The Secret...to talking to customers before you have a product -- or even a company

Fantastic point about using the present tense. I actually had the good chance to speak to a potential customer this week and did this (as luck would have it). A very good conversation ensued. If I had merely asked him what he wanted it wouldn't have been so good. This customer is very smart and very experienced, but he's still going to be stuck in a box--"this is the way we've always done it."

Much better to be bold about the feature set, pricing, schedule, what have you, and then measure the feedback.

Interesing read. But I think that better to only talking about your idea to your (candidate)customers you should talk about your product to everywhere, the most feedback you get the better. Of course, you should filter the feedback.

I'm in this phase currently, I've been talking with lots of friends, colleagues about an idea and they helped me to polish it, to the extreme that my initial idea and the current version are two completly different products! (But related.)

I think Paul wrote an essay about this same topic, but I can't find it :(

OK, so these people found that when they switched from being vague and telling the truth to being specific and lying, that they got more useful feedback. Did they try to isolate the two factors?

I think saying "ourdoings.com does X" when it doesn't yet would not help my relationship with potential customers.

This glosses over an important point: inbiased survey questions are very hard. Unless you've been trained to as nuetral questions (and I haven't), you need to weight the answers less.

A quick example: "do you want X?". Hell yah, I want X, it's so much better than not-X!