How to Use AI Agents to Find Your First Users and Run Customer Discovery Interviews

Most solo builders do not have a distribution problem first. They have a "who exactly is this for, and where are they?" problem. Customer discovery answers that question, and it is the part of building that people skip most often because it involves talking to strangers.

AI agents do not remove the talking. They remove almost everything around it: finding people who have the problem, reading what they already wrote, drafting a respectful first note, preparing interview questions, and turning messy notes into decisions. This guide gives you a workflow and the prompts to run it in Claude Code, Codex, ChatGPT or any agent that can browse the web.

What the agent should and should not do

Set the rules before you start, because the fastest way to burn a community is to automate the wrong step.

Let the agent:

• Search public posts and threads for people describing the problem.
• Summarize what they said and why they might be a fit.
• Draft a short, personal first message for you to edit.
• Prepare interview guides and summarize your notes.

Do not let the agent:

• Send messages, comments or connection requests on your behalf. You send every message yourself, one at a time.
• Scrape sites in ways their terms forbid, or collect personal data beyond what a person posted publicly.
• Invent details about a person ("loved your talk at...") that it did not read in their own post.
• Post in communities for you.

Each step below follows that split: the agent researches and drafts, and you decide and send.

The workflow at a glance

Step 1: Write the problem brief

Agents produce generic lists when they get generic inputs. Start by giving the agent a clear brief, and let it ask you questions to fill the gaps.

You are helping me run customer discovery for a product I built.

Here is what I know so far:
- Product: [one or two sentences]
- Who I think it is for: [role + situation, e.g. "solo Shopify store owners doing their own ads"]
- The problem it solves: [in the customer's words if you have them]
- What they do today instead: [spreadsheets, a competitor, nothing]

Ask me up to 5 questions that would make this sharper. Then write a one-page
problem brief with: the target person, the trigger moment when the problem
hurts, current workarounds, and 10 search phrases this person would actually
type or post when they have the problem. Phrase the search terms the way a
frustrated user writes, not the way a marketer writes.

The ten search phrases are the most useful output. "how do you keep track of [thing]", "is there a tool that [does X]", "I'm so tired of [task]" find people. Category names find vendors.

Step 2: Find 20 people who have the problem

Run this in an agent with web search (Claude with web search, ChatGPT with search, or Claude Code or Codex with a search tool or browser MCP).

Using the problem brief above, find 20 people who have publicly described
this problem in the last 12 months. Search Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers,
X, niche forums and product review sites (G2, Capterra, app store reviews of
competitors).

For each person, return a row with:
- Link to the exact post or comment
- Platform and community (e.g. r/shopify)
- Their handle as shown publicly
- A short quote (under 25 words) of the problem in their own words
- Date of the post
- Fit score 1-5 with one sentence of reasoning
- Whether the platform allows direct messages, or only public replies

Rules:
- Only include posts you actually opened and read. If you cannot open a link,
  leave it out. Never guess or paraphrase a quote you did not see.
- Do not include personal data beyond what the person posted publicly.
- Skip people who are clearly vendors promoting their own tool.
- Sort by fit score, then recency.

Then check the list yourself. Open every link. Agents sometimes return a thread that is related but where the person never had the problem. Remove anyone who does not fit; ten good rows beat twenty mixed ones.

Good places agents find people quickly:

• Complaint threads in niche subreddits and forums ("anyone else frustrated with...").
• One- to three-star reviews of the tools your users use today. Those reviewers are already explaining what is missing.
• "What tool do you use for X?" threads, where people list workarounds.
• Questions on Hacker News or Indie Hackers from people in your target role.

Step 3: Draft outreach that does not read like spam

The goal of the first note is a conversation, not a signup. It should be short, specific to what the person wrote, and easy to say no to.

Draft a first message to each person on the list. Constraints:
- Under 80 words.
- Open by referencing the specific thing they wrote, with the link in mind,
  without quoting it back at length.
- Say plainly who I am: a solo builder working on this problem.
- Ask one question about how they handle it today, OR ask for a 20-minute
  call. Not both.
- Do not pitch the product or include a link in the first message.
- No flattery, no exclamation marks, no "I hope this finds you well".
- If the platform only allows public replies, write a helpful public reply
  that answers their question first and mentions I am researching the
  problem, without a link.

Return the drafts as a numbered list matching the people list.

A good draft looks like this:

Hi [name], I saw your post in r/[community] about reconciling payouts by hand
every Friday. I'm a solo developer looking into exactly that problem. How are
you handling it now, and what's the most annoying part? Happy to share what
I've learned from others if useful. No pitch, just research.

