Customer Discovery for Early-Stage Startups

FIND THE WANT
CUSTOMER DISCOVERY

liz@grovelabs.io | @lizco Liz Cormack
Hi, I’m Liz.

KNOW THE USER
MAKE THEM HAPPY
What I do:

KNOW THE USER | Data, research, user testing.
Pursue a substantiated understanding of the way a
person uses, lives with and perceives the experience
we create.
MAKE THEM HAPPY
What I do:

What I do:
KNOW THE USER
MAKE THEM HAPPY | Product design, management.
Work across disciplines + departments to make that
experience entirely positive.

Three years ago, Grove was just
a really complicated idea
we weren’t sure anyone
wanted.

“Am I building
something
people want?”

Probably not 😬

And that’s totally ﬁne. Start testing and
revising your hypothesis now.

Product
market ﬁt
takes time.

Where can you create value?

Customer validation also proves
your idea is worthy of investment.
Where can you create value?

TEST THE PROBLEM
TEST THE SOLUTION
Customer Discovery

TEST THE PROBLEM | User research, market research.
Test your understanding of the customer’s needs.
TEST THE SOLUTION
Customer Discovery

Customer Discovery:
TEST THE PROBLEM
TEST THE SOLUTION | Prototyping, user testing.
Test that your solution solves the customer’s need that
you identiﬁed.

It’s a cycle.

Methods for
Customer Discovery
PART ONE: TEST THE PROBLEM

Before you
write a line of
code.

What problem are
you solving?
?

Leave the
building.
REMEMBER THIS #1
Thanks to: Steve Blank

OBJECTIVES
Test my value proposition (am I building a thing
people care about?)
Identify pain points + opportunities in my
assumed market segment.

Things you need:
1. A list of questions.
2. A hypothesis you’re willing to change.

Things you don’t need:
1. Understanding of the customer’s problem.
2. Existing customers.

At ModCloth, we talk to people when we ﬁrst
have an idea. At this phase, our goal is to
understand customers’ current problems
around this idea and how they deal with an
issue we’re trying to solve.
MODCLOTH

Google’s answer for the complexity of AdWords
was to hire 2,000 account managers to help people
use the platform. Pratt said one of the main reasons
for user confusion is that the terminology used by
the various platforms is wildly different.
ADHAWK

Rica Elysée founded Boston Naturals, a meet-up
group for women of color. There, she realized many
had the same issues with their salons —
overbookings, late or canceled appointments or
just a general disappointment with how their hair
turned out.
BEAUTYLYNK

Parker is second-generation pharmacist who grew
up behind the counter of his father’s mom-and-pop
drug store in Concord, N.H. Whenever he went out to
deliver prescriptions, he grew frustrated watching as
customers used Excel spreadsheets and day-of-the-
week pill containers to keep track of their
medications.
PILL PACK

Feel your customer’s pain.

My two golden rules of user research:
1. Immersion is better than any other tactic.
2. Ask open-ended questions ONLY.

1. Immersion is better than any other tactic. If
you're interviewing people outside of the
environment in which they'll be using your
product, you're missing 70% of the
observations you could be making.

2. Ask open-ended questions ONLY. The
fastest way to ruin insight is to ask a leading
question. Ask who, what, why, when, where,
how. Ask people to walk you through a
scenario in their own words.

Tips for discovery conversations:
1. Get into research character.
2. Be fascinated.
3. Be neutral and encouraging.
4. Don’t judge or dismiss.
5. Build on the conversation.
6. When in doubt, clarify.
7. Listen, don’t lead.
8. Don’t pitch.
9. Watch body language.
10. Practice!

Set up a landing page, collect emails.
Now!

OBJECTIVES
Test my value proposition (am I solving a
problem people care about?)
Get e-mail addresses (who cares about the
problem I’m solving?)

Things you need:
1. A URL.
2. A value proposition.
3. A mailing list tool.

1. A logo.
2. A blog, social media accounts etc.
3. A copywriter, designer, developer etc.

Right now, do
one thing well.
REMEMBER THIS #2

WHAT’S THE ONE THING?
Identify your core value proposition. Go hard on
that one thing.

GET THE WORD OUT
Post to social media, contact friends + family to
share with their networks, email your own
network, pursue startup promotional sites like
ProductHunt.com and betalist.com.

PURSUE CONTACT INFO
Landing pages are carefully designed to
optimize for conversion. At an early stage, just a
name + email is super valuable (see next steps).

WHAT DOES VALIDATION LOOK LIKE?
That depends.

NOT SEEING USER GROWTH?
Consider backtracking to simplify and dig into
the customer discovery process.

