Harness continuous discovery

You think you know what you want to build and who you want to build it for.

And you are most likely wrong.

Continuous discovery is the never-ending quest to prove your priors incorrect. It’s not only your job to do this, it’s your job to find doing this delightful.

The quicker you find what doesn’t work, the quicker you get to something that does (and the quicker you can get to closing deals regularly).

PMF is not a steady state. It’s a process. To stay alive, embrace the continuous discovery afforded to you through sales.

Selling is the closest you can get to having real-time market feedback. Grizzled founders can feel the market shift via sales calls and adjust their businesses accordingly.

Create a “risky assumption” registry

What are the things you’re trying to prove or disprove about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? Track them.

Tracking your assumptions puts structure around what could be an open-ended, continuous discovery process. It also provides data on your product and sales decisions, which helps align your team and your investors.

Here’s an example of the table we had in the early days of Clarify:

Whenever you’re lost and not sure of your next step, return to your riskiest assumption (the thing that could kill the business) and look to get more data points.

Don’t be afraid to pivot

If you find yourself throwing out previous ideas, don’t worry. That’s part of the journey. Some pivots our founders have told us about:

• Recall.ai the AI call recorder API, started as “Perfect Recall,” software for user researchers to record and transcribe their meetings. They later pivoted to focusing solely on the API layer and targeting developers. “We realized the pain that we're trying to solve was already solved for,” says co-founder Amanda Zhu.
• Pylon started out as a Zendesk plug-in. “We realized that the incumbent that we were plugging into was not actually as loved as we thought. And that increasingly people felt like it was a legacy product rather than one of the more modern tools,” says co-founder Marty Kausas. Now? Pylon unabashedly calls itself a “Zendesk killer.”
• Equals, encouraged by the massive adoption of tools like Notion, released a freemium version. “We brought in a lot of users, and we saw very little traction on that. And we saw even less upsell to paid accounts,” says co-founder Bobby Pinero. They eventually returned to a sales-led motion that required a demo with “no exceptions.”
• Yoodli’s mission made a B2C motion more appealing, but the company realized it needed to master the B2B market first. “A lot of [our B2C customers] folks will have a hair on fire event to use us. But once that's over, they’d stop using the platform,” says co-founder Esha Joshi. “B2C is the eventual move, and we’d like to get back to this soon because it’s where our heart is.”

Changing your mind isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s the most essential part of being an early-stage founder who embraces founder-led sales.