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Sachin Rekhi's Blog

1 resource from Sachin Rekhi's Blog we point founders to, and the questions each answers.

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Why we picked it The cleanest distillation of the one framework that turns a customer chat into a relationship instead of a survey. The three rules (talk about their life not your idea, ask about the past not hypotheticals, and chase real commitments of time, reputation, or money) are exactly how you get an early customer to tell you what nearly stopped them from buying and who else you should talk to. Rekhi is a product leader, so the examples are operator-grade, not book-report fluff.

A Primer on Talking to Customers From Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test

From Sachin Rekhi's Blog by Sachin Rekhi 10 min read

  • Never pitch your idea in the conversation; ask how they handle the problem today and what it costs them, so praise can't lie to you.
  • The strongest signal is a commitment that costs them something: a trial, an intro to a colleague, or a pre-order.
  • 'Would you buy this?' teaches you nothing; 'walk me through the last time you dealt with this' surfaces the real story and the referral.
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Answers What does 'validating an idea' actually mean? How do I talk to customers without getting false positives? How do I turn my early customers and investors into informal mentors? I'm passionate about an idea but have zero background in it. Should I still do it? How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear? Should I build an MVP at all, or can I validate without one? Should I charge my very first customers or give it away free to get traction? I only have a landing page and a waitlist, how do I turn signups into paying customers? How do I run a sales call without sounding like a pushy salesperson? Should I validate an idea before I can code, or learn to build first? Is it a mistake to fall in love with my solution before I understand the problem? How do I turn a vague hunch that something is broken into a sharp, testable idea? What are the warning signs that an idea will quietly waste a year of my life? How do I test whether people will actually pay, not just say they like it? How do I run a customer interview without leading them to the answer I want? How do I validate demand in India when people love a free product but won't pay for it? My market is huge on paper but almost nobody is actually paying for solutions today. Good sign or bad? How do I size a market I want to sell to businesses outside the big Indian startup hubs? How do I get honest answers when the person I'm interviewing is a friend or someone in my network? What's the difference between a customer saying they'll pay and actually pulling out a card, and how do I test the real one early? How do I run good discovery calls in India when the person keeps saying yes to be polite but never converts? What are the questions that quietly ruin an interview by leading the person to the answer I want? How do I decide the single riskiest assumption my MVP should test instead of trying to prove the whole idea at once? How do I actually validate my idea with a no-code prototype before I sink weeks into building the real thing? Every user interview gives me a different feature request. How do I turn messy feedback into a real prioritisation decision? My first 5 customers were friends who signed up to be nice. How do I know if any of them actually want the product? How many people should I actually reach out to before I expect to close my first 10 paying customers? Everyone says do things that don't scale, but where's the line between that and just wasting weeks doing manual work? Should I try to close my first 10 customers one by one, or run a small launch to get them all at once? What are the biggest mistakes founders make trying to land their first customers that I should avoid? As a domain expert leaving my industry job, how do I turn my old network into first customers without seeming like I'm exploiting them? What should my very first sales pitch actually say, and how long should it be?
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