During a founder interview, a fairly standard question about competitive differentiation produced an answer that made us reconsider how we frame that question generally, because the founder pointed out an assumption embedded in the question itself that we hadn't examined.
What the standard question assumed
Our usual framing asked what made the company's technology different from competitors, implicitly assuming that technical differentiation was the primary source of competitive advantage in their specific category, an assumption reasonable in many AI startup contexts but not universal.
What the founder's answer revealed
The founder explained that in their specific market, technical differentiation mattered far less than distribution relationships and domain-specific trust built over years, and that framing their advantage in technical terms, which our question invited, would have misrepresented what was actually driving their company's traction.
Why this was a genuinely useful correction
Our question wasn't wrong for every company, but applying it uniformly across founder interviews risked repeatedly eliciting technical-differentiation answers from founders whose actual competitive advantage lay elsewhere, simply because the question's framing nudged them in that direction regardless of fit.
What we changed as a result
We now more often ask founders to describe their own view of their competitive advantage in open terms before offering a more specific framing, letting them identify what actually matters in their category rather than assuming technical differentiation is the default answer worth pursuing.
Why we think this kind of correction matters
An interview question's framing can subtly shape the answer it receives, and staying alert to when our own assumptions are steering a founder's response, rather than genuinely eliciting their view, is an ongoing discipline worth taking seriously.