Podcast · ~50 min

4x Founder Shreesha Ramdas on What to Do Before You Build Your Startup

Siddhartha Ahluwalia · The Neon Show Free Intermediate India

Before writing a single line of code for his fourth startup, Shreesha Ramdas hired a salesperson and ran over 200 interviews to find out what people would actually pay to fix. It is a rare, specific account of using a real sales process, not a survey, as the discovery tool itself.

  • Hire for sales conversations before you hire for building, if your goal is finding a real problem worth paying for.
  • Run interviews at volume (hundreds, not a handful) before concluding a problem is urgent enough to pay for.
  • A problem people mention is not the same as a problem big and urgent enough that they will pay to solve it.
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The question it answers

  1. 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?

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