Customer Discovery

“That customer discovery, YC style, like blah, blah, blah, is just so wrong for the moment in terms of how to build a business. Because just because like bill in sales has some CRM shim problem, it doesn't matter. Like you can't build it and give it to him and …”

“They lie because they think they're being helpful. So it's not a malicious intent, but unfortunately they're not going to give you real advice”

“Jim and I were smart enough to know that whatever people told us, none of it was truly true until we brought them something and said, will you give me money for this?”

“I'm a very firm believer, and I actually took that from back then, and it's still true today, that you will only understand the problems that you could solve and the potential solutions if you're there. Everyone in product says that you have to speak to your c…”

“The person before that spent the two to three years to build it to where it was, they went through all the pain of, like, who is the customer, what do they want, you know, and trying to build the product. Based on that, we got to, like, interview the customer,…”

“When you speak with a customer, you kind of need to be in the mindset of seeking rejection. You go out there to learn, and again, the learning comes so much from rejection, so you got to go out there and seek that rejection”

“So on the false positives, anything that is not, can you do this for me now, tomorrow, next week, is a no. And people are really kind, and they want to be kind, and so they don't say, like, rarely do they say no, but a lot of like, oh, maybe next quarter, or l…”

“That has to take place before you build the product. Otherwise you could build a product that nobody wants to buy.”

“You pick up the phone, call 10 of them, and nine times out of 10, by the time you've made your fist call, you could predict what's customer six, seven, eight, nine, and 10 are going to tell you.”

“Customer discovery is building an audience either before or while you build the product, and I believe that this mechanism allows you to do the modern day four steps of the epiphany.”

“And I think a lot of folks, their inclinations are to like, you know, build a landing page and buy some Instagram ads and try to get people to sign up for something. And again, maybe I, maybe that's something, but I think a lot of the reason people do that is …”

“I think it's look at your calendar and there should be, you know, 20 or 30% of your time that the calendar says something like customer Meeting, customer call, like meeting with foo, meeting with this person. And when the calendar is not that, or it's all, you…”

“Kind of the rule of thumb is like, if you talk to enough people and you can like predict. 70 to 80% of what the next person is gonna say to you, cuz you've just talked to so many people and you've heard the pattern so clearly that's when you've talked to enoug…”

“Like there was a little bit of pain point, but the student wasn't getting emotional. They weren't getting frustrated. They weren't like seeing a huge reaction from the student. And he's like, that's when you know that you really are not onto something when peo…”

“So at that stage in interview round number one, it's critical to just find the pain. Don't worry about everything else. You're going to confuse yourself. It's so hard to find a pain like that. So you should just focus on doing everything you can to finding out…”

“I invented customer discovery for me, which was to inform my vision, not to create a goddamn focus group.”

“No, a hundred percent of customer discovery doesn't need to be done on purpose in person. That at least the first level is if you could see someone's pupils dilate via zoom, at least the first level of discovery, it's in fact, much more effective to do. You co…”

“If you ask them, you know, what are some of your main problems and they don't list the one that you think you want to solve, it's clearly not top of mind. The flip side is if you go in and you're like, Hey, is, is documentation a problem? You know, anything is…”

“A lot of folks want to be the expert and provide you with their expert opinions and views. And so, you know, putting them in that position is you know, it goes a long way in terms of getting your time”

“It always comes down to discovery and deals are won and lost. In discovery, right? I mean, it's just, it's very simple. You win a deal in discovery, or you lose your deal in discovery. Now, you may not realize you lost it, because bad discovery leads to very l…”

“Because the death of customer discovery is friction. If you ask individuals to do customer discovery, they will not do customer discovery. This is the thing that dies in an, in a, in an innovative company, because it's very difficult to actually talk to the ri…”

“The best part of getting people to opt in is not to say, oh, I have a hundred email addresses. It's to say, I'm going to email every one of these hundred people and I'm going to try to talk to them.”

“Like if I think back actually to the successful companies, the most common thing is just how much customer discovery they did. And that doesn't carry through the non-successful companies that I may not have put on the show, but I would have talked to as an inv…”

“The people will talk to you if you're not asking, if you don't need to sell them something. You're not, there's no give. You know, people like, people especially would want to tell you, especially if it's their job, how smart they are, and what they do in thei…”

“Oftentimes people are trying to look good and trying to say the right thing, partly because you're probably paying them. You're probably giving them a 50, a hundred dollar gift certificate to like participate. So they want to kind of try to make you happy. It'…”

“If you go in and you actually don't have an idea, there's no dream to be killed, right? You're just going in asking about their challenges. So you get a lot more really valuable feedback and conversation when you're not actually going in asking someone, is thi…”

“I think I always advise that people start with broad open-ended questions. You really can't go wrong there. This allows the customer to actually more proactively Bring up areas of concern or frustration that they have just to share what matters to them. And if…”