Customer Discovery: A Field Guide

How to use this guide

Use this as a reference manual, one section at a time.

• About to start finding people to talk to: read sections 1 through 5.
• Talking to your first person this week: go straight to section 6 (how to run it), and keep section 7 (how to capture it) open before and after each conversation.
• Ten interviews in: come back for sections 8 through 11 (synthesize, exit, solution design, offer delivery).

Treat it like a manual. Return to the relevant section at each stage. The English meta-script in Appendix 1 is safe to read off word for word for your first two or three interviews.

1. The whole thing in one loop, and three rules

Discovery is a single closed loop. Each stage feeds the next:

1. 1.Who (§4) · broad-match, then narrow-match
2. 2.How many (§5) · 5 to 8 a week, 20 to 30 over two Biweekly rounds
3. 3.How to talk (§6) · anchor the event, then follow the thread
4. 4.How to capture (§7) · one canvas per interview
5. 5.Synthesize (§8) · cluster into 3 to 5 jobs-based segments
6. 6.Two exit gates (§9) · would they switch, have they already spent real time, money, or effort
7. 7.Solution design (§10) · a 3x-10x promise, the smallest problem subset, the early adopter as a point in time
8. 8.Offer delivery (§11) · a four-act pitch, and the ask for money comes in Act 4

Three rules run through all of it. They are the whole discipline in one line:

1. 1.Talk about their life, not your idea.
2. 2.Ask about the specific past, not the hypothetical future.
3. 3.Watch what they did, not what they say they will do.

Everything else in this guide is mechanics for living those three rules under pressure. (Source: The Mom Test.)

Takeaway: if you only remember three sentences, remember those three.