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.
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.
The rest of the series
Talk 01 · The mindset
Customer Development 101
The mindset talk that explains why we run this exact sequence — and where every artifact in it comes from.
Read itTalk 03 · After the first 10
Scaling Outbound for Founder-Led Sales
When discovery is done and you're ready to repeat-sell, this is how the same muscle becomes outbound.
Read it