I recently did 20 customer discovery calls as a favor for a good friend and I loved every minute. Seriously, 5 stars, would call again.
My buddy was exploring whether there was a company in helping older adults age better. The hypothesis: people who lose their sense of purpose in retirement tend to wither faster, and white-collar professionals — who tend to identify with their work — might be especially at risk.
So I put out a note to my network and lined up 20 calls with retired or soon-to-be-retired professionals. Worked with Claude on an hour-long discovery script. Not a single "would you buy this" question. All "tell me about your day." "When's the last time you felt listless?" "How do you find new things to do?"
Here's why it was enjoyable.
Everything I know my clients is filtered through their companies. Even the cool stuff, like the one who applied to the astronaut candidate program or the one who grew up in rough part of London, I know through the lens of what it tells me about them as a founder. Everything I know about my clients is constrained.
Those 20 calls were the opposite of constrained. I got to talk to 20 strangers I will almost certainly never to talk to again, and just hear about their lives. No wrong answers. No specific outcome needed.
And I loved every minute of it.
Most founders can't get there because they're on a clock. They need the interviewee to say the magic words. To need something. And, usually, the thing their startup has already built. So discovery becomes bullshit sales wearing a customer-discovery costume.
To hell with that.
Walk into your next discovery call with zero goals other than being able to hang up and describe what's important to that person's work/life and what they're struggling with right now. That's it. That's the whole bar.
Because that — not discipline, not willpower, not a Notion template — is what gets you back on the phone tomorrow.
You actually enjoyed it in the moment.
Nobody starts a company because they want to do customer discovery. Every successful founder learns to love it anyway.