Customer Discovery
Customer discovery is the work of finding out who has the problem you think you are solving, how badly they feel it, and what they do about it today. It is the domain most first-time founders skip, because it is the one that can tell you the idea is wrong. The concepts here cover who your customer is, how to talk to them without leading the witness, and how to tell a polite yes from a real one.
14 concepts in Customer Discovery
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)A description of the specific kind of customer your product serves best, precise enough that you can tell whether any given company or person qualifies.
- Product-Market FitThe point at which a product satisfies a real need for a specific market well enough that demand begins to pull the company along rather than the company pushing the product.
- Design PartnerAn early customer who commits to working closely with you while you build, giving real feedback and real usage in exchange for influence over the product and usually favorable terms.
- Segment vs. PersonaA segment is a group of organizations or people you can actually count and reach; a persona is a portrait of the individual inside that segment whose problem you are solving.
- Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)A way of describing what a customer is trying to accomplish, independent of any product, on the premise that people do not buy products, they hire something to make progress on a problem.
- Customer Discovery InterviewA conversation designed to learn what a potential customer actually does and struggles with, not to describe your product or ask whether they would buy it.
- Leading QuestionsQuestions phrased so that the answer you hoped for is the easiest one to give, which makes the answer worthless as evidence.
- Problem Validation vs. Solution ValidationTwo separate tests: whether the problem is real and painful enough that people already do something about it, and whether your particular solution is one they would use and pay for.
- Early AdopterA customer who feels the problem acutely enough to accept an unfinished product, usually because they have already tried to solve it themselves.
- Painkiller vs. VitaminA painkiller solves a problem someone is actively suffering from; a vitamin offers an improvement they agree would be nice. Painkillers get bought, vitamins get postponed.
- Customer Advisory BoardA standing group of customers, convened on a regular cadence, who give structured feedback on roadmap and priorities in exchange for early visibility and influence over the product.
- Switching CostsThe real money, time, risk, and retraining a customer would have to spend to leave your product for a competitor's. The thing that makes retention structural rather than a matter of ongoing goodwill.
- Ideal First CustomerThe single customer whose success makes the next several reachable, chosen for how much their problem hurts, how fast they can decide, and how much their name or story carries to the customers after them.
- Pilot vs. Paid ContractA pilot buys learning under an agreed scope and end date; a paid contract buys revenue and a commitment. Confusing the two produces months of unpaid work that neither converts nor teaches anything.
Other topics
Put customer discovery to work on your own company
Reading the vocabulary is the easy half. Lev works through the whole arc with you, and explains the terms as they come up in your own documents.
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