Nice piece. I cannot over emphasise how amazingly effective actually getting off your butt and finding/talking to potential customers is. A few random addition

Nice piece. I cannot over emphasise how amazingly effective actually getting off your butt and finding/talking to potential customers is. A few random additional thoughts / tips. 1) If I'd have been in Patrick's shoes I'd have gone out a little earlier and start talked to folk with more open ended questions - before even building the 2 page demo. Things like "Can you just talk me through your typical day?" or "Tell me about a bad day?". Why? If the problem you care about is important to those people - if it's problem #1 or #2 - it will come up in conversation naturally. If it doesn't then that is telling you something useful and interesting. If you start the conversation by talking about appointments that is where it will go. Once you start talking about it with them it naturally becomes the focus of the conversation and any issues and problems will pop up and seem important - even if they would normally not care about them in the slightest. More importantly - because the conversation is just around appointments - you won't here about the other major problems in their life. Maybe the biggest issue is dealing with staff who don't show up, or managing the shift rota, or keeping track of client preferences, or whatever. And then you can dive in with something like "Can you tell me more about that?" and discover this lovely problem that the customer actually cares about. 2) On the "talk to people in the target industry" another sneaky way to find folk is to see if you can find a $industry conference you can get to. You get a target-rich environment for $industry and they're often a bit more informal and happy to talk (or drunk - which also works ;-). If you don't feel you can attend/crash the conference itself then find out what the conference hotel(s) is/are and hang out in the lobby. Or find out what the popular post-conference bars are and hang out there. (This is, of course, an instance of the more general advice of "hang out where your customers hang out".) 3) If it's more than just you I'd recommend talking to folk in pairs. Most people find it really hard to both engage in a conversation and take notes at the same time. Having one person do most of the talking, and somebody else do most of the writing makes it much easier to capture the information. Having mixed-sex pairs also helps in approaching strangers too. 4) Dress slightly smarter than the default for wherever you're doing the interviews. It makes a real difference in how you're treated. If the idea of doing interviews still scares you and you'd like some concrete advise on technique I'd consider reading this really short pocket guide from Andrew Travers http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/interviewing-for-research http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/interviewing-for-res.... It's not written for budding startup/entrepreneur folk but much of the advice is applicable. Bonus is that it's very short. If you you like that book and want to dive deeper Steve Portigal's "Interviewing Users" (http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/ http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/) is a great book that covers everything in much more detail. Again - not written for startup folk but there's a lot of great advice you can steal.