I and my co-founders are working on a side project called AutoMicroFarm [0]. AutoMicroFarm is solar panels for your food: an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software. We have a pretty good idea about how to develop and iterate our prototypes (we are following WikiSpeed’s/OSE’s Extreme Manufacture model [1]), and we know with a strong degree of certainty about what we want.

However, I keep reading entrepreneurship advice to begin marketing before starting to build the product, to make what (presumably many) people want, etc. We are following the “running lean” book [2] to clarify the top three problems our product is solving, and we have a list of interested people who gave us their emails/twitters to interview, as well as some other thought leaders in this space whom we would like to interview.

My problem is that I don’t feel I have a firm grasp on asking these people the right questions. The questions I really want answered are:

* Are you interested in producing the vast majority (up to 90%) of your own food if it was convenient?

* If so, are you willing to spend a few hours a week doing it? (I assume that if the person is a gardener, he is already putting in at least a few hours a week into the garden).

* Are you willing to pay one to two years’ worth of groceries for it (since that is how long it takes to pay for itself)? This would come out to $1600-$3200 per adult.

* Is the open-source aspect of the product appealing to you? Will you be tinkering with and modifying the system to your advantage, or just using it according to instructions?

Somehow, I don’t think just asking those questions to the people I’m interviewing point-blank will yield honest answers we’re looking for. How to best approach this customer need discovery/affirmation? If the problem interview is not a good customer discovery/marketing tool for physical products, what is a better process to find out if we AutoMicroFarmers are building something many people want, and not just us?

[0] http://automicrofarm.com

[1] http://www.wikispeed.com/the-process

[2] http://www.runningleanhq.com

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created:	May 22, 2012
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