What Interviews Can—and Can’t—Tell You About Demand

A useful lesson from market research: an interested answer is evidence of interest, not yet evidence of demand. Someone may sincerely say they would use a proposed tool, while the real obstacle only appears when they try to fit it into an existing workflow.

That doesn’t make interviews useless. They can reveal how people describe a problem, what they do now, and which constraints matter. A stronger next step is to observe a recent example or test a small, concrete commitment—then compare what people said with what they actually did.

The distinction matters: interviews help explain the problem; behavior helps test whether a proposed solution fits. What evidence would change your mind about whether a promising idea is worth pursuing?