Customer Discovery That Actually Gets You Money

How I used good customer discovery to raise money with no revenue: Turning conversations, surveys, product feedback, and early customer interest into validation that actually helps you build a better company and raise money.

My Customer Discovery Background

Across my startup, I’ve conducted customer discovery with 400+ patients, providers, and other stakeholders to validate a highly regulated drug-device product. That has ranged from individual interviews and larger surveys to working with leading patient advocacy organizations to better understand the people we are building for.

Because we are years away from commercialization, I could not rely on traditional validation like revenue or thousands of active users. Customer discovery became one of the most important ways I could show judges, investors, advisors, and eventually my own team that we were solving a real problem and that the decisions we were making were grounded in what potential users actually wanted.

The biggest thing I have learned is that good customer discovery changes as your company develops. The questions you should be asking when your startup is nothing more than an idea are very different from what you should be asking once you have an MVP in someone's hands.



Early Stage: Understand the Problem Before You Talk About Your Product

When your company is still just an idea, your first goal is not to convince people that your solution is great. It is to understand the customer’s world well enough to determine whether there is actually a meaningful problem worth solving.

At this stage, I would keep your questions extremely broad and avoid introducing your solution at all. You want the person to tell you what bothers them rather than accidentally steering them toward the problem you hope exists.

Start with questions like:

  • Walk me through how you currently do this.

  • What problems do you experience while doing this?

  • What is the most difficult or frustrating part of the process?

  • What tends to go wrong?

  • What takes the most time or effort?

  • What do you wish was easier?

  • What do you currently do when you run into those problems?

  • Are there any workarounds you have developed?

  • How frequently do these issues come up?

  • If you could change one thing about the current process, what would it be?

The important part is that you are not starting with your own assumption of what the problem is. If you ask, “Do you have trouble with X?” you have already told them what answer you are looking for. Instead, ask about their experience and see whether X comes up naturally.

If the same pain point keeps surfacing across independent conversations without you prompting people toward it, that is much stronger evidence that you may have found something real.

Your early customer discovery should help you answer:

  • What problems actually exist?

  • What is the problem actually costing them in time, money, lost revenue, productivity, or other measurable impact?

  • Which problems appear repeatedly?

  • Which ones are painful enough that people already try to solve them?

  • Who experiences them most severely?

  • What are people doing today?

  • Where are the biggest gaps in the current process?

Only after you understand that should you start narrowing your problem statement and deciding what your solution actually needs to do.

At the earliest stage, you are not validating your product yet. You are validating whether there is a problem worth building a product around.


As the Product Develops, Start Testing the Solution

As your company develops, your customer discovery should develop with it.

Once you have a clearer concept, prototype, or MVP, you can start becoming much more specific. Instead of only asking about the problem, you can begin showing people what you are building and learning how they actually react to it.

At this stage, I would start asking questions like:

  • What is your first reaction to this product?

  • What do you like or dislike about it?

  • Which features matter most to you?

  • Is anything confusing?

  • How does this compare with what you use today?

  • Would you prefer this over your current solution? Why or why not?

  • What would stop you from switching?

  • In what situations would you actually use this?

If you have an MVP that customers can safely use, this is where your feedback becomes even more valuable. Put the product in their hands and watch what they actually do with it. Where do they hesitate? What do they misunderstand? What features do they immediately gravitate toward? What do they say they like versus what their behavior actually shows?

Regulated Products

For regulated products, such as medical devices or drug-device products, this can look very different. You may be years away from being able to simply hand your final product to a patient and have them use it as intended. That does not mean you have to wait years to start getting feedback on the solution.

This is when you can begin presenting potential users with things like:

  • Product renderings

  • Prototypes

  • Images and diagrams

  • Infographics

  • Videos or animations

  • Nonfunctional or representative prototypes

  • Different product configurations

  • Visual explanations of key features

  • Examples showing how the product would work or be used

You can walk someone through the proposed experience, explain the major features, show different versions, and begin understanding how your solution is actually being perceived.

Do they immediately understand what the product does? Do the features you thought were important actually matter to them? Do they prefer it to what they currently use? Is there something about the design they dislike? Does seeing the product change their interest compared with when you only discussed the underlying problem?

This gives you a way to continue moving from problem validation toward solution validation, even when regulatory or development constraints prevent someone from actually using the final product yet.

As the product becomes more tangible and customers better understand what you are offering, you can also begin asking more specific questions around preference, willingness to switch, and eventually price.

The important thing is that customer discovery does not stop once you have validated the problem. As your product evolves, the questions evolve with it.

Turn Customer Discovery Into Evidence

This is where customer discovery starts becoming especially useful for pitch competitions and fundraising, show what those conversations actually told you and what changed because of them.

Maybe you discovered:

  • Customers experience the problem far more frequently than you expected.

  • A specific pain point consistently matters more than everything else.

  • Customers strongly prefer one product configuration.

  • A feature you thought was essential was almost irrelevant.

  • Users dislike an existing option for the same repeated reason.

