📗 A series of customer discovery lessons, as told by John Mulaney
Best practice for conducting customer discovery when you're 🎵 New in Town 🎵
Starting a student venture is a pretty tough gig.
You’re inundated with classes, surrounded by distractions, and (probably) have very little money to spend on your own venture at the moment.
I believe that contemporary American philosopher John Edmund Mulaney captures the human condition of a collegiate entrepreneur best:
As a former inundated/distracted/broke college student myself, I know the feeling. It’s one of the pressures that kills most ventures before they even get off the ground. There is a common belief that if you don’t have (at least) thousands of dollars in initial funding, there’s no way you can make any progress towards testing your idea.
But ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to say … that is not true!
In fact, there are tons of ways that you can use your time and existing resources as a college student in order to make sure you’re building something that the market actually wants.
The rest of this post will include some helpful tips/tricks from John and myself so you can move your venture ahead without putting yourself in a financial hole.
If you’re looking to subscribe for more John Mula- I mean college entrepreneurship content, please consider signing up to this Substack so that you never miss an issue delivered right to your inbox.
Customer Discovery Should Challenge Your Pre-Conceived Facts
You’re probably starting a venture because you have a million - no wait - billion dollar idea. All you have to do is build it and it’s a fact that you will soon find your face on the cover of Forbes.
What do you say to that, John?
The number one reason any venture fails is because there is no product-market fit. And lack of product-market fit stems from a lack of customer discovery.
This post is not going to be a deep dive into the purpose and method of conducting customer discovery (you can read more here, or thousands of other articles by Googling). Although many people have heard of the term customer discovery before, I thought it would still be helpful to include a quick definition from Steve Blank, who many consider a pioneer in this field.
Customer Discovery focuses on testing hypotheses and understanding customer problems and needs – in front of customers – by the founders.
As a college student, you have a very unique advantage for conducting customer discovery - people love helping college students in the name of research. In fact, you can receive a much higher proportional response to cold outreach if you tailor your message in the right way.
Whenever you’re talking with a potential stakeholder at this stage, don’t introduce yourself as “the CEO/Founder/President of Yada Yada, Inc. looking to find time to discuss your startup.” That immediately sounds like you’re about to make a sales pitch, when in reality, you have nothing to sell at the moment.
Instead, introduce yourself as “a student at Yada Yada University conducting research on [Insert Topic Here] and you would appreciate 15 minutes of their time to learn from their expertise”. You get brownie points for actually making it easy for them to solidify a meeting, whether via Calend.ly or listing specific dates/times that work best for you.
Now you’re ready to start your fact-finding mission.
Ask the Right Type of Questions
When you have a potential stakeholder on the line, you want to make sure that you’re making the most of their time. That means you’re coming up with the right types of questions in order to get as much useful, novel information as possible.
What types of questions should they be asking, John?
The purpose of customer discovery is not to ask leading questions to get answers you hope are true - it’s to challenge assumptions and be open to receiving feedback that doesn’t align neatly with your worldview.
Asking yes/no questions - or even worse - the “would you use this product if I made it” questions will not provide valuable information. It will lead to stunted conversations at best and confirmation bias at worst.
The best types of questions are the open-ended ones. Why do you do that? What’s the biggest problem you’re experiencing? If you could wave a magic wand and make something in your life easier, what would it be?
If you’re looking for more inspiration regarding the best questions to ask, Mike Fishbein created an Ultimate List of Customer Discovery Questions that are segmented by different phases. Make sure to tailor your questions to your audience in order to make sure you’re making the most of the opportunity.
(Another helpful text on this topic is Talking to Humans by Giff Constable. Highly recommend this quick and informative read).
Sift through all the data and identify trends
After you’ve started to rack up the customer discovery interviews, you’ll likely be bombarded with a lot of different, perhaps conflicting information.
Why did one store owner I talk to say that accounting keeps her up at night while another said that her accounting system is so easy she can do it in her sleep?
You may start to feel like Andy Cohen at one of those reunion shows …
The truth is - this is why you’re doing customer discovery. To better understand the actual pain points that your anticipated stakeholders have. It won’t fit together nicely and neatly because sometimes a similar persona can have different challenges.
