Tips on how to get customers to do interviews?

Hello everyone!,

Reaching out to all for your advice/guidance. I'm currently working with 3 startups:

1) First startup is already in the market but needs help re-validating the problem and identifying the right customer profile to work on.

2) The second startup is currently running their beta and wants to evaluate the customer experience and identify the right customer profile to target

3) The third has developed an MVP but wants to do some market discovery to identify the gaps in the market and tailor their solution accordingly.

I had a briefing call with all the three and we identified the customers to reach out to for interviews and also came up with the list of interview questions to ask, but somehow the founders are finding it difficult to convince the customers to do the interviews. They are just not interested.

My question to you all:

1) What could these founders do differently to get their customers to do these interviews? (In general, how can we convince our customers to do interviews to share their experience with our product or just share their pain points and problem areas)

2) From your experience, how much should I be involved with these customers in doing these interviews? Should I just let them do the interviews and wait for them to come back with the interview notes or should I participate in the interviews which not all of them would be comfortable with?

My apologies for the long post but any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Riaz

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