Elia says it's "a super hard process" you only learn by doing — and you'll "always learn something that you do wrong." The fixes: read the mom test, narrow the problem and who your customer is before you talk, get into their shoes, and watch what people do rather than what they say, because "what they say and what they do is completely different."
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Elia did three entrepreneurship programs where they teach customer discovery, starting with Ewer, his first initiation of that, and reading the mom test. You can't perfect it in advance: it's "something that you learn by doing and you always do it wrong... you will always learn something that you do wrong because it's super hard." The guardrails against bias start with "talk to the right people, so you need to do some work before, you need to narrow down the problem and who can be really your customer," otherwise the data "can be noise." And rather than trusting interviews alone, go on site — "we actually went in like hospitals" — because "nobody is gonna tell you what they like. What they say and what they do is completely different... you will learn way more by seeing than by listening."