Two paths to the same truth
Interviews are the gold standard, but you can't always reach someone right away. So there are two paths to real evidence. Pick the one you can start today.
Path A
Direct interviews
Learn how to prepare and conduct user interviews with this guided video walkthrough.
Video not loading? Open it in Loom.
Path B
Social listening
You can't reach someone yet, so you find evidence where your people already talk, write, and complain.
Everything you need for this path is right here in this guide.
Read onBoth paths give you the same three things: real quotes, documented pain, and a decision about what to do next. If you can do both, do both. Decide up front which one you're leading with so you don't spread yourself thin.
What counts as evidence
You want unbiased, unprompted experiences, found where people naturally talk.
Counts
- Reddit threadsPeople describing the problem in their own raw words.
- App store reviewsA reviewer calling out a painful gap. This is a bonus source if you're on the Product/SaaS track.
- CommunitiesDiscord servers, Facebook groups, and forums where the same pain keeps coming up.
- News & reportsTrade articles and industry reports that document the problem at scale.
- Social videoYouTube comments and TikTok replies where someone is frustrated in the moment.
Does not count
- No-author blogUnverified. Nobody stands behind it.
- AI summaryNo direct link to what real people said.
- Team opinionsYour own assumptions, restated as facts.
- Single anecdoteOne person's experience, treated as a trend.
- Blind statsA number with no source you can check yourself.
Tip
Can you point to where it lives and who said it? If yes, it counts. If no, keep looking.
How to search
Look for places where your people complain without knowing you're watching. A Reddit post written at 11pm by someone who's stuck is worth more than a survey from a research firm.
Try this search
Open Reddit. Search your problem keyword plus one of these:
Then scan for posts with real specifics, not general venting.
While you search
Behavior, not opinion
"I hate this" is an opinion. "I spent two hours rebuilding my spreadsheet from scratch because the app deleted everything" is behavior, and behavior is what you want.
Curious, not confirming
Don't only keep the posts that agree with you. The ones that complicate your idea make your findings more credible.
Follow the workaround
A hack, a manual fix, or a tool someone cobbled together is your richest signal that the pain is real.
Capture it like data
Treat everything you find the way you'd treat an interview note. A finding without a source didn't happen.
Quote it
Copy the exact words. No paraphrasing.
Source it
Write down where it came from and when.
Tag it
Note which theme or pattern it belongs to.
Example entry
| Quote | Source | Date | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| "I just gave up and use a sticky note on my laptop now because everything else failed me." | Reddit, r/highschool | June 2025 | Workarounds |
That entry is made up, for illustration. Do this consistently and you'll have a real dataset to work with, not a vague sense of what people think.
Use AI to find and sharpen
AI can help in three ways. It can point you to where the conversation is already happening, pull out the exact language people use, and argue with your assumptions before you build around them.
It can't be your source. AI finds the trail and you follow it, so open the original post, review, or article yourself before anything counts as evidence.
Fill this in once
Every prompt on this page updates as you type. Use any AI assistant you like, or run them with Flor, your innovation coach, in your Classroom.
Prompt 1
Find where the conversation lives
Instead of guessing which subreddit or forum to check, hand AI your problem and your target user and ask it to point you there.
Prompt 2
Surface the exact language
Paste in a batch of reviews, comments, or posts you've collected, then run this. The words your future users use are usually better than the words you'd choose yourself.
Prompt 3
Stress-test your assumption
Give AI your working hypothesis and ask it to argue with you. It's a good way to catch a leap in logic before you build three months around it.
From notes to patterns
Here's the step most people skip: synthesis. A pile of raw notes doesn't tell you anything on its own. Turned into a small number of decisions, it tells you a lot.
The synthesis prompt
Notice the prompt asks AI to respond to a hypothesis you already formed. That's on purpose. When you say what you think the pattern is and ask AI to challenge you, you get a sharper answer than when you dump your notes and ask what it sees.
Once you have a response, do three things.
Circle matches
What matches what you already found.
Flag gaps
Anything AI surfaced that you missed.
Push back
Anything that doesn't match what you actually heard.
AI is a partner here, not the decision-maker.
Back to your problem statement
This is the same sentence from Module 0. Now you have real material for every blank.
Use the actual words your interviewees and reviewers used, not your summary of them. If you can't fill in the sentence with confidence yet, that's information, not failure. It means you need two or three more conversations, and that's a much cheaper thing to learn now than three months from now.