Having a few anecdotes is better than nothing, but I would question, are they from the same types of people? If so, what other types of people/customers whom we have may say something completely different? Can we talk to them, too?
For example, sometimes we talk to 5-10 customers and we feel we have a strong story there, especially when they are in a specific sector or at a particular company size. But later, we talk to customers in different sectors and realize that they have completely different sets of requirements, or perhaps they do not perceive the same problem with the same magnitude. Segmentation is the key here.
Anecdotes are great because you can use them as a jump-off point. You need to gather as many stories as possible from the segments you care about the most. Or, at least you need to have the intellectual honesty to say that these stories are true but only for customers who look like XYZ. Do we want to invest/build only for these customers, or do we need more stories?
Once I have identified a pattern from qualitative research, I normally go back and try to link it with the usage data or with any behavioral data we collect. Normally, it would come from our data warehouse, Amplitude and Fullstory. It goes both ways; we do some usage segmentation and notice a particular behavior, and that triggers a bunch of calls with customers so that we can understand the reason behind it. Qual triggers quant, and quant triggers qual. It never ends.