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clement vouillon @clemnt
, 10 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
In my thread of the evening I’ll share a very simple customer discovery “program” for early stage #saas.
In the past months I realized that many early stage founders mistake what they think is a marketing problem with what is, in reality, a customer discovery problem. They have a 1st version of their product but no stream of leads. So they want to start marketing to solve that.
In the majority of the cases I later realized that it was too early to start marketing, the real issue was that they didn’t discuss enough with potential users so the “product + value proposition + customer / persona” chain was not clear yet.
And kickstarting your marketing program to get more leads in that situation generally leads to disappointment. Even if you have a working product, it’s worth going through another customer discovery phase, here’s a very simple program:
Step 1
Open a spreadsheet and write down what you think are your ideal customers / users. You don’t need to read a book on the theory of persona building. Just try to define as much as possible who you think your ideal buyers & users are.
Step 2
Set a number of interviews / meetings that you want to conduct weekly. Ex: We want to interview 5 people per week (who match your personas defined at step 1).
Step 3
Conduct these interviews like open discussions. Don’t try to sell your product. Don’t feel the pressure of being a sales. Just discuss with them about their problems, their habits, the tools they use etc… and if the flow is right then talk about your product.
Step 4
Distribute this task to 2-3 people in the team. CEO has to do it, ideally with the product guy and the first “all around” marketing person. Ex: two itws per week for the CEO, and one for the product and marketing person.
Step 5
Take notes for each interview and share them with the two other people doing the interviews. Write a weekly (or monthly) report summing up the main learnings that you share with the whole team.
It sounds crazy (since customer discovery is a such a covered topic) but if you do that you’re already doing what 80% of the very early stage startups I see are not doing.

BTW I, by no mean, pretend it’s easy. Being consistent and interviewing users is hard.
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