“Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

I always love the debate on whether great products are imagined or are discovered through experimentation (certainly a bit of both). This post details the advice I usually give to startups on this topic and I'm happy to answer questions and join the discussion.

I always tell folks to start talking to users from day 1 :)

What are some best practices for evaluating ideas before building anything. You mentioned talking to users which is good advice but assumes that an industry has been identified already.

>>> assumes that an industry has been identified already.

This is one of the key take aways from customer discovery - is your customer actively looking for a solution to the pain / problem you've identified. If your customer is actively looking for a solution than it is easy(ier) to identify and talk with them. If no one is looking for a solution then it may be that you haven't identified a real pain, you haven't identified the correct customer, or you are to early.

It's easy to say that you can't talk to customers because the industry hasn't been identified, but that is a bad statement and should be avoided.

Start with better understanding what exactly customer discovery is, Steve Blank and Eric Reis are good places to start.

To better understand how to conduct the discovery and what questions to ask you should read a bit of Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test.

It's hard to give one piece of advice about how you should do customer discovery (without having a high quality conversation about what you are doing) b/c every venture is a different in what needs to be tested. Software ventures tend to need product customer discovery (what you should be building), while STEM companies[1] tend to need go-to-market strategy customer discovery.

[1] An example would be a company that is making an orally delivered anti-coagulant drug. They have HIGH technology constraints that aren't easily adjusted, so their customer discovery tends to revolve around questions about what their real value proposition is (is it pain free needle free drug delivery or no medical training drug delivery or something else) and other such questions.