Learn Customer Discovery

Are you an entrepreneur or anyone else looking to learn about innovation methods? Take this 100% free course on customer discovery to understand how to test your assumptions and hypotheses by getting insights through tested primary research methods.

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Examine a Problem from the Customer’s Perspective

Corporate innovators and entrepreneurial founders use a “get out of the building” approach to test their hypotheses before they build and commercialize their offerings. They interview potential customers, users, and other stakeholders for feedback on all elements of a problem to validate a new opportunity—whether it be a new product, a new feature, another type of revenue opportunity, or a change to internal operations.

Article: What Is Customer Discovery (And What It Isn’t)?

What You’ll Learn

Learn valuable skills to become a more disciplined innovator.

Innovators of all stripes need good customer discovery skills. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a marketer, or a corporate innovator, you’ll serve yourself and your clients much better if you learn how to follow a strategically crafted line of open-ended questioning that gives you valuable insights into a market (and even a previously undiscovered market).

Form Hypotheses

Make educated guesses about the problem and the nature of would-be solutions

Check Your Biases

Listen in earnest and don’t let your own preferences and experiences bias you toward a result.

Define Your Customer

Strategically select and describe the type of person you want to interview based on your initial analysis of the problem space.

Develop Your Script

Ask the right questions to uncover hidden opportunities to address common and/or intense pain points.

Recruit Your Customers

“Get out of the building” or use digital tools to engage the right people in conversation.

Synthesize Findings

Learn how to collect and interpret qualitative insights, and read between the lines for hidden insights that others may miss.

Why Customer Discovery Is Important

Without conducting customer discovery you may build something nobody cares about, launch something that industry isn’t ready for, or doesn’t find valuable in its commercialized form.

Many founders and innovation teams are so passionate about an idea that they believe they have the secret sauce, and will go to market without completing customer discovery.

When no one bites on their offering, they believe the industry is the fool, but if they had completed customer discovery they would have found ways to change or modify the offer so that customers would be more likely to recognize its value and application.

Course Content

Our Customer Discovery coursework includes a brief introduction to corporate innovation, and then four modules that track the four steps of the discovery process

01

Opportunity Activation

In this module we guide you through the problem in its relevant industry context, and help you formulate testable hypotheses regarding potential solutions, the value solutions can create, and the marketing and distribution implications of commercialized solutions.
02

Ideal Customer Definition

In this module we help you build ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and relevant buyer personas to test your hypotheses. We also recruit people who match the identified customer criteria.
03

Customer Interviews

In this module we develop a call guide to extract the most meaningful insights from your customers, and then conduct and record interviews with a statistically significant sample group, which could be anywehre from 10 to hundres of poeple depending on the size of your target market.
04

Synthesis & Analysis

In the last module we gather all the documented, structured qualitative data from customer interviews, as well as any notes or manually curated insights from the discovery team, and then and categorize ideas to see a comprehensive landscape of the voice of the customer (VoC). We then analyze the qualitative data against the original hypotheses and look for unforeseen emerging trends that allow us to see the problem from a different angle. This process culminates in a set of validated or invalidated hypotheses that give you a more refined understanding of the problem, as well as a set of insights that will help you in any next steps in the innovation process (and we’ll also do a brief overview of what those might be).

Ready.

Set.

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Innovate

We'd love to put our experience with high-growth startups and Fortune 500 companies to work for you