Customer interviews and case studies

The most persuasive thing you can publish is a customer explaining, in their own words, what changed. The reason most founders don't have one is the chain of small frictions between "we should do a case study" and a published page.

Ballad takes most of that chain: it suggests who to ask, gives you a link to send, collects the answers with consent attached to each one, and turns them into a case study, a proof point on the right battlecard, and material every future draft can use.

You send the link. Ballad never emails your customers.

Who to ask

Every day Ballad looks at People for customers worth asking — someone who arrived through your content and converted — and proposes a couple in your Inbox under Customers. It keeps the number of open asks small on purpose; a pile of pending requests is a pile of small obligations.

You can also start one yourself from anyone's page in People: Ask for a case study.

Either way you get a private link. Send it however you already talk to that customer — email, Slack, WhatsApp. It's their link, and it works once.

What the customer sees

A short page with six questions, none of them compulsory:

1. What were you doing before, and what wasn't working?
2. What made you look for something new — was there a moment?
3. What else did you consider, and why did you choose us over it?
4. What changed once you started? How do you know?
5. What surprised you, good or bad?
6. What would you tell someone like you who's deciding?

They're the questions a good case study is built from — the before, the trigger, the alternatives, the change, and the honest part.

Consent, per answer

This is the part that makes the whole thing usable. On the same page, the customer chooses:

• Per answer: "OK to quote this answer." An answer without that box ticked is still useful to you — it shapes what gets written — but it will never appear as a quote anywhere.
• Once, for the whole interview: how to credit them. By name, role and company; by role and company only; or anonymously, as "a customer".

Ballad applies both mechanically rather than trusting a prompt to remember. Anything built from the interview honours the choice made on that page.

What their answers become

When the answers come back, the Inbox shows them with two tick boxes:

• A case study drafted into the collection you choose, written from what they actually said. No invented scene, no invented pronouns, no numbers they didn't give you.
• A proof point on the battlecard for whichever competitor they came from, so the next sales conversation has a customer's sentence in it rather than your own claim.

Quotable lines also join what Ballad knows your buyers say, alongside replies and thread comments — so the objection this customer raised starts showing up in the articles and posts you publish next.

The rules it works under

• Ballad never contacts your customer. It drafts the ask and hands you the link.
• Nothing is published from an interview without your approval, the same as every other draft.
• Consent travels with the answer, not with the interview, so one quotable line doesn't make the rest fair game.
• A customer who declines is left alone, and the request is withdrawn if you change your mind after sending it.

Next

• People — where the suggestions come from.
• Content marketing — the case study shape.
• Voice — why no anecdote is ever invented.