NOT SEEING USER GROWTH?
Leave the building again. Constantly verify >
adapt > verify > adapt.

TOOLS
launchrock.com + mailchimp.com

So, now you have emails!
Contact them immediately and ask if you can
discuss your problem and idea.

OBJECTIVES
Test my value proposition (am I solving a
problem people care about?)
Find out why people were interested in signing
up for my product or service.
Get direct feedback on our proposed solution.

Things you need:
1. A screener survey.
2. Speciﬁc questions.

1. A product.
2. A prototype.
3. Incredible people skills.

#1: Screener Survey.
You don’t have time to talk to just anyone. A
screener survey identiﬁes:
1. People in your target market.
2. A diversity of perspectives to interview.
3. People eligible to use your product (age etc)

#2: Speciﬁc Questions.
Use open ended discovery questions to identify
users existing behaviors + motivations around
whatever you’re digging into.

#2: Speciﬁc Questions.
For example, if I was working on a new
thermostat:
1. What kind of home do you live in currently?
2. When temperatures get hot or cold, how do
you stay comfortable in your house.
3. How has that changed in the last 6 months?
4. How did you prepare for your last trip? Walk
me through it.

Insight: users don’t care about the science.
We thought people would love to learn.

Insight: users take pride in their space,
and it needs to be beautiful.

Insight: early adopters are invested in the
entire ecosystem of sustainability.

Insight: users already garden.
We thought we’d teach non-gardeners to garden.

Thoughts on surveys.

Surveys are great if you want to…
1. Track changes over time — See what
changes before and after a feature launch.
2. Quantify issues seen in user studies — We
know [x] is a problem for some users, but
how many?
3. Measure attitudes, intents, or task success.
Thanks to: Elizabeth Ferrall-Nunge, UX at Twitter

Surveys are not so great if you want to…
1. Discover underlying user needs — users
aren’t great at self-identifying.
2. Understand whether people can successfully
use your product.
3. Uncover user habits and behavior. Again,
people are really bad at self-reporting.

1. Immersion is better than any other tactic. If
you're interviewing people outside of the
environment in which they'll be using your
product, you're missing 70% of the
observations you could be making.

2. Ask open-ended questions ONLY. The
fastest way to ruin insight is to ask a leading
question. Ask who, what, why, when, where,
how. Ask people to walk you through a
scenario in their own words.

Some insight is better than none, but beware
your solution bias when writing surveys.
Something we’ve deﬁnitely done wrong at
Grove (and I’ve now seen many times).

Survey Tips:
1. Avoid leading questions.
2. Avoid agree/ disagree statements.
3. Beware photos + visual design.
4. Avoid comparison questions.
5. Randomize answer order.
6. Keep it short.
7. Avoid “nice-to-know” questions.

Will
customers
pay for this?

Things you need:
1. A prototype or product concept.
2. A way to accept payment.

1. An actual product.
2. A ﬁnal price point.
3. Sales people.

Empty Wooden Box

Empty Wooden Box
Artiﬁcially Planted

Empty Wooden Box
Artiﬁcially Planted
No Idea How Much to Charge

Result:
Sold three units at $800+.

Result:
Sold three units at $800+.
(The ﬁnal product sold for $2400).

It’s not validation if there are no stakes.
It’s okay to sell a non-existent product. Make sure
you can reimburse the user! But go for the real
sale, in which the user thinks they’ve traded cold
hard cash for your product or service.

After selling?
We reﬁned our roadmap and let our customers
know, giving them to chance to opt-out if they
didn’t want to wait 8 months.

Do things that
don’t scale.
REMEMBER THIS #3

Optimize for learning.
That means doing everything in your power
to prove a hypothesis before building in
response to it.

Looks
automatic.

Super not
automatic.

Super informative!

Optimize for
learning.
REMEMBER THIS #4

Talk to their users.
What do users love?
What do users want, and not get?

AirBnB got started by “what would people user
if AirBnB didn’t exist? — Craigslist, where their
users were already looking for apartment
rentals.

They scraped apartment data and put it on
their own site, then pitched those apartment
owners on using AirBnB as well.

We started testing all of our (few) competitors
products at home + at the ofﬁce.

Analyze the competitive landscape.
Your users certainly are. What’s your speciﬁc
segment you can address better than anyone?

Criteria A
Criteria B
Criteria 2Criteria 1

Low Yield
High Yield
AutomatedDIY

“and will
pay for?”

Conﬁrm that yes,
you are — or pivot.

Fast.

Listen more
than you talk.
REMEMBER THIS #5

liz.j.cormack@gmail.com
@lizco
Get in touch!

Customer Discovery for Early-Stage Startups

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