Startup Guide, how startups and established companies can create profitable digital products, was the first book I wrote, originally published in 2012, focused on what we now call product discovery. Since it has been more than 12 years since its publication and seven since its last update, I decided to write a new edition to include the lessons I learned over all these years. I’m still working on this latest edition, but the foreword is ready!

Preface to the new edition of the Startup Guide

The term Product Discovery was coined in 2007 by Marty Cagan when he realized that:

We have always had, and likely always will have, two essential problems in software:

• we need to figure out the right product,
• and then we have to build the product right.

Since 2007 he have referred to the first problem as discovery, and the second as delivery

Source: The Origin of Product Discovey

When I wrote the first edition of this book in 2012, the term discovery was not yet well-known. At the time, there was a lot of talk about startups, MVPs (minimum viable products), lean startups, and other terms.

Since creating digital products and, especially, how to increase the chances of creating digital products that yield results was and continues to be an extremely important topic for any company, around 2010, we started using these techniques for rapidly experimenting with product ideas at Locaweb.

At that time, I also started testing these techniques on products outside of Locaweb’s environment. My motivation for doing these tests was that at Locaweb, we had around 200,000 customers at the time, which gave our product development team a very favorable environment for testing new products. After all, these would be the first customers to buy the products we wanted to develop.

My question was whether these techniques could be effective in an environment where there were no customers yet. That’s why I did a series of experiments, eventually leading me to create ContaCal, a calorie counter I launched independently. When I showed what I was doing to Paulo Silveira, one of the founders of Alura, he thought it was really cool. He invited me to write the first book for a publishing company he was creating called Casa do Código, focused on publishing technical books by Brazilians for Brazilians. That was the birth of Guia da Startup, originally launched in 2012.

Since then, many things have evolved, but the need to quickly test the product to see if we’re on the right track remains as essential as ever. During this period, the term Product Discovery became quite popular, to the point that today we understand its importance very well.

All product teams, whether in startups or established companies, use, or try to use, some Product Discovery techniques. However, we still make several mistakes when applying these product discovery techniques, which decreases our chances of using them successfully. The other day, I was having lunch with a client who started the conversation by saying:

I’m going to open my heart, I can’t stand hearing the word discovery anymore. The team wants to do discovery on everything and it takes them months to discover the obvious.

Although we have been practicing and learning about product discovery for over 15 years, we still have much to improve to increase the chances of discovering the best products, which are more likely to solve customers’ problems while helping the company achieve its results.

After Locaweb, I led the product development teams at Conta Azul, Gympass (now Wellhub), and Lopes. After Lopes, I decided to go back to entrepreneurship. ContaCal, a startup that served as an example to illustrate many of the concepts in the book, still exists, but it is not where I dedicate my energy today. My new startup, Gyaco, is my training and consulting company in product management and digital transformation. Through it, I have the opportunity to help several companies and individuals in product discovery and do product discovery myself for my own company.

The mistakes I mentioned above and the lessons learned to avoid them and to increase the chances of successfully creating profitable products motivated me to write this new edition of the Startup Guide.

Enjoy your reading!