  • Buyers would consider switching if you achieve a particular performance threshold.

  • Your original target customer was actually the wrong customer.

Then show how you used that information.

We heard X → therefore we changed Y.

That is far stronger than simply displaying a giant interview count.

And don’t just take that from me. The managing partner of Not Yet Ventures, who has invested thousands in student-run ventures, has specifically pointed to this kind of “what changed and why” thinking as a signal he looks for in founder updates and decision-making. Check out my interview with him here.

If you use survey percentages or quantitative findings, make sure the way you collected the data actually supports the claim you are making. Customer discovery should create evidence, not inflated statistics.


LOIs: Validation Before You Have Revenue

Another powerful form of early validation is a Letter of Intent, or LOI, from a potential customer, pilot partner, distributor, or other relevant organization.

This can be particularly valuable when your product is not developed enough to sell yet or if the pricing model is suited for a larger organization.

An LOI can show that a real organization has looked at what you are building and expressed a serious interest in potentially buying, piloting, evaluating, distributing, or working with you if certain conditions are met.

The stronger LOIs are specific. They may identify things such as:

  • The product or service they are interested in

  • The intended use

  • A potential pilot

  • Estimated quantity or scope

  • Conditions that need to be achieved first

  • Development or performance milestones

  • Who within the organization is expressing the interest

Just be careful about how you describe them. Many LOIs are nonbinding, so do not present an LOI as revenue, a purchase order, or a guaranteed future customer if it is not one.

Think of an LOI as another piece of evidence:

“We cannot sell this yet, but real potential customers are already interested enough to put that interest in writing.”

For an early company, that can strengthen the story considerably, especially if your LOI is from a major, established organization, such as a hospital system.


Regulated Products: Your “Customer” Is Usually an Ecosystem

Customer discovery gets more complicated when you are building something regulated.

For a consumer product or SaaS product, the user and the buyer might be the same person.

In healthcare, they often are not.

For my company, understanding the patient alone was not enough. We needed to understand the broader ecosystem surrounding whether that patient would ever actually receive and use the product.

Depending on what you are building, your stakeholder map may include:

  • Patients or end users

  • Physicians or prescribers

  • Nurses or other healthcare professionals

  • Hospitals or health systems

  • Purchasing or procurement decision-makers

  • Patient advocacy organizations

  • Payers and reimbursement experts

  • Distributors or channel partners

  • Other people who influence adoption

Start with the people experiencing the problem, but understand who else controls or influences whether your solution reaches them.

For medical devices, FDA's patient-preference framework specifically recognizes that understanding what patients value can inform decisions throughout the product lifecycle.

If your product depends on reimbursement, I would also start learning that ecosystem early. Do not wait until commercialization to realize that you have no idea who pays for the product or how payment works. For Medicare specifically, CMS separates reimbursement considerations into coding, coverage, and payment, each of which can affect how a medical technology ultimately gets reimbursed.

You do not need to become a reimbursement expert overnight. But you should understand enough to answer when a judge or investor asks:

“Who actually pays for this?”

I get asked this a lot!


What About Potential Acquirers?

If you are building a company where acquisition or licensing is a likely commercialization strategy, it is worth identifying potential strategic partners and acquirers early.

Understand:

  • Who buys companies like yours?

  • What technologies have they acquired previously?

  • What stage were those companies at?

  • What data did they have?

  • What indications or markets are strategically important to them?

  • What milestones appear to make technologies interesting?

But I would not make hypothetical acquirer interest the center of your early customer discovery.

You can begin building relationships with strategic companies early, but expect those conversations to become much more substantive once you have something meaningful to show them.

For a healthcare company, that may mean:

credible patient and provider validation + strong intellectual property + meaningful in-vitro or clinical data + a clear regulatory pathway.

If you can eventually approach a strategic partner with compelling data and evidence that patients, providers, or customers actually want what you are building, the conversation becomes very different and the evidence starts doing the talking for you.


Customer Discovery That Actually Helps You Raise Money

When you put customer discovery into a pitch deck, do not treat it like a box you had to check.

Your goal is to demonstrate three things:

1. The problem is real and has meaningful consequences.
The people experiencing it consistently confirm that it exists and can explain how it negatively affects them.

2. Your solution is being shaped by the market.
You are listening and changing what you build based on what you learn.

3. There is evidence people may actually adopt it.
That could come from product testing, preference data, surveys, pilots, LOIs, early purchases, or other meaningful validation depending on your stage.


The Biggest Takeaway

Customer discovery is something that should evolve with your company.

At the idea stage: understand the problem without selling your solution.

As the product develops: start testing the solution, features, usability, alternatives, and eventually price.

As you approach commercialization: collect stronger evidence through MVP usage, pilots, LOIs, purchases, and other forms of real commitment.

In regulated industries or if appropriate: expand beyond the end user and understand the entire ecosystem that influences adoption, reimbursement, and commercialization.

And throughout all of it: Keep talking to your customers.

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