Steve Blank · steveblank.com
Steve Blank's foundational insight changed how startups are built: no business plan survives first contact with customers. Before Blank, the standard approach was to write a plan, raise money, build the product, and then find customers. The failure rate was enormous. Customer Discovery flips the sequence. You start by talking to customers, test whether your hypotheses about their problems are correct, and only then start building.
Customer Discovery is the first of Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany: Discovery, Validation, Creation, and Building. In the discovery phase, your only goal is to answer one question: do real people actually have the problem you think they have? Not "do they like my solution?" Not "will they pay?" Just: does the problem exist, and is it painful enough that people are actively trying to solve it? This is harder than it sounds, because founders are naturally biased toward believing their own hypotheses.
The process involves structured conversations with potential customers, but it's not market research in the traditional sense. You're not gathering data to inform a report. You're testing specific hypotheses and updating them based on what you learn. Each conversation should change what you believe, even if only slightly. If you finish ten conversations and your assumptions haven't changed at all, you either had perfect intuition (unlikely) or you weren't really listening.
Customer Discovery is most active during the deep dive phase, where Distil assesses the strength of your market understanding. The critical questions become: have you spoken to real people who have this problem? How many? What patterns have emerged? What surprised you? If you haven't talked to anyone yet, that's a significant gap.
The framework feeds into all three scoring dimensions. For Problem Clarity: can you describe the problem better than the customer can? For Solution Potential: have customers confirmed that your proposed solution would actually help? For Idea Maturity: have you reached pattern saturation, where you can predict what the next interviewee will say?
Distil also uses Customer Discovery principles to check for pivot signals. If the people you've spoken to keep describing a different problem than the one you expected, or they care about different features, or a different customer segment responds more strongly, these are signals worth paying attention to. Distil will flag these when they appear in your answers.
Distil brings Steve Blank's rigour to a 10-minute conversation about your idea.
Test My Idea