Customer discovery is a powerful approach to building and refining a startup’s offering.

Customer discovery is a powerful approach to building and refining a startup’s offering. Honestly, too few business professionals utilize customer discovery. We were taught the importance of market research in undergrad. We all know the classic 5 step process: Define the problem, create a plan, collect relevant data, analyze/report findings, and take action. However, this can be limiting, in that our own assumptions can force us to reject the null hypothesis, as we seek out relevant data, rather than honest data. In this post, I will cover the classic steps to customer discovery, my assumptions, our initial results, and what we learned.

With customer discovery, you take more of a raw entrepreneurial approach to information gathering. This can generally be summed up into a 4 step process (1 fewer processes must be more efficient — right?). Those steps include: Define a hypothesis, declare your assumptions, ask open ended questions (and listen — we’ll call it step 3.5), and evaluate.

As an avid collaborator, I have the privilege of working with many Founders, and many businesses. My good friend (and business partner) Jim Keeney values customer discovery more than anyone I know. From the workshops he puts on at local Universities, to the way we recruit clients and partners, Customer Discovery is our sharpest tool. I assumed I had this in the bag.

We conduct face-to-face discovery sessions about 3 times a week. Sometimes we leave with a new software development project, other times we leave with a new strategic partner. The main thing is, we always approach customer discovery with our ears wide open, and our assumptions well defined. In fact, customer discovery has become our primary business development process, and the best thing is — it’s genuine! I have sold for many industries over my years of “personal development,” but our customer discovery sales-gen process is the most organic, and the most effective sales strategy I have ever experienced — and that wasn’t intentional.

We conduct so much customer discovery that I assumed doing so with social media would be easy. That was my first mistake. Assuming anything is easy in the world of startups is a major threat. Assuming social media will magically produce results, is another (more common) dangerous assumption.

To start, I created a survey on survey monkey. I decided to test one of our hypotheses: Digital agencies are frustrated with their current CMS and the mess of tools required to achieve their mission. I then declared our assumptions: Digital agencies don’t want more tools, switching can feel daunting but is desired, and the current process of development is inefficient and detracts from their core value proposition: Creativity. I also assumed that my target market would respond to a social media post. Now I just had to create my questions — piece of cake!

I decided to limit the survey to just 5 questions with a 6th as a call-to-action. After all, most of our information comes from direct conversations, so I had to create a follow up process for interested and willing participants.

These are the questions I opted to use:

Now I had to choose my distribution channel. Considering how easy it is to setup an ad with Facebook, I chose the “quick and easy” path forward. Not a good choice.

I declared our target market: People with an interest in Content Management Systems like Drupal, and Wordpress. I targeted careers like “Web designer, Developer, UX/UI, and Marketing”. I chose to target markets based on a list of the top Digital Agencies, all of which were in the US — except for one market in Ontario. I figured it couldn’t hurt to add some diversity. (Thank goodness I did).

That was it. I crafted a simple message, and published my ad. I chose to spend $50 over 7 days. I was quoted about 5,000 eyeballs on my ad, and made the classic startup assumption: If I can get just .5% to fill out the survey, then this works! Well, I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Here is what the ad looked like:

After day 1, I had 6 clicks. Felt like progress. Day 2, 10 clicks — and 1 response! Days 3–7 were consisted of more clicks, and I assumed more results — wrong again. After my ad was completed, I decided to review the results: I had one response. Now $50 is not going to break the bank, but I still felt cheated. I did all the right things, I should have gotten better results. I had 40 link clicks, 6.9k reached — and just one response. I assumed my simple questions and 2 minute completion estimate would maximize results. That may have worked — but I simply chose the wrong strategy.

I feel like we often expect that people will like us, and want to help us, if we act cute. That’s not a good strategy for a startup. We want to be taken seriously, and we want our responses to be taken seriously. Our team took some time to reflect, and we determined something we were missing — the personal touch. Our customer discovery process almost always produces results when we speak to someone face-to-face, or by phone. It’s a direct connection, and acting cute isn’t necessary. Being honest, deliberate, and real is what matters. A Facebook paid ad just isn’t genuine enough.

In practically a frenzy — I hopped onto LinkedIn and ran a simple search for “design,” and selected the “1st connections” option. This produced a modest list of about 50 people on LinkedIn. Afraid of looking cheesy, I just sent a very simple direct message to my connections:

Hi Marie! My team is conducting customer discovery from designers and developers. I am reaching out to my direct network for feedback. Would you mind taking 2 minutes to answer 5 quick questions?[ <link](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7JD8XNP)>

By the end of the day, I had 8 more responses.

Now I know 9 responses isn’t the most extravagant of results, but it was progress. We now had enough to work with on validating our assumptions. We found that Wordpress is the most used CMS, and that 22% of developers would rather build their own vanilla solution to avoid bloat and plugin overload. We found that developers spend more time working on content categorization and site-maps than the actual design process. We found that the majority of designers train their clients in the beginning, and a shocking number avoid training their clients at all. We received the most feedback on the following question (probably because of the lack of training): What do your clients need the most help with? Hysterically enough, 44% of said “something the client broke,” and 56% said “design edits,” while 67% said “creating and publishing content.”

These things are so important to us because that is what we intend to solve with dapt. When we asked “Are there things you would like to do for your clients, that you cannot currently? (What’s holding you back?)” One of our responses was “I would love to serve my clients faster. but sometimes I take longer.” This is the importance of including at least one text-box based answer. Another interesting response was “create content (we don’t have an in-house copywriter).”

It’s amazing what deliberate action produces, versus expected results.

In the end, I am not claiming to be a master of online surveys. I am certainly not suggesting that this is the end-all-be-all strategy to your information gathering either. What I am suggesting, is that there are a lot of things I’ve done, that you shouldn’t do. With that being said, I hope at least one person benefits from this.

Shameless plug: If you are a web designer, digital agency, or marketer, we would love your 2 minutes of your time with this survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7JD8XNP

If you have more than 2 minutes, and would be willing to chat with us: send us an email at ask@dapt.tech or to learn more about what we are building visit our site.

Lastly, if you ever want to chat about startups, design, or marketing — add me on LinkedIn.

Originally published on Medium