The Confirmation Bias of the Discovery Call
Every developer has been there. You have an idea for a new SaaS tool or developer utility. You spend two weeks running discovery calls, filling Notion docs with quotes, and walking away convinced you have found the signal. People are polite. They say "I would use that" when they actually mean "that sounds interesting." They say "pricing is not a concern" right before they churn over pricing.
Real demand does not live in what people tell you in a scheduled 30-minute call. It lives in what they search for at midnight, what they paid for last quarter, where competitors are bleeding revenue, and which pain points show up in hundreds of public reviews they wrote when no one was listening.
Relying solely on customer interviews is a common trap for technical founders. While interviews are useful for empathy and understanding user workflows, they are dangerous as your primary evidence of market demand. One is a polite conversation; the other is the market speaking for itself.
The Anatomy of Cold Market Signals
