Evidence-based customer discovery for funded B2B teams
Not everyone will buy your product, find the one who will say, "Shut up. Take my money."
Most teams are building on gut feel and good intentions. And those instincts are usually close, but close doesn't close.
Even a small founding team burns roughly $40K/mo, whether they're building the right thing or not. That's not a people problem or needing to find efficiencies — that's signal drop-off — and silence only slows the build.
Speed in the wrong direction is a mistake whose price keeps climbing.
Here's what fixing it looks like. The Bullseye Customer Sprint gets you to a staked customer hypothesis in about two months — five live interviews your whole team watches together, no more "I think," it's "they said." A Listening Cycle keeps that clarity from expiring while you build — weekly interviews, immediate debriefs, no reports nobody reads anyway.
Because only humans buy anything.
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 intuition to evidence
Product strategy & design
Create products customers want using tested methods that turn insights into business results
Workshop facilitation
Turn ideas into action through focused sessions — from our signature Bullseye Customer Sprint to a Listening Cycle to a Design Sprint
Team development & coaching
Build stronger teams that solve problems together through structured coaching and proven frameworks
Perspective from other humans I've worked with
The How This Works co approach
What finding your Bullseye Customer actually looks like
Finding the customer with real stakes
Replay's initial hypothesis: ops managers need help building automation apps but following a Bullseye Customer Sprint, that hypothesis was gone. The customer who actually showed up was an independent builder shipping production apps with real money on the line — someone who needed to understand what broke, not just have it auto-fixed. We ran 4-5 Listening Cycles to pressure-test each shift: ops manager to creator, creator to builder, builder to builder at stakes. By the time they relaunched as Replay Builder, the MCP and Chrome Extension were already the obvious next products.
Pivoting to survive a market collapse
At Shep, we built a browser extension for business travel compliance. Our first hypothesis — small and medium businesses — failed after a year of iterations: fragmented budgets, impossible unit economics. We pivoted to enterprise. Then COVID killed 92% of business travel overnight. Instead of folding, we went back to listening. Enterprise still had duty of care problems. We retooled around safety and health notifications, piloted with Adidas and Discovery Channel, and Flight Centre acquired Shep in 2021.
Listening past the CFO
A tier 1 bank-integrated fintech's pipeline had stalled — sales down 23% over 18 months. We ran a Bullseye Customer Sprint targeting CFOs at $50M+ SaaS firms. By the third Listening Cycle interview, a CFO handed us the real answer: "That's an audit problem — I kick it to my controller." Right pain, wrong customer. We repositioned for controllers at $30–$100M firms and ran 13 more interviews to confirm. Higher retention, shorter sales cycles, wider swathe of accounts.
This is a no pitch zone
Tell us where you're at
We'll talk through your situation and be straight about whether our approach makes sense
Insights & perspectives
Stories from inside the work
- "Um, shit," I said
- While I was gone — apparently, I've been running experiments this whole time
- Mixtape Friday: Stay as long as you want • Volume 006 Winter 2026
- The $400 method that saved Sesame’s launch, a healthcare startup
- How talking to 10 customers over two (2) weeks unlocked $2M for a Fortune 500 co
- The confidence that comes after dressing up in a giant hoop skirt
- 82 responses, three (3) interviews, and a single wasted week
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
How This Works show, our podcast
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Weekly-ish dispatches on customer discovery and product strategy — sensemaking from inside the work and from home, with AI in the mix
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