One of the main lessons I learned early on was that your problem and hypothesis don't mean anything unless you can validate them with users. You HAVE to get out there and talk to real people. Don't hide behind your computer; you need to get on the phone, arrange meetings, and visit them in person if you can. Over the past 6 months, I've talked to over 70 architects and engineers through Zoom calls or office visits.

When you get a confirmation, write 7 to 10 questions that help you understand their problems and potentially validate your hypothesis. However, DO NOT tell them what you are working on. This step is crucial to avoid introducing confirmation bias. If the interviewee is passionate and truly struggles with issues at their job, they will reveal far more information than you might expect. It’s pretty telling when your meeting is meant to be 20 minutes long and they end up talking for almost an hour! I’d assume that’s a good sign; they are so invested in these problems that they keep sharing more and more. I highly recommend reading Talking to Humans by Giff Constable when you embark on your first customer discovery interviews.

It's also essential to take notes or record these interviews. I basically just ask each interviewer if it’s OK to record and save them all on my Zoom account. They may come in handy if we need to revisit some of the conversations in the future. There is a lot of valuable information and potential clues on how to proceed with your product, but only as long as you pay attention! I’d say, one of the main challenges I faced was sifting through the so much of feedback. Identifying which aspects to pursue, which to put on the back burner, and which to disregard was an underrated difficulty I didn’t expect. It’s very easy to be captivated by some feedback and start adding more and more features, but your job is really to find that simple yet core concept without diluting it with a lot of noisy or unnecessary ‘baggage’. As Mies Van der Rohe would say: “Less is More”. Or maybe you’ve watched The Bear and seen that written in his journal, ha!

After our initial interviews, we started to identify patterns and rolled out an online survey. We received responses from almost 100 participants (professional architects and engineers) from across 20 different states. This allowed us to transition from gathering qualitative data to quantitative data; meaning, learning about user emotions and feelings through conversations, and then defining those insights on a statistical basis. Here are some of the main highlights:

• Over 75% of respondents were not satisfied with their current process of researching and selecting products.
• To find product information, over 90% relied on Google, 44% used Material Bank, and 16% used 4specs.com among others.
• 70% desired more automation in this process.
• 43% of responders did not have a materials database. The other 57% told us they relied on Excel, Word, Internet bookmarks, and saving PDFs on their servers. Which by the way, this was eye-opening for us—no one used a dedicated solution but rather conventional software to address this frustration. To us, this was an aha! moment, none of these are intuitive enough or have solid search, categorizing, archive capabilities that you’d expect.

When asked the famous "magic wand question"—"If you could solve ANY issue at your firm, what would it be?"—the most common responses were:

• Communication and Coordination Improvement
• Streamlining Documentation
• Centralized Information Systems
• Efficiency through Quality Control
• Time Management
• Automation of Repetitive Tasks