Startups: Are You Discovering or Just Validating?
You can usually tell within the first few minutes of a customer interview what the founder is really trying to do. Learn? Or get validation?
Many early-stage founders say they are “talking to customers”.
But when you actually sit in on those conversations or listen to them, a lot of it is not discovery. It is pitching.
The founder already has a solution in mind and is trying to convince the customer that it makes sense.
So the questions become (directly or indirectly):
“Would you use this?”
“Do you think this is useful?”
“How much would you pay for this?”
Very quickly, the conversation starts revolving around the product. And the customer, being polite, usually gives encouraging answers. Which gives the team even more confidence that they are “on the right track”.
But some of the most useful customer conversations I’ve seen looked completely different.
The founder spent most of the time trying to understand:
what the customer is already doing today
where the frustrations actually are
what workarounds people have created
what makes the problem important enough to solve
and sometimes, whether the problem is even important at all
and most importantly… Why?
In many of those conversations, the product barely came up.
The founder was trying to understand the situation first before jumping to the solution. That shift sounds simple, but it changes the quality of insight completely.
I think this is one of the hardest mindset shifts for researchers and technology-first founders. Because when you have already built something impressive, it is very difficult not to talk about it.
Are you “talking to customers”? What and why?
