Discovery
The work of finding out what people actually need before you build it — conversations about their past, not their opinions of your idea.
Discovery is the work done before building: talking to the people you intend to serve, watching what they currently do, and finding out which problem is worth solving. It is the cheapest phase of any project and the one most reliably skipped, because it produces no artefact anyone can demo.
The skill in it is asking about behaviour rather than intention. "Would you use this?" is worthless — people are generous and want you to succeed, and their prediction of their own future behaviour is not evidence. "Walk me through the last time you dealt with this. What did you do? What did it cost you?" is evidence, because the past already happened. Ask about the last occurrence, the workaround they built, and what they have already paid to avoid the problem. Money already spent is the strongest signal available.
Discovery does not stop after launch. The most useful version is continuous and small: two conversations a month, held whether or not there is a decision pending, so that when a decision arrives the information already exists.
Worked: ten conversations before a build. Seven describe the problem you assumed, but six of them already pay for a workaround costing $50 a month — which tells you the price, the competitor and the pitch in one pass, before a line is written.
Also known as
- customer discovery
- user research
Relevant for
- Founders
- Ask what they did last time, not whether they would use it — people predict their future behaviour badly and describe their past accurately.
- Creators
- The comments tell you what your audience enjoys; two calls a month tell you what they would pay to fix, and those are different lists.