Your happiest, biggest customers are satisfied because your product already works for them. The most valuable insights for innovation and growth come from understanding your non-customers—the people not buying from you. Their unmet needs represent your largest untapped opportunities.
Related Insights
Instead of general discovery, conduct "loss calls" with prospects who chose a competitor. This provides unfiltered feedback on what capabilities truly matter, where your product falls short, and whether your pricing or sales process—not just features—was the problem.
The trust you've built with current customers allows them to share raw industry insights and market intelligence that prospects won't. This feedback loop is invaluable for product development, competitive strategy, and identifying new opportunities.
Early customer feedback will be polarized, and this is normal. The key is to compare the 'hell yes' customers with the 'not unhappy' ones. Meaning emerges from this contrast, revealing the subtle differences that drive true product love and guide your roadmap.
Some of the largest markets address needs customers have completely given up on because no viable solution existed. This powerful latent demand is invisible if you only observe current activities. You must uncover the high-priority goals on their mental "to-do list" that they have quit trying to achieve.
Users often develop multi-product workarounds for issues they don't even recognize as solvable problems. Identifying these subconscious behaviors reveals significant innovation opportunities that users themselves cannot articulate.
The most valuable question a VC can ask a founder is, "Why are customers churning?" According to G2's Godard Abel, investigating what's not working provides the most critical insights for improvement. While founders naturally market successes, the real opportunity for growth and learning comes from understanding and addressing failures.
Directly asking customers for solutions yields generic answers your competitors also hear. The goal is to uncover their underlying problems, which is your job to solve, not theirs to articulate. This approach leads to unique insights and avoids creating 'me-too' products.
Your audience will dictate your product roadmap if you listen. Porterfield's evolution was a direct response to customer feedback. They finished her webinar course and asked what to sell. They finished her product course and asked how to market it. The path to her flagship product was paved with their questions.
Profound market insights come from rigorously analyzing why potential customers fail to convert, not just studying happy ones. Tripling down to understand why a prospect "dropped out" of the sales journey provides a more complete picture of product gaps and value proposition weaknesses than focusing only on successful closes.
Instead of broad surveys, interview 10-12 satisfied customers who signed up in the last few months. Their fresh memory of the problem and evaluation phases provides the most accurate insights into why people truly buy your product, allowing you to find patterns and replicate success.
