Validating offers is a huge headache for solopreneurs.

When you're launching a new service to a new market, how do you know if prospects will want it? And how do you know your messaging will hit the mark before you've already blown through your entire prospect list?

The standard advice is always the same: "Do a bunch of 1-on-1 interviews with your ideal customers. Get on calls with 25-30 prospects. Really understand their pain points before you start selling.

You're supposed to learn things like:

• What keeps them up at night (business-wise)
• Where they're currently spending money that isn't working
• What solutions they've tried and why they failed
• How they prefer to be sold to

Then you take all this intel and create messaging that hits their exact pain points. Easy, right?

I was following this playbook as I explored specialty clinics like ketamine therapy providers, IV wellness centers, and hormone optimization practices. These weren't typical medical practices, and I knew their marketing challenges would be unique.

How Customer Interviews Actually Work

Here's the reality I ran into:

I'd spend hours crafting personalized LinkedIn messages and emails. Most got ignored. When I did manage to schedule calls, clinic owners would sometimes cancel with no explanation. 

Pretty rough start. I was burning through my prospect list just to get basic market research, and I hadn't even started selling yet.

The AI-First Approach

That's when I had an idea: What if I could test my assumptions with AI before reaching out to clinics?

I had some theories about their main challenges—getting more patients through the door, explaining treatments, standing out from competitors, not spending all day answering the same questions. 

But theories aren't insights. And I didn't want to keep using real prospects as guinea pigs for testing my messaging. So instead of continuing to spray and pray with outreach, I decided to build a persona in Claude to stress-test my assumptions. 

Building Dr. Sarah Chen

I created a persona representing my target market: Dr. Sarah Chen, owner of Advanced Wellness Solutions. $2.1M annual revenue, 3 practitioners, 4 years established, 40-50 new inquiries monthly.

But here's what made the difference—I didn't just create demographic details. I built in real business constraints: $4K monthly marketing budget, 60+ hour work weeks, regulatory concerns around medical advertising, and the psychological drivers that actually matter (evidence-based decision making, reputation protection).

The bot operated in two modes: responding authentically to pitches like a real clinic owner would, then stepping back to explain why certain messaging worked or fell flat.

Since I wanted to test how my pitches actually sounded when spoken, I optimized everything for voice conversations on the Claude mobile app.

A Useful Reality Check

The conversations with Dr. Chen were eye-opening. Here's what this process helped me realize about my assumptions:

Time Constraints Were the Hidden Factor

While I was focused on patient acquisition, Dr. Chen kept circling back to operational efficiency. She'd mention things like "Sarah at the front desk spends 30% of her time explaining what ketamine therapy actually is."

This exposed that time savings might be a more compelling value proposition than patient volume increases.

Getting Specific About Benefits

When I mentioned "comprehensive marketing strategy," Dr. Chen pushed back: "What does that actually mean for my day-to-day operations?"

So we worked through more concrete language: "This pre-educates patients so your consultations focus on treatment planning instead of basic education—cuts consultation time by up to 60%."

Understanding Industry Constraints

Dr. Chen kept bringing up compliance concerns I hadn't fully considered. Medical marketing has lots of regulatory requirements, and anything that sounds too "salesy" creates immediate skepticism. 

This led me to focus even more on clinical credibility and professional positioning rather than typical growth-first messaging.

Crafting an Outreach Message

Working together, we created this basic offer & outreach message:

Subject: Question about ketamine consultations

Hi [NAME],

I noticed [CLINIC] offers ketamine therapy. I'm curious—how much time do you typically spend in consultations explaining what ketamine therapy is and how it works?

I built a simple content plan that helps patients understand the treatment before they contact you. It's designed to save you hours each week by filtering out basic questions and delivering pre-educated prospects.

Worth a brief conversation?

When I tested this with Dr. Chen, her response was immediate: "You know what? This person actually gets it. That opening question—yeah, that's exactly my day."

The Real Insight

This experiment revealed something crucial about market research: the most valuable insights aren't about discovering what customers want. They're about identifying gaps in your own assumptions.

Dr. Chen didn't teach me what clinic owners actually want. She's just a prompt, after all. But testing my pitch against her responses helped me articulate my value proposition more clearly, identify weaknesses in my messaging, and practice until it felt conversational and compelling.

How You Can Build Your Own Research Bot

This approach works for any service business targeting a specific niche. Here's the streamlined setup:

1. Build Around Real Business Constraints Don't just create demographics. Include specific revenue ranges, current marketing sophistication, industry pain points, realistic budgets and time limitations, plus decision-making psychology and risk tolerance.

2. Create Two-Mode Conversations Design natural ways to get both authentic responses and analytical feedback: "What did you think of that approach?" or "Can you give me some feedback on how that landed?"

3. Test Different Scenarios Use the bot to simulate cold outreach responses, discovery calls, objection handling, service positioning, and pricing conversations.

Your Next Step

If you're in a service business struggling with market validation, stop burning through prospects with untested messaging. Build your own research bot first.

Start simple: Pick your most specific target market, create one detailed persona, and have three conversations testing your current positioning. You'll be surprised what gaps emerge in your messaging when you have to defend it in conversation.

The process takes about an hour to set up and can save you weeks of failed outreach. Plus, you'll approach real prospects with confidence instead of queasy uncertainty.