Stage of Exploration: Discovery for Startups

Reduce uncertainty about WHO your customers are and WHAT they need — and ensure you're building the RIGHT PRODUCT for them.

Product discovery is a critical stage in the life of any startup or new corporate venture. Without discovery, you have no way to prove or disprove assumptions about your customers. Without that, there’s a significant chance that you’re basing your product decisions on wrong assumptions.

As a consequence, you may waste time building features and products nobody needs. And that usually takes more time and resources then you would invest to discover the right ones.

Research is not Discovery

"There are no facts inside the building so get the heck outside." — Steve Blank

If you’re obtaining information from already available “secondary” sources you’re doing desktop research. That can tell you stuff about the size of the market, competition, pricing.

That’s helpful to determine the viability of the idea in the broad sense.