Customer discovery is a well-known topic for entrepreneurs. As The Startup Owner’s Manual says, “The number one goal of customer discovery {is} turning the founders’ initial hypothesis about their market and customers into facts.” 

I got the chance to dive into this concept from the perspective of trying to do it in your encore career on Leading the Factory Forward. Here are some step by step ideas I shared on how to get started:

1. Define Your Customer

The first step is to define your customer or decide who you want to learn from in the first place. 

You may want to consider doing customer discovery on:

• Potential customers

• Early adopters of your ideas

• Possible partners in industries that are similar to yours

On top of this, you also may want to segment your possible customers into:

• Corporations: they may have complex problems and processes

• Midsize companies: they likely have medium-sized problems and are just getting started

• Small companies: they probably don’t understand their problems and don’t have time to think about them

Decide which of those kinds of companies you prefer to work with and then conduct your customer discovery interviews with them.

2. Develop Your Hypothesis

Ask yourself: “What is the big problem that I want to solve?” Once you know this, you can decide on your ideas about that problem. This is the idea that you will be testing in your customer discovery interviews. 

Write out an actual hypothesis statement with that idea (“I believe x about this idea). You can also phrase it as, “I want to help x do y” (i.e. in logistics you might say, “I want to help companies get started in international trade”). 

Always remember that your goal is to gain insight into your customers’ pains and gains. You need to be open to whatever they say; don’t just try to confirm your hypothesis. 

3. Find Customers to Interview

Where do your customers hang out? Whatever the answer to that question is, that’s where you need to go to find customers to interview. 

You may want to check out:

• People you know

• Online forums

• Trade shows

• Local meetings

• Industry groups

4. Conduct the Interview

To conduct the best interview possible, come prepared. Before the interview, prepare an interview guide with all of your questions and any other information you need. 

During the interview, take a lot of notes. If possible, conduct the interview in a pair. Bring another person with you so that one of you can ask questions and one of you can write notes.

5. Analyze the Data

To make sense of what you learned after the interview, look for the patterns in your notes. The things that were repeated the most frequently are the things you should be paying attention to and taking into account in your company. 

As I mentioned before, don’t confirm your original idea. If the interviews proved it wrong, be willing to admit that. 

Finally, create some actual data such as a category chart. These put the responses you heard into categories so that you can more easily analyze them.

Now it’s your turn to actually do the customer discovery so you can find the problem people want you to solve and develop a solution that will compellingly solve their problem.