Customer discovery is the process that startups use to understand their target market and validate the assumptions about their business idea.

It's a process of researching and talking to potential customers to gather feedback about their needs, pain points, and preferences. This information is used to validate or invalidate the startup's assumptions about the market and its product or service.

The goal of customer discovery is to identify a problem that a significant number of potential customers have and that the startup's product or service can solve. This helps the startup to understand whether there is a real demand for its product or service and if it addresses a significant pain point for customers.

The process of customer discovery typically includes:

• Interviewing potential customers

• Surveying target markets

• Observing customer behavior

• Testing prototypes or MVPs

Customer discovery happens most often at the early stage of the startup process, and it's essential for the startup to conduct customer discovery before developing a product or service so that they can validate the assumptions about their business idea and identify a significant problem that they can solve.