Product Discovery

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?

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

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.

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?”

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

The Best Approach: Ask Customers to Pay Right Now

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?

... See more