Customer Centric Solutions LLC
Methods

You're not buying interviews. You're buying answers.

Founders don't want twenty AI interviews. They want to know why deals stall, which competitor keeps winning, and whether their message actually moves a buyer. This page routes your question to the method that answers it — including away from us.

Start with your question Route by situation
What you're actually asking

The question changes with the stage.

A seed founder asks who the buyer even is. A Series B founder already knows, and asks why they're losing them. Same topic — a completely different research need.

Pre-seed & seed
Who is this really for?
  • Who actually struggles enough to buy this?
  • What would make someone switch from today's solution?
  • What problem is urgent enough to pay to solve?
Series A
Why aren't buyers moving?
  • Why do qualified deals stall?
  • Which messages create action instead of interest?
  • Which objections are really killing the deal?
Series B
Why are we losing?
  • Which competitor keeps winning — and why?
  • Where are we quietly losing customers before churn shows up?
  • Has buyer behavior changed faster than our GTM?

Different questions, different instruments. The rest of this page is how we answer them.

Two kinds of question

Understanding the market, or understanding a buyer.

Nearly every question above falls into one of two kinds, and that — not budget, not timeline — is what picks the method. One needs breadth. The other needs depth.

Understanding the market

Patterns across many.

When the answer lives in what repeats — across thirty, fifty, a hundred buyers. You're mapping a space, not reading one buyer.

  • Which competitors consistently replace us
  • Which buying triggers repeat across the market
  • Which objections consistently slow decisions
  • Which buyer language signals real intent
  • Which segments behave differently
  • Which channels create demand — not just traffic
Best served by synthetic breadth and AI-moderated interviews at scale
Understanding the buyer

Depth behind one.

When the answer is in what a buyer won't say directly. An expert moderator knows when one sentence is worth twenty more minutes.

  • Hidden hesitation
  • Contradictions between words and actions
  • Organizational politics behind a “no”
  • Emotional trade-offs that never get stated
  • The real decision process
  • The moment someone changes their mind
Best served by 1:1 expert interviews

Most real engagements blend both. AI-moderated breadth to find the pattern, then expert depth on the one thing the pattern surfaces that you didn't expect.

Start here

The difference isn't quality. It's what each interview represents.

Not a quality ladder — one method isn't better than another. They represent different things, so each answers a different kind of question.

Synthetic · one interview =
An archetype

Population-level signal. Reflects the distribution of many buyers who fit that profile — per Synthetic Users, the platform we run on.

AI-moderated · one interview =
One real buyer

Sample-level validation. Real people, consistent moderation, enough of them that the pattern is countable.

1:1 expert · one interview =
One person, deeply

Individual-level depth. Nuance, contradiction, and the follow-up question you couldn't have scripted.

SyntheticBest for exploring
AI-moderatedBest for validating
1:1 expertBest for explaining why
So which one?

The answer isn't about budget.

It's about what you're trying to learn. Each method counts something different — which makes each one exceptionally good at some questions, and the wrong tool for others. So we publish what each is for, and what it should never be used for.

The three methods

Every method is excellent at something. And the wrong tool for the wrong question.

Fastest
Method 01 Synthetic

Synthetic User Research

Simulated interviews with behavioral archetypes. Run on the Synthetic Users platform. This is the method behind both of our published reports.

Best for
Directional decisions — buyer clarity, persona shape, messaging tests, pre-investment alignment
Not for
Final decision validation, or compliance-sensitive sign-off
Evidence grade
Inferred
Timeline
5–10 days
$3,500–$7,500Free Founder Sprint tier for pre-funding founders
See the Sprint
Method 02 Balanced

AI-Moderated Interviews

Real buyers, structured discovery, AI moderation. Each interview is one real customer — at scale, with consistent methodology across the panel.

Best for
Validated decisions — confirming hypotheses with real customers, broader sample sizes, repeatable studies
Not for
Deeply nuanced executive positioning, or causal "why" questions
Evidence grade
Observed
Timeline
2–3 weeks
$7,500–$15,000Scoped by sample size and recruitment difficulty
See a study
Method 03 Deepest

1:1 Expert Interviews

Human-led, deeply probed conversations with senior buyers. One interview is one person, fully explored — irreplaceable when nuance and follow-up matter most.

Best for
Irreversible or high-stakes decisions — positioning, regulated buyers, M&A diligence, executive nuance
Not for
Early-stage hypothesis generation, or quick directional clarity
Evidence grade
Observed
Timeline
5–6 weeks from recruitment kickoff
$15,000–$30,000A client-supplied list of customers or lost deals compresses cost and timeline
See a study
They're a sequence, not a menu

Most teams don't pick one. They run synthetic to build the instrument and find where demand probably lives, then validate the surviving hypotheses with real buyers using the same guide. The Sprint's screener and interview guide exist precisely so the next study costs less and asks better questions.

Six interview types

Every moment where demand appears or disappears.

