Customer discovery: the process, the questions, and how to find people to talk to

Customer discovery asks three questions. Who has this problem? How do they deal with it today? Does it cost them enough that they'd change what they do?

It isn't a sales call, a demo, or a survey asking people whether they like your idea. People are polite. Ask whether they'd use something and most will say yes, and that yes means very little. Discovery works when you ask about the past. What someone already did, paid for or put up with is a fact. What they say they'll do is a guess.

The book most founders get pointed to for this is The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Its main idea fits in one line: ask about their life instead of your idea, and even your mother won't be able to mislead you.

1. Write down your assumptions. List who you think the customer is, what the problem is, how they solve it now and why that falls short. Each line is something to test. If you can't write it down, you don't have a hypothesis yet.
2. Pick one narrow group. You can't learn anything from a group as wide as "small businesses". "Bookkeepers at firms of two to ten people who handle payroll for clients" gives you people whose stories will overlap. Our ideal customer profile entry covers how to narrow it.
3. Find people and book short calls. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough. Ask for advice, not a sale. Where to look is covered in the section on finding people below.
4. Run the interview and take notes in their words. Write down the exact phrases people use for the problem. Those phrases become your search terms, your landing page copy and the way you describe the job, which is what jobs to be done is about.
5. Review after every five calls. Mark each assumption as confirmed, contradicted or unclear. If the answers keep surprising you, change the group or the questions. Once they stop surprising you, stop.

These are grouped by what you're trying to learn. Nobody asks all twenty in one call, so pick six to eight and follow where the person's answers go.

1. Tell me about the last time this came up. What happened?
2. What were you trying to get done when it happened?
3. What made it hard?
4. How often does it happen?
5. What does it cost you when it goes wrong: time, money, a client, a late night?

1. How do you handle it right now?
2. What have you tried before this? Why did you stop using it?
3. What do you pay for, if anything, to deal with it?
4. Who else is involved when it happens?
5. If you could change one thing about how you handle it, what would it be?

1. Where does this rank among the problems you're dealing with this month?
2. Have you looked for a better way? What did you search for?
3. What stopped you from switching?
4. Who would have to agree before you changed how this works?

1. The last time you bought something to fix a work problem, how did that go?
2. Who signed off on it, and what did they want to see?
3. What budget does a problem like this usually come out of?

1. What should I have asked that I didn't?
2. Who else do you know who deals with this?
3. Can I come back to you in a few weeks with what I've learned?

Questions 1, 7 and 12 usually tell you the most. If someone can't remember the last time the problem came up, it probably isn't painful. If they've never looked for a fix, it probably isn't a priority.

• "Would you use a product that does X?" invites a polite yes.
• "How much would you pay for this?" gets a guess, low or high, to be nice. Ask what they pay today instead.
• "Don't you hate it when...?" is a leading question, and it gets you agreement, not information.
• "What features would you want?" asks customers to design, which they do badly. They describe problems well, so collect the problem and design the answer yourself.

There's no fixed number. Stop when new interviews stop changing your notes. If the last several people described the same problem, the same workaround and the same reason they haven't switched, you've learned what that group can teach you.

Two things push the count up. A broad group gives scattered answers, so narrow it before you add more calls. And if the problem varies by company size or role, you're studying two groups, and each needs its own set of conversations.

The quality of the notes matters more than the count. A dozen calls where you wrote down exact phrases and past behaviour beat many more where you pitched the idea and recorded who seemed keen.

Booking the calls is often the hardest part of customer discovery. These sources tend to work, listed roughly from warmest to coldest:

• People you already know who match the group, and the people they introduce you to. Question 19 is how this list grows.
• Former colleagues and their teams, if you're building for a job you used to do.
• Professional groups, Slack communities and newsletters for the role. A short, honest request for advice is normal there.
• Public posts on Reddit and X, where people describe their problems in their own words without anyone prompting them. Read those threads before your interviews to sharpen your assumptions, and reply in the thread when a request for advice is welcome. Our guide to Reddit market research covers where to read and how to tell venting from buying.

Don't stop at founder communities. Pick the ones where your group talks shop. On 17 and 18 October 2026 we sampled 6,507 recent posts across 41 subreddits, and about 5% read as someone looking to buy or hire. Founder communities had very few: 1% of 299 posts in r/indiehackers and 2% of 198 in r/saas. Practitioner communities had far more, with 17% of 126 in r/msp and 16% of 100 in r/taxpros. If your customer is an IT provider or a tax preparer, the place where they ask each other for help will give you more than a forum of people building startups. Each community has a profile page with its rules and what people there ask about.

HearBuyers can do the reading for you. Paste your company website and it reads public X and Reddit posts, scores each one from 0 to 100 for buying intent, and drafts a reply that a person approves and posts. Nothing posts on its own. For discovery, the high-scoring posts lead you to people describing the exact problem you're testing.

• Don't pitch when you should be listening. Once you describe your idea, the rest of the call is about your idea. Save it for the last five minutes, or skip it.
• Don't talk only to friendly people. Friends and fans are kind. Include people who chose a competitor, or who solve the problem with a spreadsheet and seem fine with it.
• Record facts, not opinions. "They loved it" is not a finding. "They spend four hours a week on it and paid a contractor last quarter" is.
• Keep the group narrow. Answers that never repeat usually mean you're talking to several different customers.
• Don't stop at the first yes. One excited person is an anecdote, so look for the pattern across calls.
• Write the assumptions down. Without a list to mark as confirmed or wrong, every call feels like progress.

For turning your notes into a ranked list of problems, see customer pain points. For how interviews compare with surveys, analytics and other methods, see customer research methods.

It's the early stage, before most of the product is built, when founders talk to a defined group of people about how they handle a problem today to test whether that problem matters to them.

Discovery finds out whether the problem is real and who has it. Validation tests whether people will pay for your answer, usually with a pre-order, a pilot or a paid trial. You do discovery first.

They overlap. Discovery interviews happen before or alongside building and focus on the problem. User interviews tend to come later and focus on how people use the product you've made.

You can start without them. Public posts, support forums and reviews show you the problem in people's own words. Interviews are where you learn the reasons behind decisions, though, so treat the reading as preparation rather than a replacement.

Today, write your five riskiest assumptions on one page. Then find ten people in one narrow group, starting with a community where they ask each other for help, and book three calls this week using questions 1, 7 and 12.