CASE FILE #002
Discovery Methods
The Investigation Begins
BUS 399: Entrepreneurship Capstone
Wed Jan 21, 2026 | Week 2, Day 1
🔍 Today's Investigation
- Your Music & People - Sections 4-5 Discussion
- The Art of the Interview - Asking the right questions
- Observation Techniques - What people do vs. what they say
- Empathy Mapping - Getting inside their heads
- Claude Code Setup - Your AI investigation partner
- Technical Foundations - Tools of the trade
📖 Your Music & People
Sections 4-5: PEOPLE & INDUSTRY
Discussion prompts:
- What surprised you?
- What do you disagree with?
- What can you apply TODAY?
Share your:
- 5 marked passages
- 1 idea to test this week
🔍 Key Evidence: PEOPLE
"There's always a favor you can do. Give give give, and sometimes you will receive."
- Derek Sivers
"Get presents for the people you've met that are probably under-appreciated. Don't waste gifts on the high-power people. They already receive too many."
- Derek Sivers
"Pedestals prevent friendships. People send business to people they like."
- Derek Sivers
🔍 Key Evidence: INDUSTRY
"While they were pasting up flyers to promote their next gig, I just put that same amount of energy into finding a great team: a manager, agent, publicist, and label."
- Moby, via Derek Sivers
"You have to make your own success first, before you ask the industry for help. Show that you're going to be successful without their help. Show that you have momentum."
- Derek Sivers
🔍 The Case for Discovery
What is Customer Discovery?
The systematic process of gathering evidence about real people, their problems, and their behaviors.
Think of yourself as a detective:
- You have a hypothesis (your challenge/problem)
- You need evidence to prove or disprove it
- Your subjects won't always tell you the truth directly
- You must observe, probe, and triangulate
🎓 The Interrogation Mindset
Common Mistake: Selling, Not Learning
Most founders pitch their idea instead of understanding the person in front of them.
The Right Mindset:
- Curiosity over confirmation
- Listening over talking (80/20 rule)
- Stories over opinions
- Specifics over generalizations
Rule: If you're talking more than 20% of the time, you're doing it wrong.
❓ Types of Questions
Open Questions
- "Tell me about..."
- "Walk me through..."
- "What happened when..."
- "How did you feel about..."
These unlock stories and details.
Closed Questions
- "Do you...?"
- "Would you...?"
- "Is this...?"
Use sparingly. They stop conversation.
🔘 The Laddering Technique
Keep asking "Why?" to dig deeper into motivations.
Q: "What tool do you use to track expenses?"
A: "I use a spreadsheet."
Q: "Why a spreadsheet instead of an app?"
A: "I like seeing everything in one place."
Q: "Why is that important to you?"
A: "I guess... I'm anxious about missing something."
💡 Real insight: The underlying need is anxiety reduction, not "expense tracking."
⚠ Common Interview Crimes
DON'T:
- Lead the witness: "Don't you think this is a problem?"
- Ask hypotheticals: "Would you pay for this?"
- Accept compliments: "That sounds cool!" (They're being polite)
- Talk about your solution: Save it for later
- Ask about the future: Ask about past behavior instead
DO:
- "Tell me about the last time you..."
- "What have you tried to solve this?"
- "What happened next?"
👁 Observation: The Silent Witness
Why Observe?
People lie. Not maliciously, but they forget, rationalize, and misremember. Observation reveals what people actually do.
What to watch for:
- Workarounds and hacks
- Moments of frustration
- Things they skip over
- Environmental context
How to document:
- Photos (with permission)
- Sketches of the environment
- Time-stamped notes
- Direct quotes
🧠 The Empathy Map
A tool to organize your evidence about a person's experience.
👂 SAYS
Direct quotes from interviews
💡 THINKS
What they might be thinking (inferred)
😢 FEELS
Emotions: frustrated, anxious, hopeful?
