Basics of Customer Discovery
The essentials to understand your customers and build for success.
I would argue that customer discovery is the most critical component to building a successful company. Contrary to what many people believe, new features and products aren’t the result of a brainstorming session amongst executives (at least they shouldn’t be). New features and products should be built to address problems observed by the end user. How do you know what problems your end users are facing? Customer discovery.
I’ll try to break down the importance of customer discovery as simply as possible. Businesses are successful when a lot of people pay to use their product or service. People pay for products and services that provide them value. People receive value from using something that solves a particular problem or pain point in their lives. Understanding these problems and pain points is the purpose of conducting customer discovery interviews.
It seems incredibly simple, yet so many companies allocate time and resources to building products and features that their end users don’t necessarily need. I can say from experience, we have probably spent 100+ hours at VentureStorm building features we thought our users would enjoy, only for them to be underutilized and deemed unnecessary. The key word there was thought. We made the mistake of assuming what our users wanted and built features without ever validating our assumptions. To help you avoid making the same mistakes, I’ve created a quick guide to assist your customer discovery process.
Customer Discovery Before Building
Before ever writing a single line of code, you should validate the concept with your end users. Describe the product or feature to your users and get their feedback. Would they use it? Does it solve a problem or pain point they are currently facing? Would they pay for it? How are they currently solving that problem / pain point? While receiving this feedback, you should actually be able to refine your concept and mold it to better address the problem you are trying to solve.
Observe Customer Behavior and Gather Feedback
As a business, you are always looking to improve the product or service you are selling. The reason companies like Snapchat and Uber are constantly releasing updates is because they are constantly speaking with users and identifying ways to improve their product. Whether the user interface isn’t intuitive, the landing page is unclear, users don’t understand how a particular feature works, etc., there are always ways to improve.
The best way to understand what to improve is to speak directly with the people using your product or service. Ask them what they like about it and what they hate about it. Often times it’s also extremely helpful to observe their behavior while they navigate your site or use your product without any guidance.
Words of Advice
I’ll leave you with this quote that we at VentureStorm value tremendously.
Check out our next blog post as we dive into the best practices to conduct a customer discovery interview.
Originally published at blog.venturestorm.com on December 23, 2016.
