Customer discovery is the process of gaining insights into your target customers and market. It helps entrepreneurs validate or invalidate assumptions about their business ideas and products. The key goals of customer discovery are:

Understanding your target customers’ key problems and needs. The only way to build products and services that people want is to understand what they really need. Customer discovery helps you gain valuable insights into your customers’ key pain points, problems, and unmet needs.

Validating or invalidating your business hypotheses. Entrepreneurs start with many assumptions about their business ideas and target customers. Customer discovery helps you test those assumptions by talking to real potential customers. You can validate ideas that prove true and invalidate incorrect assumptions.

Finding product-market fit. Product-market fit means you have a product that satisfies a strong need for a specific market. Customer discovery helps you iterate on your product to achieve the right product-market fit. You can make changes based on direct customer feedback to build a solution your market actually wants.

Gaining key insights to fuel innovation. The insights you gain from talking to customers can open your eyes to key opportunities for innovation. You might identify additional products and features that would benefit your customers or new market segments to target. Customer discovery fuels the generation of new ideas.

Building a foundation for successful marketing and sales. Understanding your customers and their needs provides a solid foundation for your marketing and sales efforts. You can craft targeted messaging and solutions tailored to your customers’ key problems. Your marketing and sales will be much more effective when based on real insights.

The key methods for conducting customer discovery include surveys, customer interviews, customer observations, and usability studies. Surveys provide quantitative insights at scale. In-depth interviews, observations, and usability studies offer qualitative insights into customer problems, needs, and behaviors.

Using a combination of these methods, you can gain a holistic understanding of your target customers and market. Customer discovery is an iterative process, not a one-and-done task. Continuous customer discovery helps ensure you keep up with your market and gain insights to drive product-market fit.