A simple way to do startup customer research, all the time

As a founder, understanding your customers makes or breaks your business. I've been retooling how we gather customer feedback recently.

The key challenge is to enable all teams (gtm, customer, product, engineering) to do business-as-usual, and remove "can I sit on your sales call to ask product questions" requests. At the same time, enable anybody from the team to have a constant stream of opportunity to speak to customers, outside of a sales cycle, to work on product and value questions.

This is a cadence that I came up with:

Weekly — one sentence summary of all meaningful prospect calls (can just use Salesloft for that, everything >30s)

Weekly — short summary of all prospect meetings

Monthly — Ask customers 1 product question async (not aiming at answers, just engaging them and see what comes back)

Monthly — speak to panel of 10 external target personas (CEO goes out to source these chats)

Quarterly — book 10 advisors + 10 that are outside of our ICP + 10 customer feedback calls (30 min). Some call this the "Customer Advisory Board"

The goal is to get a stream of input both from customers in ICP today, and customers just outside of ICP to inform company strategy and product roadmap.

What are you doing to understand your customer better?