FOUNDER@founder1/9
"Talk to your users" is the most repeated advice in startups.
It's also how I wasted 14 months building the wrong product.
Your users will lie to you — not on purpose, but completely. Here's what to do instead:
FOUNDER@founder2/9
We ran 40 user interviews before writing a line of code.
Every single person said they'd pay for the feature we were building. "Take my money," one literally typed.
We shipped it. 3 of them used it once. None of them paid. Zero.
FOUNDER@founder3/9
Here's the trap: in an interview, people answer the person, not the question.
They like you. They don't want to crush your idea. So they describe the version of themselves who has their life together — the one who'd obviously buy your thing.
That person doesn't exist.
FOUNDER@founder4/9
So we stopped asking what people want.
We started asking what they already did last week. With timestamps. "Walk me through the last time this problem cost you something."
What people say is fiction. What they did is data. Only one of those predicts a sale.
FOUNDER@founder5/9
The rule we live by now: never trust an opinion you can't put a price on.
If they won't pre-pay, pre-order, or pull out a calendar — it's a compliment, not a commitment.
We rebuilt the product around the 2 behaviors people actually paid to keep. Revenue 6x'd in a quarter.