Customer discovery
What is customer discovery?
Customer discovery is the first step of customer development: structured conversations with potential customers to understand their problems, how they solve them today and what they would pay to solve them better, before and while building a product.
The aim is learning, not selling: ask about past behaviour and real situations rather than opinions about your idea.
Why customer discovery matters
It is the cheapest way to avoid building something nobody wants. It also gives you the language customers use, which later becomes your marketing copy.
How to do customer discovery
- Write down your riskiest assumptions about the problem and the customer.
- Find people who have the problem: communities, your network, people asking for help online.
- Ask about the last time the problem happened, what they did and what it cost them.
- Avoid pitching; listen for pain, workarounds and willingness to pay.
- Update your assumptions after every batch of conversations.
Related marketing terms
Customer development is a method for startups to find a repeatable business by testing assumptions with customers step by step, before scaling.
Jobs to be done is a way to understand demand: customers "hire" a product to make progress in a situation, not because of who they are.
Voice of customer is gathering what customers say they need and feel, in their own words, from interviews, surveys, reviews and conversations.
Product-market fit is when a product clearly satisfies a real market need: customers want it, use it, keep using it and tell others.
Early adopters are the first customers to try a new product, accepting rough edges because the problem matters to them and they like new things.