Venture building has the potential to solve many of society’s biggest problems.

We at High Alpha Innovation believe the world needs more startups to tackle global issues.

However, we also know it’s not enough to simply launch a high volume of new companies.

To truly impact the world, we need to build startups that can thrive and scale long term.

A great way to accomplish this is for scaled organizations — corporations, universities, state governments, and non-profits — interested in startup creation to work with venture builders.‍

By doing so, they can develop business models that not only address big societal problems but also the target audience’s Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) — that is, their specific pain points.

Understanding the wants and needs of intended customers for a potential startup enables organizations and their venture-building partners to validate assumptions, iterate based on real-world feedback, and reduce the risk of building products no one will actually use.

Using this approach, organizations can identify genuine market gaps, capitalize on (possibly small) windows of opportunity, and truly differentiate their companies from competitors.

This part of High Alpha Innovation’s venture-building playbook — one that leans heavily on the JTBD framework above — is our version of customer discovery: securing insights from would-be users of a technology we co-create with partners to inform product development.

The customer discovery process: Getting insights directly from the target audience

Many, if not most, venture builders use some form of customer discovery for startup creation.

And they should. Going straight to the source — those in their target market — provides rich insights that can inform which direction to go in with creating new business offerings.

We define customer discovery as:

The process of understanding potential customers’ problems (JTBD) by developing a hypothesis on initial business assumptions around an original company/solution idea, then testing those assumptions through customer interviews and research

Customer discovery questions we ask vary from one venture-build program to the next.

That said, we ask people who fit the ideal customer persona for a proposed solution about:

• Challenges they face related to their workflow
• The frequency with which these issues occur
• How they currently solve for those problems
• If colleagues experience the same difficulties
• Whether the issue is common in their industry
• If they’re willing to switch to/pay for a new solution
• What features in a solution are important to them
  

Customer discovery is ultimately about building a hypothesis, getting market data, and refining that initial thesis to ensure our potential startup actually solves the problem at hand.

All in all, this is a highly iterative process that evolves as we gain more info and insight.

As we collaboratively design startup concepts (and, in time, actual companies) with partners, we thoughtfully 'blend' the JTBD framework and questions above into our Build process.

Turning customer discovery questions into actionable next steps with our partners

The customer discovery process aims to reach a saturation point when interviews no longer provide new insights and similar patterns emerge among our discussions.

The number of interviews required to ultimately reach this point differs for each Build program we execute.

Sometimes, it takes just five target-audience conversations. Other times, it takes 100. It depends entirely on the complexity of the problem and customers' JTBD.

What is constant, though, is the roughly three months we take to uncover and analyze intel.

1) Assemble phase: Identity potential customers and JTBD

“They say that startups don’t starve, they drown," serial entrepreneur Rob Fitzpatrick wrote in his book, "The Mom Test." "You never have too few options, too few leads, or too few ideas. You have too many. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything."

The first and simplest step to avoid drowning in info-overload is defining your segment.

Every brand, even Fortune 500 businesses, started with a niche group of early adopters.‍

If you're not finding enough problems to solve and goals to set after a few discovery chats, you don’t yet have a specific-enough customer defined.

Working with partners allows High Alpha Innovation to quickly ID and access a target segment we can get very specific feedback early on in our venture-building process.

After we bucket customers, we assess the problems they face through interviews that focus on the broad, open-ended questions mentioned above to understand customers' world, pain points, and current solutions they utilize today to solve for their JTBD.

2) Test: Explore a hypothesized solution and business model

Assemble helps us build deep empathy for the customer. Once that phase ends, we move to the Test stage. This is where we begin to create and experiment with a variety of concepts.

We brainstorm novel solutions to the problems validated previously. Our team of analysts:

• Tests our hypothesized solution and assumptions with the market to gather feedback
• Expands our sample of interviewees to include more than just target customers (i.e., users, buyers, industry experts, incumbents, and investors)
• Uses the Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability Framework — a unique design-thinking approach made famous by IDEO — to gather more info.
  

By systematically exploring these three dimensions in this last bullet point, we can create a comprehensive picture of the solution's potential. This framework helps us pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in our early-stage startup concept, and allows us to refine it as needed.

Example: Nurses dissatisfied with their schedules

Nurses are leaving the healthcare industry at alarming rates. One of the reasons why is the experience they have managing their shifts and schedules.

One of our partners, a large healthcare system in the U.S., recognized this issue, and worked with us to engage dozens of nurses across their regions, units, and specialities to better learn the 'why' behind this dissatisfaction.

We expanded our interviews nationally by tapping into our network of experts and conducting cold outreach on LinkedIn and other online communities and forums. 

Our team asked questions like, "Talk me through a day in the life of your job." We'd follow up with, "What was one of your hardest days or weeks on the floor?" And we'd allow the nurses to elaborate on their specific problems.

Scheduling came up over and over again. But we realized that it wasn’t just their final work schedule that was the problem. Rather, it was the way the process worked and felt.

Many nurses cited an inability to personally shape their schedules, limited or no flexibility, and a lack of scheduling transparency. This gave us conviction that it was a problem worth solving.

We ultimately categorized this particular JTBD as, “Help nurses gain autonomy over their work schedule.”

The venture-building opportunity quickly became clear: Improving flexibility, transparency, and fairness in scheduling by giving more control to and getting more feedback from nurses.

The end result? After a 100-day Build program, our partner decided to move forward with and ultimately launched vflok, an AI-powered scheduling assistant helps hospital managers and nurses work together to optimize schedules and reduce administrative tasks.‍

Going beyond traditional customer discovery

The customer discovery process is comprehensive. A lot of primary research helps us confirm (or disconfirm) our suspicions around possible business ideas and helps us make data-driven decisions.

But our approach differs from other venture builders in that we also conduct a lot of secondary research.

Specifically, our Analyst team:

• Combs over the latest industry research and recent news coverage around the concept subject to understand trends and market size
• Checks out relevant online forums and community boards to inform JTBD and discover issues with current tech products on the market
• Conducts a competitive-landscape analysis to detect opportunities that are well-served today and those that require new solutions
  

In short, we ensure no stone is unturned in our effort to validate a likely viable startup idea.

Our structured info-gathering approach — a necessary forcing function to land on the 'right' company concept — ultimately helps us better 'know' customers and their JTBD, the current market landscape (i.e., likely competitors), and near- and long-term business opportunities.

‍And all this intel provides a solid foundation for product development and go-to-market strategies for our portfolio company founding teams.

Low-cost experiments at scale help our partners find the best ideas. Our customer-discovery process allows us to test many ideas with them quickly and efficiently.

By conducting many fast, cheap, and weird experiments, we can gather real-world data tied to big problems without having to commit a lot of resources to any one idea.

We can fail fast, learn quickly, and identify promising startup opportunities more effectively than traditional, resource-intensive research and development processes.