How many people do you need for each cycle of customer development?
Being a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you are pretty much short on all resources. This is a huge challenge but at the same time it forces you to trim fat wherever possible. I like being bootstrapped, I feel like I’ve got an “environmentally friendly” entrepreneurial existence. It’s quite cathartic.
So, since I love Customer Development and find a ton of value in interviewing people and validating problem/solution/MVP, I’ve come to a simple conclusion. Even with a relatively random sample, meaning I’ve chosen people who only approximate the target market, the magic number seems to be 8. Yes, eight.
After 2 people you see the glaringly obvious issues, after 3-4 people you start seeing strong patterns, after 5 you’re onto most of the big issues and once you hit 8, you’ve got 85%-90% of what you need. That’s enough. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to interview more people later. You should never stop soliciting feedback from users, but you need to know when you have enough to get to the next stage.
Once you get to 8, you’ll probably hear more or less the same things you heard before and lots of new feature requests. This is where the art lies, knowing what’s essential to show your unique value proposition and what needs to go into the icebox with other future features and be processed later.
