Customer Development
14 guides on customer development.
30 Customer Interview Questions Every Founder Should Ask
A curated list of 30 customer interview questions covering discovery, problem depth, current solutions, and willingness to pay — with explanations of why each works.
Read article →Building Customer Feedback Loops That Improve Your Product
How to design feedback loops using in-app surveys, NPS, user interviews, usage data, and support tickets — and how to close the loop so customers keep giving feedback.
Read article →Building Customer Personas That Drive Decisions
How to build customer personas grounded in real research — not generic marketing templates — so they actually inform product, sales, and messaging decisions.
Read article →Customer Success at Early Stage: What to Focus On With Limited Bandwidth
Before product-market fit, customer success is really just founder sales with a retention objective — here's what to focus on with a five-person team, how to spot at-risk customers early, and when to shift from high-touch to scalable CS.
Read article →How to Build a Renewal Playbook That Keeps Customers
Renewals are won or lost months before the contract ends — here's how to structure the renewal conversation, handle at-risk accounts, negotiate multi-year deals, and build the process your CS team actually uses.
Read article →How to Define Your Target Customer
Learn to define your ideal customer profile with precision — why narrow focus beats broad appeal, and how to segment, score, and lock in your ICP.
Read article →How to Find and Cultivate Early Adopters
Who early adopters really are, where to find them, how they differ from mainstream customers, and how to turn them into your most valuable product partners.
Read article →How to Run Customer Discovery Interviews That Actually Teach You Something
Learn how to prepare, recruit, and run customer discovery interviews using the Mom Test framework to get honest insights that shape your product.
Read article →How to Test Willingness to Pay Before Building
Test willingness to pay before writing a line of code using Van Westendorp pricing research, Gabor-Granger, pre-sales, fake door tests, and anchoring experiments.
Read article →Product-Market Fit: What It Feels Like When You Have It
The concrete signals that tell you product-market fit is real — from retention curves to the Sean Ellis test, NPS, and the pull founders describe feeling.
Read article →The First 100 Customers Playbook: How to Get There Deliberately
The first 100 customers require fundamentally different acquisition tactics than customers 101–1,000 — here's where they actually come from, how to convert them, and what to learn from each one.
Read article →The Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework for Startup Founders
Understand the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework, how it differs from personas, and how to apply it to build products customers actually want to use.
Read article →User Research on a Startup Budget: What's Worth Doing
The user research methods that don't require a research team or lab, how to run effective moderated sessions on your own, what you're looking for at early stage versus optimization stage.
Read article →Voice of Customer Research: A Founder's Practical Guide
A practical guide to Voice of Customer research for founders — methods, synthesis techniques, and how to translate raw customer language into product and marketing decisions.
Read article →