Customer discovery is critically important to every entrepreneur.

This template is built to simplify the process of customer discovery and keep all the information you need to get started in one place.

The basics of entrepreneurship

It doesn't start with an idea, let's get that on the table right now.

Entrepreneurship, the process of building a company, a side-hustle, a lifestyle business, a startup, or just a project - it almost never starts with an idea.

It starts with a problem.

If you found a problem, then it's likely more people have that problem.

Once you find the type of people/businesses/governments/etc. that have that problem, that's your customer.

If you can find a way to solve that problem, all your customers will want your solution.

And if that problem you found is big enough, and your customers have the money to spend, then they might pay you for the solution you made.

If you've got a startup idea, it can be a way to start diving into investigation, but it's 99% likely that your idea will flip on it's head once you start asking potential customers what they're having issues with.

And customer discovery is the process to start that investigation.

What is customer discovery?

It's basically a semi-regimented process of interviewing potential customers.

If you have a startup idea, and you want to do an investigation into whether or not it's actually solving a problem in the world.

There are questions you ask (which are listed elsewhere in this template) that specifically draw out what the biggest issues an individual might have.

Once you find those issues, you need to dig deeper, ask what they're currently using to solve that problem (that's your competition) and find out what's wrong with other solutions (to make yours better).

Overall, you need to interview a lot of people. It gets intense, so this guide is here to help you. :)

A few resources