PMs are told to talk to customers. Almost nothing in an enterprise B2B org is set up to let them. I'm building Discover First to change that.
Discover First's mission is to lower the cost of problem discovery, so more customer-ready products get built.
why i started this
I've spent 25+ years building and shipping enterprise products in regulated B2B industries. Over that time, one pattern kept repeating: product managers are told to talk to customers, and they know they need to, but they aren't set up to do it.
Customer relationships belong to account managers and customer success. To get on a call, a PM has to ask permission, because nobody wants a product conversation to get in the way of a deal or a renewal. Sellers are chasing quota and delivering what's already been promised. A PM showing up with new ideas looks like a risk, not a help.
Even when permission comes through, the hard part isn't over. A discovery call is a low priority for the customer. It gets squeezed between time zones and pushed back again and again. And it's often run by a PM who was never taught how to do discovery well.
At first I thought this was specific to the companies I worked at. It isn't. The more I looked, the clearer it became that this is how enterprise B2B works almost everywhere. That's why Discover First exists.
it's not just PMs
Founders and builders run into the same gap from the other side. It's easy to start with the solution, especially one built on exciting new technology, and assume it must be useful because of what it can do.
The step that gets skipped is finding the customers who actually have the problem and inviting them in as design partners while you build.
why enterprise b2b
In B2C, a dozen paying customers isn't a business. In enterprise B2B, it often is.
That changes what discovery is for. It isn't only about finding problems. It's about building relationships with the people who told you about them, so the customers who helped you understand the problem become your first beta customers, and then your first paying ones.
what i believe
New technology doesn't make a product useful. Solving a problem customers actually have does.
The people who report a problem can become design partners, then beta customers, then paying customers.
Time, channels to customers, and hands-on experience have to come together, or "go talk to customers" stays advice nobody can act on.
who's behind this
Discover First is one veteran product manager (me) working alongside AI models, Claude and ChatGPT, to research, write, and build faster than I could alone. It fits the mission: if AI can lower the cost of building, discovery should get cheaper too.
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I'm building this in the open. Early members get free access to everything and a say in what gets built first.
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