Why founders skip user interviews
On paper, user interviews are obviously valuable. In practice, indie founders skip them because:
- Social discomfort. "Hi stranger, can I have 20 minutes of your time?" feels presumptuous. It feels like sales.
- Fear of negative feedback. If they hate it, you have to listen. Easier to assume they're happy.
- Logistics. Scheduling, calls, taking notes — feels like overhead vs "just shipping the next feature."
- Dataism. "I'll look at the analytics" feels rigorous. Conversations feel anecdotal.
I told myself versions of all four. The result: 30 conversations across 6 months. Should have been 100+.
What every conversation revealed
Patterns from the 30 interviews I did manage to do:
- One feature I overbuilt: receipt scanning. Almost no one used it. (Covered in this post.)
- One pain point I had no idea about: hostel-mates joining and leaving mid-month, breaking the math. Now there's a flow for that.
- One naming issue: users called the "settle up" button "pay" in conversation. I renamed the UI affordance.
- One distribution insight: 12 of 30 users had heard about Hisaab from a college flatmate. Word-of-mouth from college groups was a much bigger channel than I'd realized.
Every interview surfaced at least one of these. The cost: 20–30 minutes per call, plus a thank-you message. The ROI is unreasonable.
What I would do differently
- Build a habit, not a project. One interview per week, forever. Calendar block it like exercise. Don't wait for the "right time."
- Ask for the call when they're happy. Right after a positive review or a good support interaction is the easiest moment. People in a positive state say yes more often.
- Ask about behavior, not opinions. "Walk me through the last time you split a bill" beats "what features do you want?" every time.
- Talk to negative reviewers too. The friction is highest, but the insight density is highest. We've learned the most from users who almost churned.
- Record (with permission) and timestamp insights. Memory will fail. A 20-minute call has 5–10 actual insights buried in it.
The lesson for other indie founders
The cheapest research method is also the one indie founders skip the hardest. If you're building a consumer app and have under 1,000 users, you should be talking to one of them every week — at minimum. Do it before you build the next feature, not after.
And if you're a Hisaab user reading this — I'd love to talk to you. admin@thehisaab.com. 20 minutes. We reply to every email.