Meet IVA: Revolutionizing Customer Interviews

When most people hear customer interviews, they shiver. We all read about the importance of talking to target customers and understanding their problems. And yet, when faced with customer interviews, everybody gets creative in avoiding them. Some run surveys, and others excuse themselves for the lack of people to interview.

We get it—there are many reasons for interviews to be hard. That’s why Icanpreneur is on its path to making customer interviews as streamlined and rewarding an experience as possible for entrepreneurs and product builders. Their path to product-market fit is based on consistently validated steps instead of gut feeling and luck.

Critical Role of an Interview Script

The customer interview process starts long before meeting the interviewee. It starts with preparing an interview script.

Why is an interview script needed? Interview scripts ensure that conversations are executed consistently so that insights extracted from them, later on, are valid.

What’s hard about interview scripts? Chances are that interviewing people is not something you learned at school. You might feel intimidated and anxious because you do not know how to do it.

The good news is that it is science more than anything else. Asking questions without biasing the interviewee with our thinking is essential for getting valid insights. Yet, when we are all passionate about what we are doing, it might be hard to detach yourself from the product you are about to build.

The Icanpreneur Way

Customer problem interview scripts were part of the Icanpreneur product for a while, but they were ignored by our early adopters. We went out to ask why and to understand more about people's experience with the platform.

What did we learn? Going through a 30 to 40-minute script requires time. In its initial form, the product required the user to check the script for gaps - something users want to understand that is lacking in the script. But they also had to fix grammar, adjust language, and tune the tone so the script sounded like them. And that was taking time.

So, Meet IVA

Icanpreneur Virtual Assistant, or IVA, is an LLM-based solution, adjusted for the specific needs of people who want to prepare a customer interview script. It takes a predefined template + the job-to-be-done defined by you to return with a customer problem interview script that … sounds great and you can use right away for your interviews—in less than 3 minutes!

To illustrate AI's impact on the script generation process, take a look at the following excerpt from an actual interview script with and without AI.

Where IVA adds value:

Adjust Grammar and Syntax

When replacing the provided by the user job-to-be-done into the predefined template, sentences do not always make sense. IVA helps with fixing the sentences so they are grammatically correct. This might include fixing the verb tense, adjusting conjugation, adding punctuation, etc.

Tune the Language and Style

Not all jobs are equal. Some might be urgent, life-or-death matters, while others are long-awaited delights. Something about “having a need to find a place to enjoy a gourmet meal” just doesn’t sound right. The AI model understands the context of the job-to-be-done - in this case, a gourmet restaurant being a special experience, and adjusts the question based on that context.

How did we do that?

Key techniques used in the implementation include:

• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting: This technique, similar to how a human might think through a problem step-by-step, helps the AI organize its approach to creating interview scripts.
• Directional Stimulus Prompting: The system offers example sentence enhancements and hints to guide the AI in crafting appropriately specific interview questions.
• Contextual guidelines: We provide comprehensive guidelines to the AI before it replaces placeholders, ensuring a thorough understanding of the task.

During our technical evaluation of more than 10 different models, we sought the best balance between cost, quality, and speed. Anthropic's models consistently delivered the best output across these criteria. Their aggressive release cycle, including the recent Claude 3.5 Sonnet version, which offers higher speed and lower cost, convinced us that this is a technology we can rely on moving forward. Another highlight is the excellent documentation on structuring prompts, allowing our team to fine-tune the model output precisely.

Another key element of the Icanpreneur platform's technological stack is the ability to trace, measure, debug, and improve the model's performance. For that purpose, we integrated Langfuse, which empowers effective development while protecting the privacy of the platform's users.

The Role of AI in Innovation

The future potential for companies is vertically integrating AI in a specific problem domain. Combining your domain expertise and understanding of the problem with AI capabilities will create a new level of customer value.

We are experiencing a remarkable technological breakthrough, leading to the next generation of discontinuous innovation. The rise of AI opens a window of opportunity for new products to disrupt existing markets.

Teams with a deep understanding of a problem space and domain expertise are now empowered to use AI to provide previously impossible value. These moments in history are very rare. We at Icanpreneur have the privilege of having the front seat supporting our customers in this endeavor.

What’s Next for Icanpreneur?

We believe AI has a massive role in supporting entrepreneurs and product builders on their path to market success. That’s why AI is a CORE element of the Icanpreneur product strategy.

You can expect many other AI-enhanced features to pop up on the platform where they make the most sense for you in the future. Some of those features are already in the works and are the product of deep technological research on what works best.

We are settled on complementing our own expertise in product building with AI capabilities to provide an entrepreneurial experience that creates strong tailwinds for startups and innovative enterprise companies.

This turns AI into an unfair advantage that is hard for others to replicate.

To try the new enhanced script-building experience, jump straight into the Icanpreneur Platform and check out the "Prepare Your Problem Discovery Interview Script" task within your own startup journey.