Video · 2 min

Customer Discovery: The Search for Product/Market Fit. 2 Minutes to See Why

Steve Blank Free Beginner

A two-minute animation showing why building before talking to customers wastes months. Useful to send a cofounder who wants to skip discovery and start coding. Fast, memorable, and free.

  • Discovery is a search for the problem, not a sales pitch.
  • Build only after you understand the customer.
  • Two minutes can save you a year of building the wrong thing.
Open on steveblank.com ↗

It answers 5 questions

  1. What questions should I actually ask in a customer interview?
  2. How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the signal?
  3. How do I talk to customers without getting false positives?
  4. How do I run customer discovery as an Indian founder building for Indian users?
  5. How do I test whether people will actually pay, not just say they like it?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. A YC partner turns 'talk to users' into a repeatable 5-question interview script you can use this afternoon. It's The Mom Test... YC Startup Library Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky (YC / founder of Pebble)
  3. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  4. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  5. A UX-research leader (ex-Uber Eats, BetterUp) gives founders a concrete three-step discovery process, including how to recruit... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read A founder-friendly playbook for early customer discovery First Round Review (Jeanette Mellinger)
  6. A deep conversation on why direct questions fail and how story-based interviews surface real behaviour. Torres names the common... Lenny's Newsletter Podcast · ~75 min Teresa Torres on how to interview customers Lenny Rachitsky and Teresa Torres
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