Who to Interview — and How to Find Them in the GCC

The first instinct of most founders is to interview people they already know: friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, family members of family members. Resist this. Your network is self-selected toward people who like you, which means they are self-selected toward people who will tell you what you want to hear.

A better starting list:

For B2B products, map your assumed customer's role. If you are building a logistics software for SME warehouse managers, you need to talk to warehouse managers — not logistics consultants, not investors in logistics, not your cousin who once worked in procurement. Target the person who would sit in front of your product every day.

For B2C products, define your assumed customer's demographic precisely: age, city, income bracket, behaviour (what apps do they use daily, where do they shop, how do they currently solve the problem you are addressing).

In the GCC, you can find interviewees through:

LinkedIn — especially effective for UAE-based B2B conversations. Most professionals in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh maintain active profiles and respond to direct outreach if the message is personalised and clearly not a sales pitch.
Industry events and accelerator demo days — GITEX, Step Conference, Biban Forum, LEAP, and the dozens of sector-specific gatherings across the region are high-density environments for relevant contacts.
Existing communities — WhatsApp groups for specific industries (real estate professionals, medical staff, HR managers) are often accessible through a single warm introduction.
Cold email with a clear, non-selling subject line — state that you are a founder researching a problem, that you are not selling anything, and that you would like 20 minutes of their time. Offer a small thank-you — a gift card, a coffee — and keep the ask minimal.
Accelerators and co-working spaces — Dtec, DIFC Fintech Hive, Hub71, Flat6Labs, Brinc, and similar hubs host exactly the kind of ecosystems where your target customers also work or network.

Aim for 15 to 20 interviews before drawing any conclusions. Fewer than ten gives you pattern noise rather than pattern signal.

The "Mom Test" Applied to Gulf Politeness Norms

Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test is the foundational text on customer interviews. The central insight: if you ask your mum whether your startup idea is good, she will say yes — because she loves you. The fix is to ask questions about her life and behaviour instead of about your idea.

In the GCC, the politeness problem is structural, not personal. Gulf culture places high value on hospitality, face-saving, and avoiding direct disagreement, particularly with a guest or someone who has demonstrated passion for their project. An Emirati or Saudi interviewee who privately thinks your idea is weak is far more likely to give you a polite, encouraging answer than a blunt dismissal.

This does not make GCC interviewees dishonest. It makes the default framing of most interviews broken.

What not to ask:

"Would you use this product?" — They will say yes.
"Do you think this is a good idea?" — They will say yes.
"Would you pay for something like this?" — They will say probably.

What to ask instead:

"Walk me through the last time you dealt with [the problem you are solving]."
"How are you handling it right now?"
"What does that cost you — in time, money, frustration?"
"Have you ever paid to solve this problem? What did you try?"
"Why did that solution fall short?"

The key shift is from hypothetical future behaviour (what they would do) to documented past behaviour (what they did do). Past behaviour is fact. Hypothetical future behaviour is flattery.

Two additional techniques that work particularly well in GCC contexts:

Use silence deliberately. After an answer, pause for three seconds before your next question. In Gulf conversation, long silences create social pressure to fill the space. Interviewees frequently self-correct or add nuance to an overly polite initial answer.

Ask for a referral at the end. "Is there someone else you think I should speak to?" If they found the conversation valuable, they will introduce you to a peer. If they found your problem irrelevant to their reality, they will struggle to name anyone — which is itself a signal.

Questions That Get Truth, Not Flattery

A well-structured customer discovery interview runs approximately 25 to 35 minutes. The structure below is a starting point, not a script. Adapt the language to your industry and the relationship formality appropriate to your interviewee.

Opening (5 minutes)

Tell me a bit about your role and your main responsibilities day to day.
What tools and processes does your team rely on most heavily?

Problem exploration (10–15 minutes)

What is the most time-consuming or frustrating part of [the domain you are targeting]?
Can you give me a specific example of when that caused a real problem?
How does your team currently handle that?
Have you ever tried to fix it? What did you do?
What made that difficult or incomplete?

Prioritisation (5 minutes)

On a scale of one to ten, how important is solving this compared to everything else on your plate right now?
What would change if this problem disappeared tomorrow?

Economics (5 minutes)

Do you have a budget allocated to solving this kind of thing?
What does the current workaround cost you — directly or in wasted time?

Closing (5 minutes)

Is there anything I have not asked that you think I should understand?
Who else should I talk to about this?