Edit every draft before you send it. Send them yourself, spread over a few days, and follow each community's rules on direct messages. Expect most people not to reply. That is normal, and it is why you start with twenty.

Step 4: Prepare customer discovery interviews

The best customer discovery interviews ask about the past, not the future. "Would you use this?" invites polite lies. "Tell me about the last time this happened" gets real behavior.

Write a customer discovery interview guide for a 20-minute call with someone
in my target segment. Use the Mom Test principles: ask about specific past
events and current behavior, never about hypothetical future use or my idea.

Include:
- A 2-sentence opener that sets expectations (research, not a sales call)
- 8 to 10 questions, in order, each with one follow-up probe
- Questions that uncover: the last time the problem happened, what they did,
  what it cost (time, money, stress), what they've tried, why those didn't
  work, and who else is involved in the decision
- 3 questions I must NOT ask, and why
- A closing that asks who else I should talk to

Cut the result to eight questions you would actually ask out loud. The Mom Test, a short book by Rob Fitzpatrick (momtestbook.com), is worth reading before your first call; the prompt borrows its core idea.

A typical guide ends up close to this:

1. Tell me about the last time you had to [do the task].
2. What did you do, step by step?
3. What was the most frustrating part?
4. How often does this come up?
5. What have you tried to make it easier? What happened?
6. What does it cost you when it goes wrong?
7. If you could wave a magic wand, what would be different? (Listen, then ask why.)
8. Who else should I talk to about this?

Step 5: Run the interviews yourself

This is the one step to keep human. Some practical notes:

• Record only with permission, and say how you will use the notes.
• Talk less than a third of the time. Silence after a question often gets the best answer.
• Do not demo the product unless they ask, and only after the questions.
• Write notes right after the call, while you still remember the exact words people used.

Five to ten interviews in one segment are usually enough to see whether a pattern is real.

Step 6: Turn notes into jobs to be done

Paste your raw notes (or transcripts, with personal details removed) and ask the agent to find patterns without inventing them.

Here are notes from [N] customer discovery interviews. Each starts with
"Interview #".

1. For each interview, extract:
   - The job they are trying to get done, as "When [situation], I want to
     [motivation], so I can [outcome]"
   - Current workaround and what it costs them
   - Exact quotes that show strong pain (copy verbatim, mark the interview #)
   - Any money or time they already spend on the problem
2. Then across all interviews:
   - Group the jobs into 2-4 themes, with how many interviews mention each
   - Rank themes by evidence of pain (spending, workarounds, frequency),
     not by how often a feature was requested
   - List what surprised you versus my original problem brief
   - List contradictions between interviews
3. Rules: only use what is in the notes. If something is unclear, say
   "not enough evidence". Do not add quotes or numbers that are not in
   the notes.

The output you are looking for is not a feature list. It is a sharper sentence for your landing page headline, a clearer idea of who to target first, and sometimes the discovery that the problem is real for a different group than you expected.

Step 7: Recruit your first beta testers

The people who gave you the most specific answers are your best beta testers. They already understand the problem and have told you what good looks like.

From the interview synthesis, list the 5 people whose job and pain most
closely match the strongest theme. For each, draft a short note that:
- Thanks them for the conversation and names one specific thing they told me
- Explains in one sentence what I changed or built because of it
- Invites them to try it free for 30 days in exchange for a 15-minute
  feedback call
- Makes it easy to say no
Under 100 words each.

When beta users give you feedback you are allowed to quote, ask for permission explicitly and use their words exactly. That becomes the real social proof your page is probably missing; in our scan of 238 launch pages, half had none.

Common mistakes

• Treating the agent's list as verified. Open every link before you write to anyone.
• Pitching in the first message. A question gets replies; a pitch gets ignored or reported.
• Asking about the future. "Would you pay for this?" tells you almost nothing.
• Talking to anyone who will talk. Five people in one segment beat fifteen across five segments.
• Sending at volume. Twenty personal notes over a week is customer discovery. Two hundred templated ones in a day is spam.

When you would rather not do the search yourself

The workflow above takes a weekend. If the bottleneck is time rather than skill, LaunchBuddy's First Ten service ($199) returns ten named prospects with a way in and a drafted note for each, and Ten honest reviews ($199) puts the product in front of ten people in the market who tell you the truth. Either way, you still send the notes and have the conversations.

Before you invite anyone, make sure the page they land on explains the product. Paste your URL at launchbuddy.com/scan for a free launch-readiness score and the one gap to fix first.

Related reading

• Zero to first 100 users: a distribution playbook
• Launching an MVP: how to get unstuck
• How to validate a product idea before you build more