ENTR 502 | Session 7 | Validating the Venture: The Customer Discovery Blueprint

Summary:

Customer discovery is a structured, empirical process focused on validating business hypotheses by "getting out of the building" to learn directly from potential customers. Rather than selling, the goal is to determine whether a problem is significant enough to support a business by designing objective pass/fail experiments and using minimum viable products (MVPs) to elicit honest feedback. To gather reliable data, entrepreneurs must apply "The Mom Test," which involves asking specific questions about a customer's past behavior and life rather than seeking opinions or hypothetical validation, which often results in biased "bad data" such as compliments and fluff. This phase also requires mapping the customer's buying process, understanding their unique motivations, and identifying a homogeneous group of the "Next 10 Customers" who closely fit the target profile to ensure the solution is replicable. Ultimately, this phase concludes with a pivot-or-proceed decision, where the founding team assesses whether they have found "earlyvangelists" with an urgent need or whether they must refine their value proposition based on factual market insights rather than potentially expensive assumptions.