The Foundation:

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The foundation of every user research project should be to 

1. explore a problem space without a made-up mind
2. validate or invalidate a thesis 

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You are already dead in the water if you start a research project just to “prove you are right.” So be honest with yourself if you feel like you know exactly what you will build, no matter what feedback you get. Save yourself from the wasted time, but know the risk you’re taking.

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For everybody else, let’s get into it.

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Who do you talk to?

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Who you talk to has a major impact on the results of your validation research, so you can approach it in two ways:

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1. Throw a big net and talk to lots of different people in different company types & sizes in different industries to see where the problem space you are exploring is the most pressing.

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2. Have a clear thesis of what type of company or industry you are going after to make the breakdown of differences between the people/companies you talk to more nuanced.

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Either way: 

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After doing enough early research of type a), you should at some point see which rough ICP has the most pressing problem and then go into more granular type b) research.

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The reason we started with type b) is because my Holding Company EarlyNode, has a clear strategy of “Building SaaS products for SaaS companies,” 

So, I don’t care if agencies or real estate agents also have the problem we are exploring, as this is a strategic constraint we set for ourselves.

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That’s why, in validating SocialKit, I talked to founders, IC marketers, head of marketing, and head of content of SaaS companies of sizes from 2 people to 500 people to see who has the problem we were exploring.

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Getting people on customer discovery calls

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First, let’s set expectations:

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It’s not enough to talk to 10 people and call it a day.

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In my initial validation research to decide if we want to go after the idea of SocialKit I did around 20-25 calls, BUT that was after market research on my own and with a core strategy of EarlyNode being that we are trying to build a better mouse-trap and not reinvent the wheel.

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So even with zero research calls and just copying/pasting a competitor, we would have had some chance of being at an okay starting point.

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What I am trying to say:

If you do something crazy innovative, I think the number needs to be more than 50-100.

And the great thing:

This also validates if you are even able to get customers one day.

Because if you can’t even get people on a 30-minute call, the chances of getting them at scale to buy your product are - at least - not great.

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So it’s a micro-validation for the initial GTM-phase of founder-led sales.

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But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Schedule calls that are at least 30 minutes long. 1h calls would be even better, but people are busy, and it’s hard to get people to agree to 1h calls initially. 

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A smart hack here:

Just ask them for a follow-up call a couple of weeks later if the initial call was insightful and if there was rapport between you and the person.

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Here are some tips on how to get the initial calls:

1. Your network: Ask the ICP people in your network if they had time for a chat.

2. Post in relevant communities. 

3. Do outbound on LinkedIn.

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Here’s a guide on how to do the calls:

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Ground rules:

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• Don’t tell them what the idea is. You want unbiased, honest opinions.

• Always record the calls → you don’t want to fumble around with note-taking during the conversation.
• Re-assure them that it’s not a sales call otherwise people can get defensive. Say something like “We are currently considering doing a startup in the ABC field so I am talking to folks with job title ABC at company type XYZ to learn more about the space. 

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Every call should have mostly the same structure, and you should have 1-2 “core topics” you always want to talk about and that you really dig into.

For me this was talking about:

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Are people using organic social in their SaaS marketing to drive revenue?

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And if yes: on which platforms? And who on their team is responsible for it? Through which profiles do they post? Are they paying for any tools to help with that?

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What can be spotted in my structure:

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I started with a very broad and high-level question that is a core prerequisite for them, even if they are potential future customers.

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Because our initial thesis was that SaaS startups are using social media through personal profiles of founders to drive revenue.

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So if they would have said that they do social for employer branding purposes, or only on company profiles that would have shown us that they are not a fit.

And if a major percentage of the people you talk to would not be a fit that is an indicator that too few companies have that pain and that your thesis is inherently wrong.

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Which is amazing! Because you just saved yourself from building a pointless startup for two years that is destined to go no-where.

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Let’s use my research for SocialKit as an example again:

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Initially, our hypothesis was to build a founder-led social media management tool spanning platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and BlueSky. This approach was inspired by our experience at ReactSquad (a dev staffing agency I co-founded), where Jan Hesters, my co-founder, is the face of the brand. 

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So I asked the people I spoke to if they use social media to drive revenue and what social channels they are using. Most of them said “yes we use social media to drive awareness so that we get more revenue”.

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All of them used LinkedIn, some of them LinkedIn + Twitter, or LinkedIn + YouTube, or LinkedIn + BlueSky….but LinkedIn was the constant.

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Unexpectedly a high percentage of B2B SaaS companies only used LinkedIn and nothing else.

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This made me challenge my assumption of whether we should really build for all the social platforms instead of just being LinkedIn-focused.

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But I did not jump the fence and just marked this in my “open questions” product doc with a big red question mark.

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The second assumption that did not hold up was that brands are fully focused on “founder-led marketing,” aka having the founders as the sole face of the brand.

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Especially the venture-backed SaaS startups I talked to wanted to leverage their employees' LinkedIn profiles to increase awareness for their startup.

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So “employee advocacy” as a use-case entered the scene.

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And then another couple people made off-hands comments like “yeah I’m trying to get my sales team into posting more, we’re running a pilot with on Account Executive and then consider rolling it out across the whole sales team”. 

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That’s how social selling was suddenly something I had to consider as a use-case we might need to tackle as well with SocialKit.

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So those were the next two topics I needed to dive into, and I needed to validate if enough of our target ICP are executing employee advocacy and social selling.

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As you see in my example, getting “led away” from your initial thesis is not a bad thing. Quite  the opposite it’s a natural part of the process.

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What’s hard to teach in an article and sadly just takes experience is knowing which rabbit holes to dig into and where to put a line in the sand in terms of “yes, this might be an issue that people are having, but I am not planning to also solve this issue”.



At what point can I stop doing research calls? 

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How many calls are enough calls?

The answer to this is as elegant as stupidly simple: When you stop learning new things.

The sole goal of research calls is for you to learn about the problem space and the customers you are talking to. When you notice that you are starting to get bored in calls because you think to yourself, “yepp…that old story of this issue in that situation again”, then you can stop without feeling guilty.

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How do I know if the idea is validated?

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This is a bit more tricky, and the two main signals I am using are:

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1.  It is the degree to which I can find a common thread between all the participants' problems I am talking about. If everyone seems to have a different problem or a completely different situation, then there is no way you can build a single SaaS solution for them to solve this pain.

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2. How interested are they in using/buying the product? I, on purpose, did not do any kind of sales pitch at the end of the calls to see what percentage of research participants themselves say something like, “Please tell me when it’s live so that I can test it with my team.” 

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