Product Discovery

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?”

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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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

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

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.

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?

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.