Key Questions
- Is customer discovery always necessary?
- Where should I start with customer discovery?
- How can I find people to interview?
- How can I convince them to do an interview with me?
- How do I run a good interview?
- What are common mistakes people make when running interviews?
- How much – if at all – should I talk about my product idea in the interview?
- How many interviews are necessary?
- What techniques are there to support customer discovery beyond interviews?
- Do surveys work?
- How can I best evaluate progress on customer discovery?
- How do I know if I’m ready to move forward from customer discovery?
Worksheets
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Max Fleit: How to Talk to Users – Customer Discovery for Your Startup
(10 min video.) Max emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs, pain points, and preferences. Key topics include preparing and conducting user interviews, actively listening, and extracting valuable insights to inform product development and marketing strategies. He also highlights the importance of asking follow-up questions and documenting surprising insights from interviews.
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Stanley Tang: Three Lessons From the Founding Story of Doordash
(6 min video.) Stanley, the co-founder of DoorDash, shares the founding story and three lessons learned: 1. Test your hypothesis: Treat your startup ideas like experiments and test them before investing significant time and resources. 2. Launch fast: Don’t wait for perfection. Get your product or service out there quickly and gather feedback to iterate and improve. 3. Do things that don’t scale: Don’t get caught up in building complex systems at the beginning. Focus on the core of your business and hack together solutions to get started.
Steve Blank: Your Job Is Not to Make Every Customer Happy
(6 min read.) Through the experience of a former student turned entrepreneur, Steve examines the intricacies of customer development and common mistakes startup founders make when pursuing customers. While he acknowledges the importance of going out and talking to potential customers, Steve notes that founders often miss the key point: Their job is not to make every possible customer happy. He explains that a critical part of customer development is figuring out which customer segments and pricing tactics drive a company’s business model.
Steve Blank: How Startups Should Do Customer Discovery
(4 min read.) Steve shares insights into customer discovery, explaining how startups should do it through a case study revolving around a company founded by a former student of his. Noting that an MVP eliminates parts of the business model that create complexity, he advises startup founders to focus first on what provides immediate value to passionate early adopters and leave additional value for later. Steve’s main point is that startups with continuous customer discovery built into their DNA will become smarter than their investors and achieve greater success.
Steve Blank: Doing Customer Discovery Is Like Searching for the Holy Grail. 2 Minutes to See Why
(2 min video.) In this video Steve emphasizes the significance of customer discovery, comparing it to the quest for the Holy Grail. It underscores the importance and difficulty of this process, highlighting its crucial role in understanding and meeting customer needs effectively.
Lenny Rachitsky: How to Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
(8 min read.) The article discusses strategies for identifying an ideal customer profile (ICP) in the context of kickstarting and scaling a B2B business. Lenny emphasizes the importance of understanding who the product is for, providing insights from various industry leaders and startups. Key points shared in the article include the significance of selecting the right problem and target audience, common signs indicating proximity to the ICP, and examples of successful ICP identification strategies from companies like Gusto, Gong, Snyk, and Looker.
Michael Seibel: How to Get Your First Ten Customers?
(4 min video.) In this video Seibel discusses strategies for acquiring early customers. He provides insights and tips on how startups can effectively attract their first ten customers. Some of the tips he shares include finding people who love your products, they do not need to come from elaborate marketing activities and should be handpicked. He stresses on the importance of being selective about the first 10 customers.
Eric Ries: The Lean Startup
(58 min video.) Eric discusses the core concepts of his book “The Lean Startup” during a talk at Google. He outlines the entrepreneurial journey in three acts: the protagonist’s idea and flaws, the development phase (photo montage), and the final success. Ries emphasizes that the critical work happens during the development phase, which is often overlooked in storytelling. He also highlights the importance of customer feedback, iterative testing, and learning from failures to build successful startups.
Rob Fitzpatrick: How to Learn From Customers When Everyone Is Lying to You
(45 min video.) Rob, author of “The Mom Test,” provides guidance on how to effectively gather customer feedback without being misled by compliments or biases. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on understanding customers’ lives and goals, rather than directly pitching your idea.
Isabelle Ilyia: The Mini-Guide to Talking to Your Customers
(12 min read.) Isabelle provides practical advice for effective customer communication. She emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs, active listening, and clear, empathetic responses. The guide suggests using open-ended questions to gather insights, maintaining a positive tone, and following up to ensure satisfaction.
