From Intuition to Evidence: Gathering Clean Evidence for Problem-Validation (part 3)
Everything to this point structures your intuition so you can state the problem clearly. But here’s the dirty truth of founder intuition: without clean evidence, intuition remains an assumption. Even if the assumption is directionally correct, evidence adds the conditions and nuance. With evidence, your goal is to learn:
When the problem actually shows up (contexts, triggers, frequency).
For whom it’s truly painful (segment, role, maturity).
What “success” really means for that stakeholder (outcome definition).
Which edge cases matter (and which to ignore for v1).
Intuition gives you the direction; evidence gives you the details.
What constitutes clean evidence?
Clean evidence is behavior-backed, bias-aware, repeatable, and can be obtained using the following techniques:
Unbiased discovery: problem interviews with the stakeholders experiencing the pain, no pitching, no leading questions.
Observed behaviour: a concierge run, prototype walk-through, or workflow shadowing.
Willingness signals: metrics around time invested, data access granted, or money committed (pilot, LOI, pre-pay).
Triangulation: the top pains repeat across interviews, and the same blockers recur.
Replicability: signals hold when you talk to new people in the same segment.
A simplified system for capturing evidence
While there are several robust systems for capturing techniques (something that I will write about in a later post), a simple way to organise evidence is to use a single page (or form submission) per item. You can spin this up in Google Forms or Notion to make capture fast and consistent.
For ad-hoc notes, links, emails, call snippets (≤60s exercise):
Title (short)
Evidence Type: User insight / Competitor insight / Industry insight
Audience/Stakeholder: Agency-side researcher / Customer-side researcher / No specific stakeholder
Top 1–2 observations or quotes (bullets; add timestamp if from a call)
Source link (recording, email, doc, Loom, Drive)
Submitter (name)
(Optional) Signal tick: Unprompted pain? □ Yes □ No
For formal interviews/tests (5-7 min exercise)
Who/When: stakeholder (+ segment), date, method (interview/prototype/concierge)
Top 3 observations (bullets with quote/time; no solutions)
Emerging Opportunity (optional): “Users struggle to ___ because ___.”
Evidence Type / Audience (same pickers as above)
Links: transcript/recording/artifacts
(Optional)Willingness signal: Data access / LOI / time invested (Y/N)
Do
- Capture what you saw/heard; use their words where possible.
- Add links to source materials/raw evidence to keep an auditable trail.
Don’t
- Pitch or propose a solution in the capture.
- Merge personas (“Franken-customer”). Identify one stakeholder class and write evidence from their perspective.
Keep a lightweight Evidence Log (one card/row per submission). The product person processes each item into Insights or Opportunities and then clusters them into associated problems to be tacked together.
