Takeaways from a lunch & learn with Matt Foley, Managing Director of Startup Incubation at NextCorps
TL;DR
- Customer discovery should evolve alongside your startup, from identifying painful problems early on to refining messaging and expanding into new markets later.
- One-on-one conversations consistently provide deeper insights than surveys or focus groups, especially in the earliest stages of building a company.
- Discovery is about gathering evidence and reducing assumptions—not just collecting positive feedback.
- The goal is to build what customers will actually use, grounded in real behavior and experiences.
Too often, customer discovery is treated like a box to check for early-stage startups: conduct a certain number of interviews, validate an idea, then move on. At a recent lunch & learn, NextCorps’ Matt Foley challenged that thinking.
Drawing from his experience as a founder and longtime customer discovery practitioner, Foley walked through how ongoing customer conversations help companies reduce risk, uncover opportunities, refine messaging, and build better products across every stage of growth.
Stage 1: Pre-idea
In the pre-idea stage, customer discovery is about identifying a meaningful problem worth solving. The focus should stay on understanding a specific audience rather than immediately building solutions.
Foley emphasized the value of one-on-one interviews early on because they uncover context, emotions, and behaviors that surveys often miss. Prompts like, ‘Walk me through your typical day,’ ‘What’s keeping you up at night?’ and ‘What project keeps getting pushed off?’ help uncover recurring pain points and patterns.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can support this work by helping founders research audiences, develop interview questions, and synthesize insights. However, Foley cautioned against allowing AI to replace direct customer interaction. Hearing real experiences, frustrations, and behaviors firsthand remains critical.
As a complement to interviews, Foley also highlighted netnography—the practice of observing conversations in spaces like Reddit, Slack, and Discord—to understand how people naturally describe their challenges.
Look out! Pre-idea traps: Becoming attached to a solution too early, or relying on hypothetical answers instead of real-world behaviors.
Stage 2: Idea validation
Once a problem is identified, discovery shifts toward validating whether a proposed solution resonates before investing time and money to build it. Foley recommends using concept descriptions: simple, customer-friendly summaries focused on outcomes and usability rather than features or branding. He shared a classic iPod-style example to illustrate how clarity and value drive stronger reactions than technical detail.
This new MP3 player enables you to store up to 5,000 songs in your pocket. No more difficult to use menus—get to the songs you want in seconds. When you’re ready for new music, connect to an online store for instant downloads.
Discovery during this phase should focus on gathering honest reactions around usefulness, clarity, customer fit, and pricing. Questions like, ‘What is your initial reaction?’ and ‘What is a fair and reasonable price?’ can help gauge real interest.
Look out! Idea validation traps: Seeking validation rather than the truth, relying on overly positive feedback, or talking to the wrong audience.
“If 10 people tell you they would buy it, assume one actually will,” Foley said.
Stage 3: Prototype & launch
Here, discovery shifts from what customers say to what they do. Observing real-world product use reveals friction points, high-value features, and gaps between expectations and experience.
Customer discovery during launch can help improve onboarding processes, prioritize feature development, refine usability, and avoid overbuilding unnecessary functionality.
Look out! Prototype & launch trap: Overbuilding features based on assumptions or customer opinions rather than observed behavior.
Stage 4: Growth
In growth, customer discovery becomes a powerful tool for improving marketing and positioning.
Foley emphasized that the language customers use to describe frustrations, goals, and success often becomes the strongest source material for website copy, positioning, messaging, and sales conversations. As he put it, founders should strive to “let customers write your marketing copy.”
Customer discovery during growth can also help businesses refine pricing strategies, improve retention, and identify opportunities to expand into adjacent customer segments or markets.
Look out! Growth trap: Assuming customer discovery is no longer necessary and losing touch with customer language and behavior.
Stage 5: Maturity
For mature companies, customer discovery becomes an embedded discipline. Companies should seek to maintain continuous feedback loops through ongoing interviews, customer conversations, market monitoring, and product feedback collection.
Look out! Maturity trap: Speaking to customers only when problems arise, leading to outdated assumptions.
Turning discovery into a habit
At its core, customer discovery is about consistently talking to customers to make better decisions. Whether validating a concept, refining a product, or entering new markets, ongoing discovery helps teams stay aligned, reduce risk, and uncover opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
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