Most Jobs-to-Be-Done practice is switch interviews and nothing else. Five of these are moments on a demand timeline; the sixth sits underneath all of them.

01 · No-decisionNever came

No-decision interviews

Why people who have the struggle still chose to stay put — and what would have to change for them to act. In B2B this is usually your largest competitor.

Best for
Demand generation Messaging & positioning Market barriers Prioritize objections
Reveals
What made staying acceptable Unaddressed anxieties Barriers to entry Objections worth answering
Interview guide →
02 · SwitchingCame in

Switching interviews

What actually drove someone to fire what they were using and hire you instead — the trigger, the timeline, and why you won.

Best for
Acquisition strategy Positioning & messaging Competitive insights Win/loss analysis
Reveals
Triggers that created urgency Pains with prior solution Decision criteria Switching friction
Interview guide →
03 · AdoptionGot value

Product use interviews

How customers onboard, where they hit friction, and what sits between buying and actually realizing the value they bought.

Best for
Onboarding optimization Activation Feature adoption Time-to-value
Reveals
Where onboarding stalls Time to first value Features left unused Activation blockers
Interview guide →
04 · ExpansionBought more

Expansion interviews

Why customers upgrade, add seats, or buy the second product — and what makes deeper investment feel obvious rather than risky.

Best for
Expansion strategy Upsell / cross-sell Product roadmap Customer success
Reveals
What earns more budget Upsell triggers Signals of deepening trust Where value plateaus
Interview guide →
05 · FiringLeft

Firing interviews

Why customers stopped, and when the decision was actually made — usually months before the usage data showed it.

Best for
Reduce churn Improve retention Product roadmap Save at-risk accounts
Reveals
When the decision was made Early warning signals What would bring them back Retention gaps
Interview guide →
Core JobsUnderneath all five

Core Jobs interviews

The progress customers are trying to make — functional, emotional, and social. Not a moment on the timeline. The thing that defines the market the other five happen inside.

Best for
Market & segment definition Value proposition Messaging framework Product strategy
Reveals
The functional job Emotional and social job Competing alternatives Segment boundaries
Interview guide →

Any engagement is one interview type, run by one method. No-decision is the hardest recruit — those people aren't customers and aren't in your CRM — which is where synthetic earns its keep before you spend panel budget. Firing resists scale almost regardless of budget; people who left are guarded, and the useful material is emotional.

The instrument underneath

Why findings compare instead of conflict.

The failure mode in customer research isn't asking bad questions. It's asking different questions in every interview — so twelve conversations each cover a different six things and nothing lines up. Every method I run, synthetic through expert, works off the same underlying instrument. That's what makes the findings comparable.

Coverage

Every element is accounted for in every interview — including the ones buyers don't volunteer.

Comparability

Interviews that touched the same twelve elements code into one finding, not twelve anecdotes.

Portability

The same deck runs across synthetic, AI-moderated, and expert — only the emphasis changes.

Consistency

Decisions rest on evidence gathered the same way every time, so they compound rather than reset.

The Wheel of Progress with 62 interview cards arranged around it, each mapped to one of the twelve elements of customer progress — first thought, passively looking, triggering event, actively looking, deciding, hiring and firing, consuming, and continuous use.
My 62-card interview deck, mapped across the Wheel of Progress® — the framework by Eckhart Boehme and Peter Rochel

How the deck gets used.

  • Pick the moment — cards are drawn for the stage you're probing, from first thought to switching, so the conversation targets where demand actually forms.
  • Follow the person, not a script — a script makes you march; the deck keeps every interview covering the same twelve elements while letting each one go where the buyer takes it.
  • Tag as you go — every answer maps back to an element, so a transcript becomes structured evidence instead of notes.
  • Synthesize, don't summarize — because every conversation used the same map, ten of them compare cleanly rather than blur together.
  • Reuse across methods — the one deck runs behind synthetic, AI-moderated, and 1:1, so findings line up no matter how the interview was run.
Progress, not just outcomes

The twelve elements cover the full arc of a customer's progress — from first thought through the triggering event, deciding, hiring, and continuing use — including the resisting forces most instruments skip. Outcome-driven approaches quantify the desired end state well. This maps the whole journey to it, which is where the barriers live.

Want to run the system yourself?

The same 62-card method, taught as a cohort course — for founders and teams who'd rather build the muscle in-house.

The Maven course → Cohort of 6+ · join an open one or bring your team

Different methods. Same instrument. Comparable evidence. Better decisions.

Which one is mine?

If you're not sure, that's the normal starting point.

Choosing the right method is most of the expertise — it's not something you're supposed to already know. Most founders arrive somewhere in here:

Pre-PMF

No customers to interview yet — but decisions can't wait for them.

Scaling the motion

Founder-led sales worked; now it has to work without the founder in the room.

Defending the lead

Past the Series A, competitors have caught up, and you need to know what holds.

Not knowing which method fits is itself the problem worth solving. If the answer is that you don't need research yet, that's a fine outcome for a fifteen-minute call.

Book 15 minutes →