Gustaf Alströmer: How to Talk to Users
(18 min video.) Gustaf covers who to talk to and how to run interviews. He advises startups to ask open-ended questions, listen actively, and avoid leading questions. Gustaf also highlights the value of observing user behavior and iterating based on feedback.
Jeanette Mellinger: How to Know if Your Idea’s the Right One — A Founder’s Guide for Successful Early-Stage Customer Discovery
(20 min read.) Jeanette covers how to form a research plan, learn without letting bias creep in, and find patterns in the analysis phase. She emphasizes the importance of structured customer discovery for startup success. Founders should avoid casual idea validation and instead engage in rigorous research early on. Mellinger suggests forming a research plan, conducting “mini research sprints,” and using 5-minute debriefs to understand user needs. This approach, while time-consuming, prevents future course corrections and is beginner-friendly. Founders should establish healthy research habits before creating a dedicated UX team to ensure their business ideas are viable and enduring.
Ivaylo Durmonski: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick [Actionable Summary]
(11 min read.) “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick is a practical guide for evaluating business ideas by asking the right questions. Key lessons include: avoid asking if your business idea is good, transition from bad to good conversations by avoiding fluff, stop seeking approval, embrace bad news, ask potential customers for help, and identify specific customer segments. The book emphasizes listening more and speaking less to get honest feedback, ultimately saving time and money by not pursuing flawed ideas.
Jason Evanish: 95 Ways to Find Your First Customers for Customer Development or Your First Sale
(29 min read.) Jason provides a long list of ideas on how to reach potential customers. He covers ways to use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Email, Meetup, blogs, Q&A sites, Craigslist, newsletters, meeting in real life and more.
Jeff Gothelf: Case Study: How 3 Startups Built Their Customer Discovery Practice
(13 min read.) Jeff summarizes how three startups, including Winware and Vistaly, built their customer discovery practices. Steven Cohn of Winware prioritized customer conversations over product development, speaking to over 300 companies to understand their challenges with data and marketing tools. Vistaly’s team learns from customer support interactions to identify product friction points. Regular customer conversations are emphasized as crucial for making informed decisions and reducing unnecessary spending.
Giff Constable: Talking With Humans (full PDF)
(60+ min read.) A short “how to” book covering customer discovery, who to learn from, what to learn, how to find interview subjects, how to run an effective session, and how to make sense of what you learn. Also includes mock interview exercises and cold approach examples.
Chuck Liu: Never Ask What They Want — 3 Better Questions to Ask in User Interviews
(5 min read.) Chuck advises against directly asking users what they want during interviews, as people often struggle to articulate their needs. Instead, he suggests asking contextual questions that reveal their motivations, pain points, and behaviors. The three recommended questions are: “Tell me about the last time you encountered this situation,” “What was going through your mind at that moment,” and “Then what did you do?”
Eric Migicovsky: How to Talk to Users
(32 min video.) Eric provides a framework for effectively asking questions and gathering feedback from users. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining a direct connection with users and outlines common errors in user interviews, such as focusing on ideas rather than user experiences, discussing specifics instead of hypotheticals, and listening more than talking. Migicovsky also shares five essential questions for early customer interviews and discusses the benefits of user feedback in different company stages.
Myk Pono: Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): How to Create a Comprehensive Customer Profile
(42 min read.) Myk’s guide outlines nine key elements: target organization, customer demographics, daily life, external market forces, customer acquisition process, pains and problems, empathy, media consumption, and customer aspirations. The ICP is crucial for brand storytelling, strategic messaging, and customer acquisition. The article also includes strategies for integrating ICP into your business and gathering relevant information.
Suhail Doshi: Acquiring your first 100 customers
(3 min read.) In this article Doshi shares insights on acquiring the first 100 customers, emphasizing the importance of direct engagement. He advises getting away from the monitor to talk to users, finding communities of like-minded people, and putting effort into the initial steps of the product. Doshi highlights the value of leveraging personal networks, getting involved in relevant communities, and focusing on niche markets. He warns against early attempts at viral growth, suggesting instead to make early users happy. Doshi also suggests using chat for direct feedback and assistance, and shares examples of creative customer acquisition strategies from other entrepreneurs.