Venture building has the potential to solve many of society’s biggest problems. We believe the world needs more startups to tackle global issues. However, we also know it’s not enough to simply launch lots of new companies.

To truly impact the world, we need startups that can thrive and scale long term. A great way to accomplish this goal is for scaled organizations interested in creating their own companies to work with venture builders.‍

By doing so, they can develop business models that not only address big societal problems but also the target customer segment's Jobs to Be Done (JTBD): their specific pain points discovered through customer discovery.

Learning the wants and needs of intended customers enables organizations and their venture-building partners to:

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• Work together across the customer discovery journey
• Test and validate assumptions and product-market fit
• Iterate on solutions based on real-world feedback
• Reduce the risk of building products no one will use

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By conducting customer discovery interviews, scaled organizations can identify customers' biggest challenges, pinpoint specific market gaps, capitalize on (possibly small) windows of opportunity to fill said gaps.

This engagement with potential customers is part of our proven venture-building playbook — one that leans heavily on the JTBD framework above — and is our distinct (and streamlined) version of customer discovery.

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

Many venture builders use some form of customer discovery, a critical component of modern lean-startup methodology popularized by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, to explore business concepts and build companies.

Conducting interviews and focus groups with the ICP for a potential startup can unearth their needs and issues.

Going 'straight to the source' like this provides rich insights that can inform which direction to take a startup and its proposed solution to solve problems faced by the target market in question.

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 Qs around:

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• 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

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Customer discovery is about building a hypothesis, getting market data, and refining that initial thesis to ensure our startup actually solves the problem at hand. It's a highly iterative process that evolves as we gain more insights.

As we collaboratively design startup concepts (and, in time, actual companies) with corporations, universities, and public-sector organizations, 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. This means we've extracted all relevant info possible.

The number of interviews required to  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 at hand.

What is constant is the roughly three months we take to uncover and analyze intel. This falls into two phases.

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? 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 chats, you don’t yet have a specific-enough customer defined.

Working with partners allows us 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:

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• 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

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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 of the nurses we spoke with cited an inability to personally shape their schedules, limited or no flexibility, and a lack of scheduling transparency. This info gave us conviction 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 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:

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• 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

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

Our structured approach — a necessary forcing function to land on the 'right' concept — helps us better 'know' customers, the current market landscape (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.

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 options more effectively than traditional, resource-intensive R&D processes.