Aurum
Download

Founder Customer Discovery

Recruit the right people, run unbiased discovery interviews, debrief and synthesise every week, and turn what customers actually do into decisions you can defend.

Free · Mac (Apple silicon) and Windows · v1.0.0 · Other platforms

Then open the Marketplace in the app, search for Founder Customer Discovery, and click Install. It goes into your own files, and works offline from then on.

What it installs.

1

Pillar

1

Area

50

Projects

201

Starter tasks

🚀 Founding & Startups

Founder Customer Discovery

Running customer discovery interviews as a founder, finding the right people, asking unbiased questions and turning answers into decisions.

  1. Riskiest assumptions list before the first interview
  2. Narrow first interview segment
  3. Forty named prospects for discovery calls
  4. Outreach messages that book discovery calls
  5. Interview guide built on past behaviour
  6. Recording consent and note-taking set-up
  7. Interview notes repository with a tagging scheme
  8. First five interviews as a practice round
  9. Screener questions that filter interviewees
  10. Discovery time budget and weekly interview quota
  11. Weekly interview booking pipeline
  12. Same-day interview debrief
  13. Weekly synthesis session with the founding team
  14. Fortnightly assumption board review
  15. Referral ask at the end of every interview
  16. Interviewee thank-you and close-the-loop notes
  17. Monthly discovery evidence summary
  18. Quarterly interview guide refresh
  19. Call-back list of articulate interviewees
  20. Discovery funnel metrics log
  21. Past-behaviour questioning practice
  22. Follow-up probes that find the real pain
  23. Separating facts from compliments and feature requests
  24. Talking less and using silence in interviews
  25. Running remote video and phone interviews well
  26. Interviewing senior buyers and executives
  27. Contextual observation of the work itself
  28. Affinity mapping interview findings
  29. Bias audit of your first ten interviews
  30. Problem ranking from interview evidence
  31. Choosing a discovery notes and transcription tool
  32. Segment narrowing decision after twenty interviews
  33. Commitment ladder for interview follow-ups
  34. Buyer, user and approver map for B2B accounts
  35. Switch interviews with recent changers
  36. Linking discovery findings to the build plan
  37. Interview sprint week of ten conversations
  38. Discovery conversations at an industry conference
  39. Discovery readout to the whole team
  40. Discovery evidence pack for investor or accelerator panels
  41. Customer roundtable dinner for eight
  42. Discovery around a full-time job
  43. Discovery for technical founders who prefer building
  44. Discovery in regulated sectors such as health or finance
  45. Discovery for consumer products with hard-to-reach users
  46. Discovery in a new country or language market
  47. Continuous discovery with paying customers
  48. Interviews with lost prospects and churned users
  49. Survey to size patterns found in interviews
  50. Teaching discovery interviewing to early hires

Where it starts.

Each project arrives with its purpose, milestones and first tasks written out. Here is how the first three read.

Riskiest assumptions list before the first interview

Founders who start interviewing without written assumptions tend to hear whatever confirms the idea. Listing the eight to twelve beliefs the business depends on, and ranking them by how fatal it would be if each were wrong, tells you what the first twenty conversations must actually test.

First tasks

  • Write every belief the business depends on as a one-line statement
  • Score each assumption for impact if wrong and for evidence so far
  • Pick the three riskiest assumptions to test first
  • Share the ranked list with your co-founder and ask for one challenge each

Narrow first interview segment

Interviewing 'small businesses' or 'busy parents' produces answers too varied to compare. A single segment defined by role, context and a trigger event, such as finance leads at 20 to 100 person firms who have just switched accounting software, lets ten interviews show a pattern instead of noise.

First tasks

  • Write the segment as role, context and triggering moment in one sentence
  • List three traits you could verify before booking a call
  • Park two alternative segments in a separate list for later
  • Name at least ten places where people in the segment gather

Forty named prospects for discovery calls

A recruiting list of real names is what separates founders who run twenty interviews in a month from those who run three. Forty people who match the segment, each with a note on how you know them or could reach them, gives enough volume to absorb the usual reply rates and no-shows.

First tasks

  • Set up a tracker with name, source, route, status and date columns
  • Pull ten names from your own contacts who fit the segment exactly
  • Ask five people for an introduction to one named person each
  • Search two online communities for members who match the traits
  • Fill the tracker to forty names

Make it yours.

Install Founder Customer Discovery, then tell Aurum the date you're aiming for. It checks whether the plan fits the weeks you actually have.

Free · Mac (Apple silicon) and Windows · v1.0.0 · Other platforms

Blueprints are general information to help you organise your own work. They are not medical, financial, legal or other professional advice. See the Terms.