What should a founder do when they forget to record an interview?

You just ended your interview, and you’re bounding with excitement! The quotes you got were great, the person you spoke to was 100% a potential user, and wants nothing more than to get their hands on a solution to the problems you thought, and proved, they had. You look down at your phone, ready to end the recording, and it hits you, you never started your recording…

What do you do? First things first, start a new recording and start talking. You’re going to want to describe the conversation as well as you can, trying your best to recall exactly what you heard during the interview. Make sure to mention everything you can think of, even if you think “there’s no way I’ll forget that”. Studies show that our ability to retain important details rapidly diminishes… 

So great, you’ve spilled out everything you could remember. Unfortunately, you can’t use any of this as customer discovery proof as everything you said is based on your recall of the conversation, not on recorded quotes. However, the information you have can still be used in many ways. What sorts of things did you remember the person being impacted about the most? What Ughs were largest? In what situations did those Ughs come up? Chances are, you recalled some of this well enough to use it as a starting point in future conversations.

To summarize, if you forget to record an interview, you need to quickly start a recording and recall as much as you can and say it on record. Doing this helps you keep as much of the important information as possible. While this recording can’t serve as evidence for customer discovery, the information you remembered and recalled can be used as a learning point for future conversations. 

If the conversation you had was extremely strong proof of what you believe, you’ll be able to get it again, and this time on record!