Nail Your Customer Discovery – Sean Sternbach

August 12, 2020

This article will highlight ways to start validating your startup idea. It starts by doing customer discovery.

Two years ago, Sarah, an engineer at Microsoft decided to take the plunge building her startup.  She quit her day job and then spent months building her product. The day came for her to launch the product into the market and when she did, no one wanted to use it.  Ouch.  Too often talented engineers build products without talking to customers first.  They wonder why potential customers do not want to use what they built.  The way to solve this is to start by doing customer discovery before writing a line of code.

Without getting technical, customer discovery is about talking to people and learning about their pain points with the intent to validate (or invalidate) your assumptions.  This is called primary research.  There are many ways to approach this process, and to set yourself up for success you should have the following steps in place beforehand:

Define your personas.  Start out by hypothesizing who will be your target customer. Personas describe characteristics of your target customers and you will most likely have several of these for your company.  If one persona is an engineering manager working in a tech company, you may highlight various aspects of her job, what motivates her, team size, and the type of company she works for.  If you are offering an e-commerce product, you may have more characteristics around user demographics.  You may not know who your target personas are, but you should start hypothesizing and iterating on this.

Once you’ve thought through the type of people to talk with, write your customer discovery questions down on paper.  With practice, you will refine this process.   Your questions (and personas) may change, but it is important to write them down.

Set up a CRM (this can be a Google sheet) to track everyone you are talking to as well as the feedback they provide you.

I often get asked how many customer interviews are enough before I can start building my product.  There is no magic number but if you have to ask the question you haven’t done enough.  Once you have a recognizable pattern of the pain your interviewees are experiencing you are on to something.  An example of this would be if the majority of people you talk to offer to pay you on the spot to fix the problem they are having.  If you are not hearing about a repeatable pain from everyone you are talking to, you should continue conducting customer discovery interviews.  

I’ve seen successful startups do more than 200 interviews before they were confident to build product and take institutional capital.  One of these companies is Iteratively.  Iteratively’s co-founder, Patrick Thompson, said, “Customer discovery was the single most important thing we did when starting Iteratively. It helped us identify a problem worth solving, validate our solution, find our early customers and close funding. It’s the single most important thing for founders to spend their time on.” 

Keep in mind, they made micro-pivots to hone in on the right target customer, which meant more customer interviews.  This was due to not hearing enough signal about the pain – and all of this was done before writing a single line of code.   

Other founders got lucky and received a strong signal about the pain with their first 25+ interviews.  No matter which group you fall into, you should know who your target customer is better than anyone else.  This will help you identify more customers that fit your mold and talk intelligently about them with potential investors.

Going through the customer discovery process will help investors know you did your homework.  They need to know that you know your target customer better than anyone.  You should be a SME on your customer and their pain point(s).  You should know the personas inside-out.  

For me, this means conducting 50 or more customer discovery interviews.  My logic for this number is that if you cannot find 50 people with this pain, how will you build a multi-million (or billion) dollar company with thousands of people using your product?  The best founders I’ve seen understand how to be scrappy, and get in front of potential customers to validate the pain.

Here are some things you can do to find more people to conduct customer discovery interviews.  The fastest way to do this is to identify communities that fit your personas.  The ones that I’ve seen work the great are below:

Slack groups

Reddit channels

Facebook groups and other social channels

Trade associations

Ask mentors, advisors, etc., for introductions

Meetup Groups

Google

No matter what, customer discovery interviews never stop.  Your customers continue to evolve, and hopefully your company evolves with them and that means continuously learning from your customers.  Here are a few additional resources to help you with your customer discovery:

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