Customer discovery is a process of defining who your target customers are and understanding their needs. Your goal at the early stage should be to know your customer and what problem you’re solving for them. Knowing your customers is key to building things that people actually want.
Customer discovery can include talking to customers, observing customers, or other interactions such as writing a blog, creating a podcast or creating a social media following.
<aside> 🧠 We do not recommend using surveys at this stage, because they do not provide in-depth insights on the customer
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A great resource to start out with is reading the short ebook Talking to Humans:
Talking to Humans (Giff Constable)
This video is a great primer of the concept of customer discovery and why it’s important:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRzz9JJ6iiI&t=5s
Customer discovery overview with Steve Blank
Next, the following blog post explores many more ways that you can find and interact with customers in order to understand who they are, what their needs are, and if they’re interested in what you are offering:
95 ways to find customers for customer development
Talking to customers can be a very effective way to understand your customers and their needs. Here are some tips to help you when you’re talking to customers: