The Four Steps to the Epiphany

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Let me state the purpose of Customer Discovery a little more formally. A startup begins with a 

vision: a vision of a new product or service, a vision of how the product will reach its customers, and 

a vision of why lots of people will buy that product. But most of what a startup’s founders initially 

believe about their market and potential customers are just educated guesses. To turn the vision into 

reality (and a profitable company), a startup must test those guesses, or hypotheses, and find out 

which are correct. So the general goal of Customer Discovery amounts to this: turning the founders’ 

initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. And since the facts live outside the 

building, the primary activity is to get in front of customers. Only after the founders have performed 

this step will they know whether they have a valid vision or just a hallucination. 

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet for anyone who has worked in established companies, the 

Customer Discovery process is disorienting. All the rules that marketers learn about product 

management in large companies are turned upside down. It’s instructive to enumerate all things you 

are not going to do:  

•  understand the needs and wants of all customers  

•  make a list of all the features customers want before they buy your product  

•  hand Product Development a features list of the sum of all customer requests 

•  hand Product Development a detailed marketing requirements document 

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Chapter 3: Customer Discovery

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•  run focus groups and test customers’ reactions to your product to see if they will buy 

•  Instead, you are going to develop your product for the few, not the many. Moreover, you’re 

going to start building your product even before you know whether you have any customers 

for it. 

For an experienced marketing or product management executive, these statements are not only 

disorienting and counterintuitive; they are heretical. Everything I am saying you are not supposed to 

do is what marketing and product management professionals have been trained to do well. Why 

aren’t the needs of all potential customers important? What is it about a first product from a new 

company that’s different from follow-on products in a large company? What is it about a startup’s 

first customers that make the rules so different?