Customer discovery

How it is used

A core step of the lean startup method. Founders do customer discovery interviews, often dozens of them, before writing much code. Good interviews ask about what people did in the past, not their opinions about a future product.

Example sentences

1. We did 60 customer discovery interviews with restaurant owners before building anything.

2. Customer discovery showed us that the real buyer was the finance team, not HR.

Common collocations

• customer discovery interviews
• do customer discovery
• customer discovery phase

Related terms

• pain pointA specific problem or frustration that customers have and that a product can solve. Strong startups are built around real, painful problems.
• lean startupA method of building a company by testing ideas quickly with real customers in a build, measure, learn cycle, instead of following a long, fixed plan.
• validateTo check with real evidence, such as customer interviews, sign-ups or pre-orders, that an idea, a problem or a business assumption is true.
• early adopterOne of the first customers to try a new product, usually someone who has a strong need for it and accepts bugs and missing features.
• MVPMinimum viable product: the simplest version of a product that real customers can use, built quickly to test whether the idea solves their problem.

More terms: MVP & Product-Market Fit

• product-market fit
• iterate
• prototype