No (kindly end the interview) Based on Bita’s persona, the goal of her screener questions is to identify if the woman she’s interviewing recently planned a wedding in Los Angeles. She needed participants with fresh memories about what happened at their weddings. Also, she needed them to be married in sunny Southern California, in which they probably had an outdoor venue like a park, beach, or fancy backyard. This detail was crucial to validating the Airbnb for Weddings value proposition, because she assumed that these outside locations (such as someone’s fancy backyard overlooking the beach) would have solved this potential participant’s wedding venue woes. Phase 2: The interview If a woman passed the screener test, Bita was able to move on to her actual interview questions. Typically, this is when product makers and tech entrepreneurs like to extol the virtues of their awesome value proposition. But, if you just start pitching ideas at strangers, they tend to just nod their heads in agreement to quickly get the hell away from you. That’s not the validation you need or want. Remember customer discovery is about listening and not selling. Let’s take a look at how Bita handled it in her interview questions: 1. How did you go about planning your wedding? Prompt for both ceremony and reception locations Prompt for tools/means, such as Internet, word-of-mouth 2. Did you have a budget for venues and were you able to stay within that budget? (If not, by how much more?) 3. How many people were you planning to have at the reception (for example, 50 to 200)? 4. What were some of the challenges you faced in finding the venues (Prompt: e.g., finding the ideal location, such as by the beach)? 5. How did you overcome these challenges? Did you end up having to compromise on your ideal wedding? These questions actually set up the context for our solution. Now that the participant has that context, it’s time for Bita to ask her money-shot question. Bita: Excellent, thank you so much for all this great feedback. I have two last questions for you. 6. Have you ever heard of or tried a website called “Airbnb”?