Product Discovery

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... See more

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.

Express the opportunity as a customer problem and work backwards. What has to be true for the opportunity to exist? Now take each of those assumptions and ask what are the main assumptions behind them ? Repeat until you’re reached the root assumptions. This is similar to the 5 Whys. Working your way back up from the bottom identify evidence that... See more

Most of us have pre-ordered a book before. I’ve sold every single one of my courses before I did all of the course production work. Plenty of products are bought and then made to order (think Dell computers, custom cars, and even Boeing airplanes). Many startups concierge test their ideas before they start building—this means they sell and manually... See more

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

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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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These tactics aren’t just for startups. I’ve worked with many large companies who used their sales teams to demo products that didn’t exist yet. This is a great way to get fast feedback on new ideas.

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

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.