Customer discovery is the research you do before building: talking to real potential customers to learn whether the problem is painful enough, and your solution wanted enough, that they'd actually pay.
The two free templates below, a customer-discovery interview script and a business model canvas, give you the structure.
Here's how to use them.
To turn what you hear into a sharper offer, our Value Proposition Canvas Worksheet maps customer pains to what you build.
Why Discovery Comes First
It is far cheaper to learn you're wrong in a conversation than after you've built the product. The goal of discovery is to try hard to disprove it. As Jason Cohen puts it, find ten customers who'll hand over cash before you build the thing. If you can't, that's the most valuable thing you could have learned this month.
How to Run a Good Discovery Interview
The biggest mistake is pitching. You're there to learn, not to sell. A few rules:
- Dig into the problem, not your solution. Ask how they handle it today and what that costs them.
- Ask about real past behavior, not hypothetical future intent ("When did you last try to solve this?" beats "Would you buy this?").
- Listen far more than you talk, and let silences sit.
Use the interview script template to build your question list, and pull from the larger questions list to tailor it to your idea.
Map It with a Business Model Canvas
Discovery feeds a business model canvas, the one-page map (from Strategyzer / Alexander Osterwalder) of how your business creates and captures value across nine building blocks. Treat each block as a hypothesis. Your discovery interviews exist to validate or invalidate those hypotheses, and the filled-in canvas becomes a sharp one-pager you can put in front of advisors and investors for fast feedback.
Recommended Reading
For a 30-minute deep dive on running interviews, John Jabara's "Mastering Customer Interviews for Entrepreneurs" is worth the $10.
Get the Templates
Make a copy of the Customer Discovery Interview Script and the Business Model Canvas template, validate your top hypotheses, then share the canvas with your inner circle. Once you know who you're really for, sharpen it with the Ideal Client Profile worksheet.
Related Malloy resources
- Achieve Unparalleled Sales Growth with Fractional Sales Leadership
- Pricing Sensitivity, Strategy, and Tactics
- Clarify Your Ideal Client Profile