Understand your customers

Talk to real users, define who you're for, and read the market clearly.

What founders use for understand your customers, ranked by how many answers lean on it.

  1. Instead of refreshing competitor pages all day, you set up an alert once per competitor and let the updates come to you in a... Google Tool · A few minutes to set up Google Alerts Google
  2. The fastest way to stand up a fake-door landing page. Build a one-page site in an afternoon, add an email capture, and measure... carrd.co Tool Carrd carrd.co
  3. A free one-page template for capturing what you actually learned from a single interview, so the insight does not evaporate. It... Product Talk Template · 1-page template The Interview Snapshot template Teresa Torres
  4. Your short answer names the LOI as a real B2B validation signal, and this is a clean, lawyer-built template made for exactly... Common Paper Template · 1 to 2 page template Free Letter of Intent Template Common Paper
  5. Free templates including the Positioning Canvas and a messaging document you can fill in for your own product. They turn the... aprildunford.com Template · Downloadable April Dunford Positioning Templates April Dunford
  6. Your short answer says to watch real sessions, and this is the most common tool for doing exactly that: replaying where new... Hotjar Tool · self-serve tool Hotjar Session Recordings Hotjar
  7. A ready-made template for drafting a comparable, reusable question set across every interview, which matters because you can... Notion Template Customer Interview Question Generator Notion
  8. When your personal network and community outreach genuinely run dry, this is the paid fallback: a recruiting panel of people... userinterviews.com Tool User Interviews userinterviews.com
  9. The actual one-page canvas, free to print or copy into a doc, so you can fill it in within the hour instead of reading a whole... LEANSTACK Template Lean Canvas template Ash Maurya
  10. A ready-to-use script and structure for the five-act interview, so you're not writing your test flow from scratch. Having the... Design Sprint Kit (Google) Template Conduct a 5-Act Interview Design Sprint Kit (Google)
  11. A simple tool for a narrow but useful version of unbiased reaction testing: show someone a screen for five seconds, then ask... Lyssna Tool Five Second Testing Lyssna
  12. This Notion template turns the Mom Test's rules into a fill in the blank interview and synthesis workflow, which is useful once... Mari Luukkainen Template Master Customer Interviews with a Mom Test-Based Notion Template for Startups Mari Luukkainen
  13. The switch interview technique here is the deepest version of the live conversation approach: instead of asking what someone... jobstobedone.org Tool Jobs-to-be-Done: The Switch Interview Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek
  14. A free AI notetaker that records, transcribes, and summarizes your calls so you are not scrambling to write notes while also... Fathom Tool Fathom Fathom
  15. A ready made, Mom Test style script you can use as is instead of writing your own from scratch, which removes the improvising... Ideaproof Template Customer Interview Script Template Ideaproof
  16. A free one page canvas built specifically to map what someone was doing before your product, their old solution or workaround,... LeanStack Template The Customer Forces Canvas (Updated) Ash Maurya
  17. This worksheet is built for exactly your situation: choosing one narrow persona to start with when you could plausibly serve... reifyworks.com Template The Initial Ideal Customer Profile (IICP) Worksheet Reify
  18. This blueprint walks through analyzing your existing customer base with a structured framework to find the patterns that signal... Winning by Design Template How to Uncover Your ICP Winning by Design
  19. A practical, runnable four-question survey you can send your current audience this week to find out, empirically, whether they... SurveyMonkey Tool · 10 min read How To Use The Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter SurveyMonkey

The questions

Talking to customers & user research 18

Learn the truth without leading the witness.

Defining your ideal customer 18

Know exactly who you're for (and who you're not).

Finding your niche / beachhead 17

Win a tiny market completely before going wide.

Understanding the problem (JTBD) 17

People hire products to do a job, find the job.

Competitive & market research 18

Know the landscape better than the incumbents.

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