The Customer Discovery Guidebook

When I expanded the content of the guide, I also raised the price so that people who purchased the guide would have an incentive to put in the work and realize the value of the advice in the guide.

After sharing the guide in a few communities, I got my first paying customer who paid 4x the original price.

The guide is still underpriced for the value I aim to deliver to people who purchase this guide, but right now, I'm focused on delivering value and getting feedback on how to make it better, not maximizing revenue.

Inspired by my first paying customer, I realized: I've been training coworkers and clients on customer development for years, but primarily through live, in-person, small group coaching. And because my time is limited, there were only so many people I could reach.

Democratizing access to my expertise by creating content, courses, and community would allow my to scale the impact of my work and allow me to reach people who otherwise wouldn't be able to hire me as a consultant or coach.

I set a goal to train 1,000 people on how to do customer development better.

To realize this vision, I sat down to write the first draft of The Customer Discovery Guidebook: https://gumroad.com/l/custdevguide

In mid-December, I did a lighting talk for my team on cognitive biases in user research, and it was a hit.

A few days later, I wrote up a short article recapping the key points of my lighting talk.

As an experiment, I edited a two page guide to customer discovery (I would later expand and evolve this into the Customer Development Guide) that I created for coworkers months ago, and linked to it at the end of my post, offering it on a pay-what-you-wish basis.

Five days after that, I got my first paying customer.