Entrepreneurs skip customer discovery because building a product is much easier.

Junior Owolabi
1 reply
In my opinion, a significant number of entrepreneurs and startup founders skip customer discovery because building a product and customer acquisition are much easier. The effort required to define the problem, create the assumed customer profile(s), scour the web for people with the problem, convince people to take part in customer interviews for free**, transforming the interaction data to stats that can be quantified, finally identifying if there is a large enough market for their problem, and the market is willing to pay for a solution. Even when #entrepreneurs start with a problem, it may be defined incorrectly or for the wrong market; are you willing to do the above every time? (I’m a solo founder, I try, but it requires a significant amount of my time). People shouldn’t keep downplaying the difficulty of Customer Discovery, it’s truly a problem, that is why I have a startup focused specifically on providing a self-service cloud platform for Customer Discovery and address the issues that lead to a high mortality rate for startups. ** - the value is we are trying to resolve their problem

Replies

Dimitris Karavias
Great points! One lesson I've learned this year is to focus on real people, not personas. Literally start building for the 5-10 people who're going to pay from Day 0.