To increase our chances of building a CRM that businesses are willing to pay for, we decided to learn from interviews with our target audience: owners of delivery businesses, such as water delivery, carpet cleaning, and logistics.
I prepared the questionnaire and interview rules with Claude. At first it generated too many questions (55-60), some marked “Must” and some not. It looked good at first glance, but the number felt huge, so I started thinking about how to cut it.
I went through every question and did four things:
- Removed questions that made no sense in our context.
- Merged questions that asked the same thing in different words.
- Marked which ones are mandatory and which are not.
- Added a “What you can learn” note under each question. The interviewer won’t be me, and the note gives them a clear understanding of why each question matters, so reading from a script doesn’t feel awkward.
The thing I want to share:
No matter how lazy you get with AI, you still have to review what it does.
Next time I’ll share what we learned from the interviews and how it will shape our prioritization, solutions, design, and development. Until then, here are the questions and instructions for the interviewer:
Interview questions
👋 Hi, below is a list of questions that, in my opinion, are worth asking business owners.