Last Saturday, I attended a eChai Ventures event on GTM & Distribution held at DevX and as a result I gained a lot more from it than I had expected.
It was full of founders – building products, asking great questions through the entire discussion. And then there was networking – that's where the fun part started for me personally. I ended up pitching my product to multiple founders and got way more feedback than I thought possible. Currently working through it.
The speakers gave one piece of advice: speak to 1,000 customers, since it is only in this way that you will be able to design for a real problem and truly understand the user.
Valid advice – I don't disagree with that.
And this is my takeaway for the day – if you want to save time before getting to 1,000 customers, look closer to home first. Talk to any friends or family members who work at that scale in the exact domain that you're building in – getting direct feedback from them will help you cut quite a bit of time and guesswork you'd need to do while reaching the larger audience.
Exactly this happened to me that same day when a close friend of mine, who is a professional working in the exact domain of my product – also running a business in that space – sat down and gave me honest feedback. It wasn't always easy to accept but it was definitely useful.
Reaching 1,000 users is in itself a major and valuable achievement - there's no point in skipping that step. However, the quickest way to get started is generally to talk to the people who are closest to the problem.
Back to building.
