Talk 02 · The tactics

How to: Customer Discovery
the call-by-call flow.

A practitioner-level walkthrough of what to actually do before, during, and after every customer discovery call.

DeckHow to: Customer Discovery

Audience

Founders, GTM engineers, and PMs who have an ICP hypothesis and need a repeatable interview process that produces learnings — not noise.

About

The tactical sequel to Talk 01. Same interview philosophy, but zoomed all the way in: how to recruit, how to pre-game, what to say, how to score, and how to store the output.

Key takeaways

01Customer Discovery is a chain of four call types — context, problem, position, pilot. Don't skip stages and don't talk to non-customers.
02Recruit in three lanes simultaneously: LinkedIn post, in-network (Happenstance over your exports), and prospect outbound (Sales Nav + Dripify / Lemlist).
03Pre-game every interview in 5–15 min: review the guide, review their LinkedIn profile, test your transcriber (Granola or Fathom).
04During the call: the guide is a guide. Follow their story, ask open-ended "and then what?", investigate the last time it happened, learn into emotions.
05Use CURSE as a problem-worthiness score: Crucial, Ubiquitous, Recurring, Specific, Engaging. Bank the quote, the spend, and the search behavior.
06After the call: store the recording, score in a CURSE Tracker, and only stop interviewing when you stop learning.

Companion assets

Everything else from the talk.

Guide
Problem Interview Guide
The 25-minute problem-discovery script. Open the Doc, copy it, and edit the bracketed placeholders to your ICP — then bring it to every problem call.
Open Download .docx
Spreadsheet
CURSE Problem Tracker
The spreadsheet template we use to score every interview on Crucial / Ubiquitous / Recurring / Specific / Engaging — one tab per persona, one row per problem-quote per call. This is the artifact that lets you see patterns instead of remembering them.
Download
Guide
Value Interview Guide
The 45-minute script for value-prop interviews — qualify the problem, share six props, run the $100-budget question per prop, then comparative 0-10 rating on a summary slide. Open and copy.
Open Download .docx
Deck
Value Interview Deck
The slide deck that pairs with the Value Interview Guide — the six-prop walkthrough and the comparative summary slide you actually screen-share on the call. Open and copy alongside the guide.
Open
Guide
Pilot Interview Guide
Script for the pilot conversation with both positive-close (book the next call, prep the contract) and negative-close (optimize for why) branches. Open and copy.
Open Download .docx
Deck
Pilot Interview Deck
The slide deck that pairs with the Pilot Interview Guide — the offer, the proof stack, and the close, in the order you walk through them on the call. Open and copy alongside the guide.
Open
Post series
First Founder Sales — the post series
The written long-form of this exact playbook. Three posts — Turning Prospects into Problems, Problems to Pilots, and Optimizing Pilots to Generate Proof — covering recruit, interview, score, and convert. Keep them open in a tab while you run your first batch of calls.
Read the series