While there is no golden number of customer discovery interviews that need to be done, I usually tell my students to try and aim for 30. That’s a nice statistically significant number. And you should start to see some trends.
You can use the info that you gain with each customer discovery interview to better refine your questions. You may start out by asking very general open-ended questions (What type of accounting software do you use?), but through enough initial conversations, you should be able to narrow the scope (What component of the accounting process is the most time-intensive/confusing for you?)
Additionally, you will likely encounter A LOT of extraneous information that doesn’t exactly seem relevant to your venture. Especially towards the beginning of the process, you might not even know what info is helpful vs. what is fluff.
Any advice, John?
Well said!
You truly don’t have time to unpack every single thing that you might uncover in a customer discovery interview. Let’s say that you interview 30 stakeholders just for 15 minutes each.
That’s 450 minutes of total information.
In another unit of measurement - seven and a half John Mulaney stand-up specials.
This is why you want to conduct enough interviews to have a sample size that you can draw trends from. I guarantee you will go crazy if you try to reconcile every single thing that 30 different stakeholders say. Keep your blinders on and know what information truly matters to your prospective venture.
You’ve done some customer discovery? OK, maybe its time to start finding some funds …
The purpose of this post is not to encourage you to never pursue money for your venture. Of course you’ll eventually need something to get you off the ground.
In fact - sometimes you can actually get paid for doing customer discovery. Check if your university is running a regional I-Corps program, which often comes with a grant for completing a requisite number of interviews.
But even if there’s no I-Corps opportunity available, just by completing customer discovery, you’ll put yourself in a much stronger position to win money via a student startup grant or business plan competition at your university.
As someone who has reviewed hundreds of applications, the most compelling ones usually combine their first-hand customer discovery interviews with publicly available market research in order to make a case for why their venture has a strong market opportunity.
Just saying “I have this idea and I think it’s pretty great, so others will too” is not going to impress too many judges.
Although we’re encroaching on summer and there’s not a ton of open opportunities at the moment, check out my list of Student Founder Funding Opportunities below so you can be prepared for when they open up again.
Use Your Street Smarts and Just Start
Like I said at the beginning of this post, it can be tough to fight through all the distractions and actually start the process of customer discovery.
You will be rejected at times.
You will receive no response from people you really want to talk to.
But most importantly, you will uncover information that helps you build your venture with a stronger foundation. And that’s why it’s necessary to use street smarts throughout the process.
Street smarts! Listen up!
When conducting cold outreach, keep it short and sweet. Explain who you are (remember, a researcher) and why you’re specifically reaching out to the person you have in mind. You can use a template for some language, but make sure you have at least a line or two that makes it feel personalized. Then, end your message with a clear call-to-action for connecting.
Offer specific times + a method to connect. Make it as easy as possible for the other person to say yes. Saying “let me know if you are free to connect sometime” or some variation of that puts more work on the respondent’s end and will lead to less conversion. I usually offer a range of dates/times or just send over a Calend.ly link with open availability.
As your conversation is winding down, there are two things you should absolutely do. One is to genuinely thank them for their time, because they really didn’t have to talk to you at all. And the other is to ask “Is there anyone else in your network who I should be speaking with about this?” If they do connect you with someone, then that is validation on two fronts. First, if they thought that you were completely wasting their time, they probably wouldn’t put you in touch with one of their friends/colleagues. And two, this is how you can turn cold outreach into warm leads. You just got an intro to a relevant person who you didn’t even know existed a few seconds ago. Congrats!
Now you’re equipped with all the street smarts you need in order to get out there and talk to humans. So … time to start.
And thank you, John, for all of your expertise on conducting customer discovery. You truly can do it all.
Happy discovering!
ℹ️ Final CTAs
If this John Mulaney entrepreneurship content resonates with you, please consider sharing this post with anyone else who might appreciate it as well.
Subscribe now to get more content like this as well as many more resources for student startups & entrepreneurship educators.
Interested in chatting to see how I can help your university entrepreneurship center or student startup? I’m interested as well! Check out my website below to get an idea of my services.
If you’ve got some suggestions, or want to get in touch to promote your venture or an opportunity, you can let me know below.