Customer evidence for funded B2B founding teams
Your team may be talking to customers on the regular — and still be picturing different ones
Sales calls, support tickets, surveys, demos, and product feedback all create customer contact. But they rarely give the people making the decision the same evidence at the same time.
That is how teams end up building from slightly different pictures of the customer. Those small differences turn into conflicting product priorities, muddled positioning, and eventually wasted runway.
The Bullseye Customer Sprint helps your core team test one customer hypothesis through five live interviews and turn what you hear into a documented direction and clear next actions. A Listening Cycle keeps that evidence current while you build through regular interviews, immediate debriefs, and an evolving record of what customers are doing, trying, and struggling to solve.
Less “we think.” More “they said.”
Book a 25-min intro call — no pitch, just a conversation about where you're at.
Clients & collaborators
Teams that have done the work
Services
How we help B2B teams move from customer evidence to clearer decisions
Customer strategy & product direction
Clarify who you are building for, which problem matters, and what deserves to move forward
Strategic facilitation
Use structured working sessions — including the Bullseye Customer Sprint to a Listening Cycle to a Design Sprint 2.0 to turn uncertainty into a decision and next actions
Team development & coaching
Help leaders and teams improve clarity, decision-making, and how they work together through structured coaching, facilitation, and practical operating frameworks
Perspective from other humans I've worked with
The How This Works co approach
What turning customer evidence into direction looks like
Finding the customer with real stakes
Replay began with a reasonable hypothesis: operations managers needed help building automation apps.
The Bullseye Customer Sprint weakened that assumption and surfaced a stronger signal — independent builders shipping production apps with real economic stakes. They did not just need problems fixed; they needed to understand what broke and why.
Across 4-5 Listening Cycles, we tested each shift in the customer hypothesis using interviews, existing customer conversations, developer-relations input, and patterns from their Discord community. The evidence helped the team narrow its customer focus, sharpen its messaging, and shape the direction behind Replay Builder.
Pivoting when the market vanished
At Shep, the original focus on small and midsize businesses did not hold. Enterprise organizations had the stronger need because business-travel compliance and duty of care carried more serious consequences.
Then COVID erased most business travel almost overnight.
We returned to customer conversations and found that enterprise duty-of-care problems had not disappeared; they had changed. The product shifted toward safety and health notifications, leading to pilots with Adidas and Discovery Channel. Flight Centre acquired Shep in 2021.
Finding the right problem with the wrong buyer
A bank-integrated fintech had seen sales decline 23% over 18 months. The initial hypothesis focused on CFOs at SaaS companies, but the interviews revealed a more specific pattern: CFOs recognized the issue, while controllers dealt with the operational consequences.
That shifted the customer hypothesis from CFOs seeking lower processing costs to controllers at $30M–$100M firms trying to reduce reconciliation and audit problems. Thirteen additional interviews pressure-tested the revised direction and informed updated positioning, product priorities, and go-to-market choices.
Early observations suggest a stronger fit with the revised audience and clearer sales conversations. The expected benefits were higher retention, shorter sales cycles, and access to a broader set of qualified accounts, but those outcomes have not yet been fully confirmed.
This is a no pitch zone
Tell us what decision your team is trying to make
We’ll talk through where you are, what evidence you already have, and whether the Bullseye Customer Sprint, a Listening Cycle, or another approach makes sense.
If we aren't the right fit, we'll say so.
Insights & perspectives
Stories from inside the work
- How to build a Bullseye Customer one-liner
- Where do customer conversations come from?
- The questions that inform the Bullseye Customer one-liner
- How to build a Bullseye Customer one-liner
- The question is always about the past
- When your pipeline stalls, check which conversation you're having
- The difference between a discovery conversation and a sales pitch is one question
Stories and conversations on customer discovery, product strategy, facilitation, and the messy middle of building and making right now — including the How This Works show.
Phone: +1 917-720-6388
Email: heythere@howthisworks.co
Book a call: howthisworks.co/start
Based in San Francisco, CA, working globally
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