🏃 DOES
Observable actions and behaviors
PAINS: Frustrations, obstacles, risks
GAINS: Wants, needs, hopes, measures of success
🤖 Meet Your Investigation Partner
_____ _ _ _____ _
/ ____| | | | / ____| | |
| | | | __ _ _ _ __| | ___ | | ___ __| | ___
| | | |/ _` | | | |/ _` |/ _ \| | / _ \ / _` |/ _ \
| |____| | (_| | |_| | (_| | __/| |___| (_) | (_| | __/
\_____|_|\__,_|\__,_|\__,_|\___| \_____\___/ \__,_|\___|
Claude Code is an AI coding assistant that lives in your terminal.
It can read your files, write code, run commands, and help you build things fast.
Think of it as a partner investigator who never sleeps and knows every programming language.
💻 Terminal Basics
The terminal is how you talk to your computer directly.
$ pwd
$ ls
$ cd folder/
$ cd ..
$ mkdir new
$ cp a.txt b.txt
$ mv a.txt b/
⚠ Danger Zone: rm
The Remove Command
These commands permanently delete files. No trash can. No undo.
$ rm file.txt
$ rm -r folder/
$ rm -rf folder/
Rule: Always double-check what you're deleting!
📚 RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation
What is RAG?
A way to give AI access to specific information it wasn't trained on.
Without RAG:
AI only knows what it learned during training (has a knowledge cutoff date)
With RAG:
AI can retrieve your docs, codebase, or data and use it in responses
Why it matters: Claude Code uses RAG to read YOUR project files and give relevant answers.
🔌 MCPs: Model Context Protocol
MCP = Plugins for Claude
A way to give Claude superpowers by connecting it to external tools and services.
context7
Access up-to-date documentation for libraries/frameworks
github
Read repos, create issues, manage pull requests
godot
Game development with the Godot engine
memory
Remember things across conversations
puppeteer
Control a web browser, take screenshots, scrape sites
🏗 Infrastructure Tools
Tools that handle the boring stuff so you can focus on building.
Firebase
Backend-as-a-Service
- Database (no SQL needed)
- User authentication
- File storage
- Hosting
Google's "easy button" for backends
Vercel
Deployment Platform
- Push code, it goes live
- Auto HTTPS/SSL
- Preview deployments
- Great free tier
Makes deployment stupidly easy
🌐 Web Fundamentals
DOM
Document Object Model - the tree structure of a webpage that code can manipulate
Browser DevTools
Right-click → Inspect. See the code behind any website. Your best friend.
HTML
The structure/skeleton of a webpage (headings, paragraphs, links)
CSS
The styling/appearance (colors, fonts, layout)
JavaScript
The behavior/interactivity (clicks, animations, data)
API
Application Programming Interface - how apps talk to each other
Database
Where data lives (users, posts, products). Firebase handles this for you.
🛠 Useful Services
Services that solve common startup problems:
Stripe
Payment processing. Accept credit cards, subscriptions, invoices. The gold standard.
OAuth
"Login with Google/GitHub/etc." Don't build your own auth from scratch.
Analytics
Google Analytics - free, powerful, everywhere
Umami - privacy-focused alternative
Know your users. Measure everything.
📋 Git & Dev Terms
Terms you'll hear constantly in tech:
Repository (Repo)
A folder where your code lives, tracked by Git (usually on GitHub)
Clone
Copy a repo from the internet to your computer
Commit
Save a snapshot of your changes with a message describing what you did
Push / Pull
Upload your commits / Download others' commits
Environment Variables
Secret config values (API keys, passwords) that don't go in code
Localhost
Your computer running as a server (usually localhost:3000)
npm / yarn
Package managers - install code libraries other people wrote
📱 People to Follow
Stay current. Learn from the best. Twitter/X is where tech lives.
Reminder: You should have followed 50 people in your area of business interest by now!
📋 Case Assignments
Due Friday, Jan 23 (Make-up Class):
- Challenge Brief + Research Plan
- Gift-Giving Exercise (with reflection)
- Venture Log #2 (include gift response)
Reading: YM&P sections 6-7 (RESOURCEFUL, DESCRIBE) for next Wednesday
Friday is a make-up class (Monday schedule) - Fieldwork kickoff!
❓ Questions?
The case is open.
What do you need to know?
🔎 Begin Your Investigation
Your mission:
1. Gather evidence (interviews, observations)
2. Build your empathy map
3. Prepare your research plan
The truth is out there. Go find it.