Shipping solo means your capital is focus. This sprint trades fancy prototypes for ten structured conversations that reveal whether a problem is painful enough to monetize. The goal is not consensus—it is clarity about who cares, why now, and how deeply.

Day 0 — Frame the bet

Clarify the market slice you want to study. Draft a one-sentence problem statement, the jobs-to-be-done trigger you suspect, and the “why not” objections you expect to hear. Capture them in your decision journal so you can compare belief to evidence later.

Prompt: “When [trigger], I feel [emotion] because [consequence].”

Day 1 — Build your hit list

  1. Export ten existing contacts who match your target persona. LinkedIn Sales Navigator or a niche Slack community can do in a pinch.
  2. Send a short message that sells the learning, not your idea: “I’m mapping how [role] solves [problem]. Can I steal 15 minutes to learn what’s working and where it breaks?”
  3. Calendar stack the calls back-to-back. Momentum matters more than polish.

Day 2 — Run discovery like a scientist

During each conversation:

  • Anchor on their latest attempt, not your imagined workflow.
  • Ask for screenshots, spreadsheets, or Zapier logs; artifacts expose hacky processes you can productize.
  • Log emotional words. They signal copy you can reuse when you start selling.

Close with an invitation test: “If I built a simple version that solved the painful part, what would make it a no-brainer to try?” Record exact phrasing.

Day 3 — Shape the offer

Translate the patterns into a 120-word one pager: painful moment, promised outcome, proof you understand their constraints, and the first action you want them to take. This is your proto-landing page copy.

Pair it with a pre-order or pilot invitation. Rejections are data; “sounds cool” without commitment is a fail state. Track:

  • How fast they respond.
  • Which objections repeat.
  • What success metric they volunteer first.

Day 4 — Publish the landing page test

Use a landing page generator, Notion, or typed Markdown served through Astro’s public/ directory. Add a single CTA that collects email plus one qualifying question about the severity of the problem.

Drive traffic by:

  1. Emailing your interviewees a recap of what you heard and the pilot offer.
  2. Posting one actionable insight thread in the community where you recruited leads, with a PS linking to the page.
  3. Running a $25 retargeting-only campaign if you already have a warm audience.

Day 5 — Debrief and decide

Aggregate the data in your decision journal. Score each interview against three lenses:

  • Urgency — do they already spend time or money solving it?
  • Budget — do they have authority to pay without meetings?
  • Frequency — does the job recur weekly or monthly?

Green-light the idea if you secured ≥3 commitments to pilot or at least one paid pre-order. Otherwise, pivot by reframing the problem statement or narrowing the persona until the signals strengthen.

Evidence log template

Interviewee: [Name, role]
Latest attempt: [Tool + workflow]
Desired outcome: [Their words]
Objections: [List]
Buying trigger: [Event]
Commitment test: [Accepted/Rejected + reason]

You now own a repeatable validation loop. Run it for every idea before you open your editor. The compounding effect is a pipeline of problems that merit your limited build cycles.