Product Discovery

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?”

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

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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A Good Approach: Ask About the Past

So in the framework of good, better, best, what counts as “good”? We can ask, “What have you done in the past?” If you’re trying to understand what someone would pay for something, ask them if they pay for something like that today. If I’m going to do a new streaming entertainment service, I can ask you, “What su... See more

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

The Best Approach: Ask Customers to Pay Right Now

A Better Approach: Run a Demand Test

We can simulate the buying experience and see if it resonates with people. We can mock up our pricing page including our different packages, what is included with each package, how the pricing will work (e.g. monthly, annual, subscriptions, one-time payments, etc.) and the price for each package. The goal is to ... See more