Customer Discovery

Goal

The goal is not to convince someone your idea is good. The goal is to understand whether the problem is real, painful, frequent, and expensive enough to solve.

Good questions

Ask about their past behaviour:

• When did this last happen?
• What did you do instead?
• How long did it take?
• What was annoying or risky about that?
• Did you pay for anything to solve it?
• What would a better version need to do?
• Who else on your team cares about this?

Avoid these

These questions produce polite lies:

• Would you use this?
• Do you think this is a good idea?
• Would you pay for this someday?
• Should I add feature X?

The useful signal

Strong signal sounds like:

• “I had this problem last week.”
• “We hacked around it with spreadsheets.”
• “We already pay for something, but hate it.”
• “If you had this today, I would try it.”

Weak signal sounds like:

• “Interesting.”
• “Looks cool.”
• “Maybe later.”
• “Keep me posted.”