Early-stage founders often take one of two paths. Sometimes they lived a problem and used their experience to build a solution and market it to people like them. Other founders learn about a problem and then must learn more about it to figure out what solution to build. You can do both, too, but that happens less frequently.

If a founder has lived the problem, they are the customer. They’re building something for themselves and people like them. If founders haven’t lived the problem, they need first to understand it from the customer’s perspective. To do this effectively, ideally before they start building, founders would be well served to do customer discovery interviews. Simply put, they should interview customers to understand a problem from their perspective and, ideally, uncover unique insights about a problem. When done correctly, customer discovery saves time and resources by preventing founders from building something customers don’t want.

Customer discovery is more difficult than it sounds because founders want to tell everyone about their ideas. This process isn’t about the founders’ ideas; it’s about the customers’ problems. So, founders have to go from sell mode to listen-and-learn mode, which isn’t always easy. Ideally, the founder’s ideas shouldn’t even be mentioned during customer discovery conversations.

Luckily, there’s a great book written for founders that details a framework for conducting effective customer discovery interviews. It’s called The Mom Test. I’ve read it a few times and gotten value from it each time. Whenever I want to learn about a problem, I refresh myself on the framework. It reminds me how to ask questions in a way that leads to my gaining a better understanding of the problem, which leads to unique insights and creative ideas about how to solve the problem.