Last year I spent six months building a SaaS product. I did everything "right", polished UI, solid architecture, clean code. Launched to 12 signups...
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The risky part is that asking people what they want automated may collect ideas, not commitment.
The useful clue is the 12 signups / zero paying users part. If someone names an annoying manual task, I would look at what happened the last time it broke: what they used instead, who had to fix it, and whether fixing it was actually part of someone's job.
Without that, you can end up with a list of annoying workflows.
True, but not yet a first wedge.
Really sharp read, "ideas, not commitment" and "not yet a first wedge" is the honest diagnosis most people skip, and I didn't see it clearly until my postmortem either.
Since then I've flipped my process around the same instinct you're pointing at. When someone names a painful task, I don't ask what they'd want automated anymore. I ask three things:
A recurring annoyance is a complaint. A recurring annoyance with a broken process and a willingness to change is a wedge.
Genuine question though: how did you land on "first wedge" as the bar? Was it a filtering framework you built up, or did it come out of a specific interview that went sideways?
It came from the failure side, not from a framework first.
I was reading public postmortems of stalled products, and the same split kept showing up: the ones that moved had a current cost someone was already paying. A workaround, a bad alternative, an annoying manual step, a risk they were already living with.
The ones that stalled had interest, but not much cost.
So "first wedge" is just my name for the first kind. Closer to an interview going sideways, except the "interview" was a pile of other people's postmortems.
Your three questions are the right flip. The one I would weight most is "would you switch tomorrow" — with one caveat. In an interview, that answer is still aspirational unless it attaches to a dated incident.
"When this broke last month, I spent two hours on it" counts differently from "yes, I would probably switch."
If the switch answer cannot attach to a specific memory, it is still a wish describing itself as a decision.
That distinction is sharper than anything I had in my toolkit. A wish describing itself as a decision, that's going to stick with me.
It reframes how I'd run the next round of conversations. Not "would you switch?" but "walk me through the last time this actually hurt you." If they can't anchor it to a specific moment with a cost attached, the signal is weak no matter how enthusiastic the answer sounds.
Basically: enthusiasm is cheap. A dated incident with a real cost is the receipt.
Appreciate you pressure-testing this in public instead of just letting me sit with a clean-sounding framework that doesn't hold up.
Your last line is the one worth keeping: enthusiasm is cheap, a dated incident with a real cost is the receipt. That's the whole test in one sentence.
One small addition: a vivid incident is not always a recurring one.
"Walk me through the last time this hurt" gets the story. "How often does that happen?" separates the one-off war story from the ongoing cost.
A founder with one dramatic anecdote and a shrug on frequency is a different signal from a boring incident that happens every week.
Both count as receipts. Only one of them is a market.
Frequency is the whole filter. One dramatic story is a blog post. The same boring incident every week is a business.
That reframes the interview itself. You don't just need the story, you need the calendar. "When did it last hurt?" gets the receipt. "How many times this month?" tells you if it's a market or an anecdote.
Stealing "a wish describing itself as a decision" and now adding "a vivid incident is not always a recurring one." This thread is building a better filter than anything I've read on customer discovery.