Product Discovery

The resonance of many profound creative pieces stems from a deep understanding of the human condition; and to get there the creative process necessitates a significant amount of trial and error.

The illusion of knowledge: We can't learn things when we believe we already know, so this illusion of knowledge hinders our effort to discover. Recall the bull: beauty is in the simplest outcome (and often we’re stuck amidst the higher complexity phases, and so we actually don’t really know until we get to the simplest form of the bull or can expla... See more

I had heard many times that startup success is PACE OF LEARNING. But it took me a while to internalize that. A good way to maintain a strong pace of learning is to be in discovery mode

What part of the discovery process are we currently in? Are we diverging? Exploring different approaches, sketching 100 solutions, running lots of quick tests in different directions, etc. or are we converging: narrowing our focus, testing one thing out and maintaining constraints?

Here’s what pain and pull look like in practice:

1. People pay you money: Several people start to (or offer to) pay for your early product, ideally people you don’t have a direct connection to.


2. Strong emotion: You’re hearing hatred for the incumbents (i.e. pain) or a deep and strong emotional reaction to your idea (i.e. pull).


3. Cold inbound interest: Y

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I noticed four distinct paths to effectively validating a startup idea:

1. The do-it-manually path: Don’t build anything—solve the problem manually first, for a small number of companies


2. The listening path: First talk to tons of potential users, and then start building


3. The prototype path: Start building a prototype and then co-create it with a small n

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Ponder and probe

1. What’s a trend that’s emerging but underserved (e.g. security, collaboration)?


2. What’s a transformative technology that’s emerging that’s underutilized (e.g. data scalability)?


3. How many potential customers have you spoken with about your idea?


4. How important to potential customers is the problem you’re exploring, on a scale of 1 to 10?

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No matter which path you take, you are looking for two things: pain and pull . Pain tells you there’s an opportunity to solve a problem, and that it’s important. Pull tells you that you’re actually solving the problem.

Founders spoke to a median of 30 potential customers to validate their idea before committing.

It is the responsibility of the whole team to continuously ask each other:

“Is this the smallest thing we can do to test our riskiest assumption?”