They were 90 days out from closing their seed round. Every investor who asked "who's your customer?" got a slightly different answer.
The product person had one. The lead engineer had another. The co-founder had a third. None of them were wrong — they just weren't the same.
You don't lose deals because you don't have an answer. You lose them because your answers don't match.
The work was real. They'd built lean, brought on their first ops hire, shipped a more focused product. But the story wasn't consistent, and inconsistent stories don't close rounds.
So we ran a Bullseye Customer Sprint. Six weeks, five live interviews, whole team watching together. Before any of that, we ran the one-liner exercise — the same one I wrote about in the last issue. Generating a handful of one-liners as a group, dot-voting, picking the one specific enough to recruit against.
What got them there wasn’t having the answers for the slots. It was working through the questions.
If you want the full DIY spec sheet — the step-by-step exercise with real examples — sign up for How Might We…here.
—
Know someone who should read this?
The person who needs this most probably isn't trying to figure out their customer alone.
If you know a founding team where everyone's got a slightly different answer to that question, you should forward this their way.
The questions
These aren't interview questions. They're for your team — to surface what everyone actually believes about the customer before anyone writes anything down. Run through them as a group before you write a single one-liner. One person facilitates, everyone answers, one thought per sticky note. There are more where these came from, but these five will get you further than most teams might get on their own.
Specific person — "Who is the person feeling this most acutely?"
Not who has the problem on their radar. Who is living in it. For this team, the first instinct was "ops leader" — broad enough to feel safe. The question pushed it further. A head of ops at a company scaling fast enough that the workarounds are breaking. That's a person. That's someone you can find.
Specific place — "At what stage or size does this become urgent — not just something that can wait until tomorrow?"
This is the question that turns "growing companies" into "20–100 person companies." Below a certain size, someone absorbs the chaos manually. Above a certain size, there's a system. The window in between is where the pain is acute enough to act on. That's your specific place.
Trigger/motivation — "What was the moment they went from 'we should fix this' to 'we have to fix this now'?"
The inciting incident. Not a general frustration — a specific moment. For this team's customer, it was scaling fast enough that the stitched-together spreadsheets and lightweight tools stopped holding. The trigger is what makes the one-liner recruitable — it gives you a screening question with real teeth.
Inadequate solution — "What are they actually doing instead right now?"
Not what they wish they were doing. What are they doing today? Stitching together spreadsheets and lightweight tools. Submitting tickets to engineering that never move. Watching the team drown in manual data entry. Name the workaround. That's your inadequate solution.
Outcome — "What does done feel like for them?"
Not features — what changes for this person on the other side? For this team's customer: running internal workflows without touching code or adding headcount. That's specific enough to test. "Better visibility" is a guess.
The hypothesis that emerged for the team: a head of ops at a 20–100 person company who is scaling fast, currently stitching together spreadsheets and lightweight tools, but needs a way to run internal workflows without adding headcount.
We found five ops heads and talked to them. Same pain, same reasoning, same workarounds (mostly). Different people, same story. The product manager, lead engineer, both co-founders, and the new ops hire all left with the same target — and the same roadmap. Later, they had three investors competing on terms because the who and the why finally matched — and now there was evidence.
The questions didn't just fill in the slots. This process got the whole team to the same answer.
Open tabs in my browser right now
How Should a Book Sound? And What About Footnotes? from NYTimes via kottke.org
Harvard Innovation Labs - The Path to Product-Market Fit, 2024 deck - from Rob Snyder
Bonuses from Eric Ries’ new book Incorruptible
The one-liner isn't the finish line. Once your team makes a number of them and agrees on one, you have what you need to build the hypothesis canvas — the next activity before you recruit and interview anyone.
To that end, you cannot recruit a generic person. The questions are how you make sure you're not trying to.
Meanwhile, elsewhere…
The job of a startup is to discover a repeatable and scalable business model.
Blank writes that a startup is a “temporary organization” searching for “a scalable and repeatable business model," which is a great way to think about the mechanism for discovery as well as positioning or marketing.
Need more context on the one-liner itself? The previous issue has the formula.
Thanks,
Skipper Chong Warson
Only humans buy anything, build for your Bullseye Customer
—
If you’re more a video call type of person than a keyboardy one, book a quick call: howthisworks.co/start