Customer Discovery

Summary

The customer discovery process is one of locating your first customers based on the problem they have and your product’s ability to solve it. You can gain crucial feedback that helps develop your product and follow a much smoother path.

Customer Discovery

Here’s an example of why customer discovery is so important. Imagine you have a start-up with a product or service you are passionate about. You just know this is something lots of people are going to want and will benefit from. You just know it. But you don’t actually know it. There are many reasons start-ups fail, but the most major reason is that they haven’t tested out their theories about their customers early on. The problem could be that you price your product too high or that a feature ruins the entire experience, but you’ll only know this when your product or service is in front of customers and by then it could be too late.

Keep it small scale

At this very first step you should be developing your product or service for your first customers. This will be a small amount of people who buy into your idea early on. By focussing on these few people and developing your product for them, and not for the mainstream, you can get invaluable early feedback and you can learn from it. The benefits of doing this can’t be stressed enough. Not only will these first customers give you the feed back you need to allow you to grow the product, they will also start to talk about your product and build enthusiasm.

Who is the first customer?

You have your idea for a product or service and you know how it will work and the problem it will solve for people. Recognise who those people are going to be and go to them with your idea. Once you have a potential customer who is aware of the problem they have and is looking for a solution you can start to sell them your product. This early step will also test if you have the price right. At this point it’s important to point out that you are finding customers for your product, you are not building a product based on customer needs. If, of course, you find no customers for your product you’ll have to re-think it, but this should be a case of developing a product you know there is a need for and then identifying a small group of customers who have that need.

Feed it back

You have your first customers and they are giving you that important feedback. This is whereyou feed that information back to product development. This should be an interactiveprocess. Your product development team should understand that this feedback is coming directly from the customers and that it’s important. If your customer development team and your product development team are working together and understanding each other’s work, this should be a free flowing process.

Customer discovery is aboutidentifyingyour early enthusiastic customers and understanding their needs better, then testingthat your product really does solve their problems and thatthese customers are happy to pay for your product. You can adjust your path depending onwhat you learn from this process, meaning you arealways evolving.