Keep It Casual

You don't need to schedule 'customer discovery interviews'. Formal meetings add friction, put people in polite mode, and make everything slower. The early learning you need fits into casual conversations: at an event, in a community, at the end of another call.

Fitzpatrick suggests you can strip the formality entirely: a good question about how someone deals with a problem takes five minutes and doesn't require them to know you're doing research. The learning happens faster when nobody is performing.

Formality returns later, when you're showing product and asking for commitment. That's a sales meeting and should look like one. But the learning phase should feel like a chat, not a deposition.