Do not pitch your product during the interview. If the interviewee asks what you are building, give a vague one-sentence answer and redirect: "I am still figuring it out — your experience is exactly what I am trying to understand first."

Synthesising Interviews Into Insight

Twenty conversations produce a lot of raw material. The founder's error is to cherry-pick the most enthusiastic responses and call them validation. The discipline is to look for patterns across the full set, including the lukewarm ones.

After each interview, immediately write up three things:

The specific problem mentioned — in the interviewee's exact words, not your paraphrase.
The current solution — what they do right now, and what it costs.
The signal quality — did they describe past behaviour (strong signal) or hypothetical future behaviour (weak signal)?

After ten interviews, begin tagging notes by theme. You are looking for:

Problems that multiple people describe in near-identical language (usually the sharpest pain)
Solutions people are already paying for, even if the solution is inadequate
Language your customers use to describe the problem — this is your future copywriting

You are not looking for:

Unanimous agreement (you will not get it)
Permission to build (that is not what this process gives you)
A fixed feature list (the interviews surface problems, not solutions)

How Many Interviews Is Enough?

The practical answer is: enough to reach saturation. Saturation is the point at which new interviews stop introducing new themes. For most early-stage startups, this happens between fifteen and twenty-five interviews for a reasonably narrowed target audience.

If you are interviewing across multiple customer segments simultaneously — say, both SME owners and their employees in a B2B product — you need fifteen to twenty interviews per segment, because the problem experience is likely to differ significantly between them.

Signs you have not yet reached saturation:

Each new interview is still changing your understanding of the core problem
You are still hearing problems you had not considered

Signs you are there:

The last five interviews primarily confirmed what you already knew
You can predict most of what a new interviewee will say before they say it

Turning Findings Into Validation Evidence

Customer discovery interviews are not the end of validation — they are the beginning. What they give you is a documented problem hypothesis grounded in real conversations, which you can then test for demand using harder evidence: landing page click-throughs, waitlist sign-ups, pre-sales, or letters of intent.

When packaging interview findings for investors or co-founders, structure your summary as:

Problem statement — one sentence describing the specific, urgent, expensive problem you identified
Evidence base — "We interviewed 18 [customer segment] in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Of those, 14 described [X behaviour] and 11 said they were actively seeking a solution."
Current solutions and gaps — what they tried, why it fell short
Willingness to pay signal — whether any interviewees mentioned budget, paid for a workaround, or volunteered that they would pay for a better solution
Next step — what you will test next based on these findings

This summary is not a full validation package, but it is the foundation of one. Investors who take early-stage diligence seriously will ask to see it. More importantly, building it forces you to evaluate honestly whether you found a real problem — or just an interesting conversation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I do customer discovery interviews via video call, or do they need to be in-person? Video calls work well for B2B interviews across the GCC, particularly with UAE and KSA-based professionals who are accustomed to remote meetings. For consumer research in KSA, in-person interviews in a familiar setting often yield richer responses, particularly with female consumers where trust is important to establish.

How do I avoid confirmation bias in my own note-taking? Record interviews (with permission), and have a co-founder or trusted third party review the transcripts independently. Compare your summaries with theirs. Divergences reveal where your framing is colouring the findings.

What if everyone says they would use my product — is that good validation? Not on its own. Hypothetical intent is not evidence. Look for the subset who have tried to solve the problem with existing tools, who have spent money doing so, or who ask you when they can try your product. Those are your real early adopters.

How do I get people in the GCC to agree to interviews? The most effective approach is warm introductions from mutual contacts. Accelerator networks, LinkedIn, and co-working spaces are reliable starting points. When reaching out cold, lead with a clear, non-selling framing: "I'm researching [the problem space] — not selling anything — and would value 20 minutes of your experience."

Should I share my idea during the interview? As a rule, no — at least not until the end. Sharing your solution early shifts the conversation from problem exploration to product feedback, which biases the responses you receive.

The Bottom Line

Customer discovery interviews are the cheapest research you will ever do. Twenty conversations, conducted properly, can prevent months of building the wrong product for the wrong market. In the GCC especially — where politeness is a cultural norm and investors have become more diligence-heavy — founders who arrive with documented customer insight have a structural advantage over those who built on assumption.

The goal is not to get people to agree with you. The goal is to learn whether the problem you intend to solve is real, urgent, and worth paying to fix.

Start the conversations before you write a single line of code.

Ready to turn your customer discovery into a formal validation package? Run a free FoundrProtocol Readiness Scan to see how your evidence stacks up.

Customer Discovery Interviews: A GCC Founder's Playbook