us spent our lives online and accepted recordings. It’s now become normal to record Zoom meetings with a note-taker bot like Otter.ai. It can still be awkward to record in-person conversations, but I’ve found that interviewees now often agree to recordings. The unlock is that interviewees want to be helpful (that’s why they talk with founders in the first place!) so founders secure consent by highlighting that recordings make interviewees even more helpful. I’ve found this statement works about 80% of the time:
What you’re saying is helpful. I don’t wanna be distracted taking notes.
Would you mind if I recorded our conversation?
Want to put this into practice? Go record one conversation with one person who might benefit from your startup. That’s your first step to build a solid foundation for your knowledge-creation project. In the coming posts, I’ll detail how to analyze those recordings to get a meaningful understanding of the potential for your startup to get customers.
Mike supports founders of pivoting startups who want to quickly decide a new direction using structure, not intuition. Book a call with me to protect your remaining runway by calculating Estimated Revenue Next Year ($) for your pivot ideas.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been building Nascent as the strategy for startups with no customers. As of 2026, I’m publishing Nascent, a few ideas at a time, in regular podcast episodes. This is the companion newsletter that summarizes the podcast. For a deeper dive, check out the podcast on Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube.