#tag
Customer Discovery
Talking to customers to learn their real problems.
6 guides · 1 tools · 51 books
Simple guides
Customer discovery
Go and talk to real potential customers to check that the problem you want to solve actually exists.
The Mom Test
Ask customers about their real life and past behaviour — never 'do you like my idea?'.
Jobs to Be Done
People don't buy products — they 'hire' them to get a job done in their life.
Negotiation with tactical empathy
Negotiate by deeply understanding the other side's feelings and view — not by splitting the difference.
Radical candor
Give feedback that shows you care personally while challenging people directly.
Clear messaging (customer as hero)
Make the customer the hero of the story and your brand the guide who helps them win.
Free tools
Essential sources
Books in the library
Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology
by Gayle Laakmann McDowell & Jackie Bavaro
Gayle McDowell and Jackie Bavaro's comprehensive guide to product management—from landing the role to excelling at it. Essential for founders who need to think like product managers.
Loyal: Listen or You Always Lose: A Leader's Guide to Winning Customer and Employee Loyalty
Guide for leaders on building loyalty among customers and employees through listening. Key for startup growth via retention and culture.
Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress
by Bob Moesta & Greg Engle
Applies Jobs-to-be-Done to startup sales, mapping customer buying timelines and forces to accelerate acquisition without pushy tactics. Vs Traction Channels, focuses on demand-side psychology for higher close rates; use cases cutting B2B sales cycles by 50% via struggle interviews. Go-to-market sales transformation.
The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers
by Alex Banayan
Alex Banayan's interviews with Gates, Buffett, and Wozniak reveal 'third door' persistence—banging on back entrances amid rejections—to breakthrough success. Founders adopt unconventional networking, relentless pursuit, and value-creation mindsets to bypass gatekeepers and avoid waiting in line. Vs memoir-style Shoe Dog, it's aggregated wisdom; perfect for early-career hustle inspiration and rejection resilience.
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
A collection of in-depth interviews by Jessica Livingston with founders of influential startups such as Apple, PayPal, Hotmail, and others, detailing how they conceived ideas, raised funding, built products, and navigated the chaotic early stages—widely regarded as a must-read for startup founders seeking real-world lessons and inspiration.
Steal the Show: From Speeches to Job Interviews to Deal-Closing Pitches, How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life
by Michael Port
Public speaking and high-stakes communication guide by Michael Port that helps startup founders and professionals master pitches, demos, and persuasive presentations—crucial skills for fundraising, sales, and recruiting in early-stage companies.
The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
by Steve Blank & Bob Dorf
Steve Blank and Bob Dorf’s comprehensive, step-by-step handbook for startup founders, based on the Customer Development methodology and Lean Startup principles, covering validation, customer discovery, product–market fit, and scalable business models—often considered a foundational manual for building a startup systematically.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie's timeless principles foster entrepreneurial personal growth in relationship-building and influence, key habits like genuine appreciation and empathetic listening to overcome networking failures. Use case: Winning investors, partners, and teams without resentment. Vs Atomic Habits, it targets interpersonal dynamics over solo routines.
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
by Clayton Christensen & Taddy Hall & Karen Dillon et al.
Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done theory, explaining how to understand what customers really want and create successful innovations.
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
by Clayton Christensen & Taddy Hall & Karen Dillon et al.
Clayton Christensen's Jobs-to-be-Done framework shows how understanding what customers hire products to do leads to breakthrough innovation. Essential for founders building products people actually want to buy.
FOCUS Framework: How to Find Product-Market Fit
by Justin Wilcox
A practical guide by Justin Wilcox that provides step-by-step instructions on how to find product-market fit through customer experiments. Includes 5 workbooks with 44 experiment exercises covering customer interviews, opportunity sizing, MVPs, and scaling.
Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice
by Anthony Ulwick
Anthony Ulwick's practical guide to Jobs-to-be-Done theory and Outcome-Driven Innovation. Learn how to understand what customers really want and create products they'll actually buy—with an 86% success rate.
Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want
by Étienne Garbugli
Étienne Garbugli's essential guide to B2B customer development, packed with over 20 case studies. This book provides a proven process to get from idea to product-market fit in business-to-business markets using lean startup principles.
Lean UX
by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden
Lean UX adapts user experience design to the Lean Startup world, helping product teams and founders build, measure, and learn faster by emphasizing collaboration, experimentation, and continuous learning.
Starting a StartUp: Build Something People Want
by James Sinclair
A founder-focused book on how to identify real customer problems and build products that people truly want. Emphasizes idea validation, customer discovery, and iterating toward product–market fit—core concepts for any early-stage startup founder.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
by Steve Blank
Steve Blank's pioneering book on customer development that launched the lean startup movement, providing a systematic framework for discovering and validating customer needs.
User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
by Jeff Patton & Peter Economy
Jeff Patton's definitive guide to user story mapping—a technique for keeping the big picture in view while building products. Essential for product managers and founders who want to build what customers actually need.
UX for Lean Startups
by Laura Klein
UX for Lean Startups shows founders and early-stage teams how to do effective user experience research and design with limited time and resources, aligning UX work with Lean Startup experimentation.
Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies
by Stefanos Zenios & Josh Makower & Paul Yock et al.
Must-have book for starting a medical device company, featuring a great customer discovery process. By Zenios, Makower, Yock et al.
Continuous Discovery Habits
by Teresa Torres
A hands-on guide for product leaders and startup founders on how to embed continuous discovery practices—regular customer interviews, rapid experiments, and assumption testing—into their workflow. It shows how to reduce product risk, increase learning speed, and consistently ship features that drive both customer and business value.
Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers
by Michele Hansen
A practical guide to customer interviewing that teaches founders and product teams how to conduct effective customer research interviews. The book provides frameworks, scripts, and templates for discovering customer needs, testing hypotheses, and making better product decisions based on real customer insights.
Four Steps to the Epiphany
by Steve Blank
Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany" is a seminal work that outlines a customer development process for startups. It highlights the importance of understanding customer needs and iterating based on feedback, offering a comprehensive approach to building successful startups.
Inspired
by Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan's book offers insights into product management and development, focusing on creating products that resonate with customers. It's essential for tech startup founders.
Intercom on Product Management
Intercom's collected wisdom on building products customers love. Short, practical essays from a company that scaled to serve over 25,000 businesses.
Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy
by Cindy Alvarez
Cindy Alvarez's practical guide to customer development for product teams. Learn how to talk to customers and validate ideas before building, based on her experience at Yammer and Microsoft.
My First 1000 Dollars
by Yogi Raj
Yogi Raj's workbook provides actionable strategies for acquiring initial customers, a critical step for any startup. It's a hands-on guide for founders looking to build a customer base from scratch.
Pretotype It
by Alberto Savoia
Alberto Savoia's "Pretotype It" is a manifesto that emphasizes the importance of gaining market feedback before fully investing in a product idea. It provides guidance on testing concepts efficiently.
Talking to Humans: Success Starts with Understanding Your Customers
by Giff Constable & Frank Rimalovski
Giff Constable's ultra-practical guide to customer discovery. Short, free, and filled with tactical advice for validating ideas through conversations.
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development
by Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits
This guide by Brant Cooper provides a practical approach to understanding customer development, a crucial aspect for startups aiming to achieve product-market fit.
The Mom Test
by Rob Fitzpatrick
A practical guide to customer conversations that teaches founders how to ask the right questions and avoid misleading feedback. The book provides a simple framework to uncover honest customer insights during interviews.
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
by Rob Fitzpatrick
Guide to conducting effective customer interviews without biasing responses or getting false compliments. Shelved 137 times as startup on Goodreads with average rating 4.37 from 14,040 ratings, published 2013.
What Customers Want
by Anthony Ulwick
Written by Anthony W. Ulwick, this book challenges the traditional customer-driven model by introducing 'outcome-driven innovation.' It provides a scientific approach to understanding customer needs and creating products that deliver specific outcomes, making it a valuable resource for startups aiming to innovate effectively.
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
by Marty Cagan
A comprehensive guide to building successful technology products by former eBay and Netscape executive Marty Cagan. This book provides a master class in structuring and staffing product organizations, discovering the right product, and creating products that customers will love.
The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets
by Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits
Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits provide a practical guide to combining customer insight with rapid experimentation. Essential for founders implementing Lean Startup methodology in their ventures.
Core Curriculum Reading: Experimenting in the Entrepreneurial Venture
by Thomas R. Eisenmann & Eric Ries & Sarah Dillard
A Harvard Business School core reading (by Thomas R. Eisenmann, Eric Ries, and Sarah Dillard) that introduces hypothesis-driven entrepreneurship and lean startup experimentation. It teaches founders how to translate vision into testable business model hypotheses, design experiments, and use data to iterate toward product–market fit—making it a must-read foundational text for startup founders.
Running Lean
by Ash Maurya
Running Lean is a pragmatic guide for founders to systematically test and iterate their business model from an initial concept to one that works. It applies lean startup methodologies, focusing on hypothesis-driven validation, customer interviews, and metrics to reduce risk and build products that customers actually want.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany
by Steve Blank
"The Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank is recommended by Babak Nivi (founder of AngelList and Venture Hacks) as the closest thing to a manual for building a startup. Marc Andreessen also appreciates the book as a roadmap for achieving Product/Market Fit.
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
An examination of modern open source software development by Nadia Eghbal that explores how the dynamics of open source have evolved over the past two decades. Drawing on hundreds of developer interviews and platform analyses, the book reveals insights applicable to all individual creators on the internet.
The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and Adobe's Chief Product Officer, addresses the often-ignored middle stretch of entrepreneurial journeys. Drawing from 5+ years of interviews with legendary founders and his own experience with companies like Airbnb and Pinterest, this national bestseller provides 100+ lessons for navigating the hardest part of building something great.
Zero to IPO: Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Frederic Kerrest
A comprehensive startup guide by Frederic Kerrest, cofounder of Okta, distilling lessons from building Okta and interviews with top founders and investors. It covers idea validation, fundraising, go‑to‑market, scaling, culture, and leadership, making it a must‑read playbook for startup founders aiming to grow from inception to IPO.
Primal Leadership
by Daniel Goleman & Richard E. Boyatzis & Annie McKee
'Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis, and Annie McKee highlights the importance of emotionally intelligent leadership. The book emphasizes empathy, collaboration, and motivation as crucial elements for effective leadership in today's world.
Who
by Geoff Smart & Randy Street
Written by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, 'Who' focuses on the importance of hiring the right team members for startups. It presents a 4-step method for successful hiring and includes interviews with high-profile leaders, aiming to help businesses avoid costly hiring mistakes.
Founders at Work
by Jessica Livingston
Jessica Livingston's collection of interviews with founders of successful technology companies, offering insights into the early days of startups and the challenges they faced.
The Growth Equation
by Andy Budd
"The Growth Equation" by Andy Budd is a comprehensive guide for startup founders, synthesizing lessons on customer discovery, positioning, sales, growth, and product development. It provides actionable frameworks and real-world examples to help founders achieve their first million in revenue.
Free Radio & Podcast Marketing In 30 Minutes
A concise, practical guide that teaches entrepreneurs and startup founders how to use radio interviews and podcasts as a low-cost channel to market their products and ideas. It focuses on actionable tactics for getting booked, telling your story effectively, and turning audio appearances into measurable growth—useful for early-stage founders looking for scrappy, high-ROI marketing approaches.
It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy
by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
By Captain D. Michael Abrashoff (2002, Grand Central Publishing), this memoir describes how he transformed the USS Benfold, one of the Navy's worst-performing ships, into one of its best by pushing decision-making down to his crew and genuinely listening to them.
What Every BODY Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People
by Joe Navarro
By Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence agent (2008, HarperCollins), this book teaches how to read body language — comfort and discomfort cues especially — to better understand people in negotiations, interviews, and meetings.