Don't worry about serving 1000 customers, taking three weeks. You pick up the phone, call 10 of them and nine times out of 10, by the time you've made your fifth call, you could predict what's customer six, seven, eight, nine and 10 are going to tell you.
Stop talking to customers when their answers become predictable
Discovery → Customer Interviews
If you talk to enough people and you can predict 70 to 80% of what the next person is going to say to you, because you've just talked to so many people and you've heard the pattern so clearly, that's when you've talked to enough people.
If you take the average customer group in the world, 90% are not early adopters. It doesn't matter if you have something new and cool, they're just not interested. Those 10 percents are the early adopters. They're The ones that you actually want to reach. But that means you have to reach 10 to find one.
If you don't have a hypothesis, you're going to spend a lot of time researching, you're going to get a lot of data back, qualitative, anecdotal or quantitative and you're not going to know what to make of it because it's not either validating or invalidating your hypothesis because there isn't a hypothesis.