Most early-stage innovators come into customer discovery hoping to confirm what they already believe, and honestly, that’s human nature. You’ve spent months, sometimes years, developing a solution to a problem you’re convinced is real. Of course you want people to agree with you.
But here’s what we’ve seen consistently across teams in the NSF Great Plains I-Corps Hub: the first handful of interviews rarely tell the whole story. The first 10 conversations tend to surface the obvious stuff, pain points you probably already suspected and general agreement that yes, a problem exists. It feels validating, and it can also be misleading.
What changes around interview 20, 30, or 40 is harder to predict, and that’s exactly the point. Teams start hearing contradictions. A pain point that seemed universal turns out to only matter to a specific segment, and the person who uses a product every day cares about completely different things than the person who signs the check. Assumptions the team had quietly held for months start falling apart, and that’s not failure. That’s the process working.
Tracy Reding, a STEM education researcher at the University of Nebraska Omaha who completed both a regional cohort and our Discovery 60 program, described it as a fundamental shift in how she approached her work. “It was a mindset shift from the research focus to customer focus,” she said. “You have to learn how to be an active listener, not only how do you ask questions, but also how do you actively listen, whether or not it confirms or challenges what you initially thought.”
The I-Corps program is built around this reality. Our Ag45 (Agriculture 45) cohort, designed specifically for ag-focused innovations, challenges teams to complete 45 interviews within the agriculture ecosystem. Our Discovery 60 cohort pushes even further, asking teams to reach 60 interviews before drawing conclusions. The teams who keep going after they think they’ve already “gotten it” are usually the ones who find the most important insight buried underneath.
One of the most common things we hear from teams at the end of a cohort isn’t “we confirmed our idea.” It’s “we found something we never expected.” That shift, from seeking validation to genuinely pursuing understanding, is where commercialization starts to get real. As one industry mentor put it, until someone does customer discovery, the work they’re doing, the technology they’re building, is simply a hobby — and a lot of times an expensive one.
More conversations mean more chances to be surprised, challenged, and ultimately better informed, and in early-stage innovation, being well-informed before you build is one of the few advantages you can actually control.