Customer Interviews Should Be Used For Testing, Not For Creating.

I know that I might be becoming delusional regarding early-stage sales; spending enough time in any field can lead your mind to connect dots that may or may not be there. I have observed this over the past decade, and I know others have also alluded to it.

"A great product can not be built solely by interviewing the market."

This statement received a lot of pushback on Twitter, and I think there is a lot of nuance in it—or my wording was unclear, which I will certainly own.

The vision for a product comes from within YOU, the Founder. Building an incredible business is certainly a science, but it's also an art crafted by a visionary—not by the market, but by an individual who sees the world differently through their own experience.

Product (founder vision) + Market (buyer reality) = fit.

There are many "known unknowns" about an early-stage business, but the one known that truly needs commitment is the founder’s unique perspective or secret related to a business model or technical insight.

You need to be flexible about how/where the market reality fits into that vision, but it needs to start somewhere, often from direct experience.

Here’s another observation: many early-stage startups pre-ZIRP had their previous employer as their first customer.

Market interviews can help ensure that your vision aligns with their reality. This level of discovery work can unearth repeatable customer themes to inform messaging (value prop), positioning, and refining/prioritizing areas of the product.

In short, the market is an incredible resource to test vision but never to create one.

I've had folks ask if this means I don't believe in Design Partners. The answer is that it depends on how you use them. Design Partners can be a very valuable resource to help refine and work out product kinks. However, using design partners to build exactly what they need, with limited/no vision as a constraint, means you'll risk becoming an unscalable business that serves fringe customers and niche demands.

Founders must know what to build (vision); they can't just be great at building (craft).

When folks suggest going out and "talking to customers," they are missing an important nuance: talking to customers must be done through the lens of testing.

Inconsistent and unstructured conversations in the market will create more noise and confusion than having none at all.

As the founder, you must clearly understand who you want to serve (i.e., define the market) and what problems you believe they are facing (i.e. inform how you define yourself within the market). Then, you can leverage problem-oriented testing in the market to help refine your search and approach.

Yes, aligning vision with reality is certainly a game of trial and error—a process of elimination.

This is why founder-led sales are critical—imagine delegating who to serve and vision refinement to a non-founder.

Delegating visioning to sales or the market is a leading indicator that a startup has lost its way.

Now, the one big takeaway I want to ensure you have is: never wait for the product to go to market—otherwise, you’ll be putting far too much time/weight on your vision being correct on Day 1, which we know is near impossible to align precisely with reality.

Understanding market reality (beyond friends/warm intros) takes a significant amount of time and refinement, and most founders need to understand the level of invalidation and iteration on the ‘market’ side of things that must occur before they get anywhere close to product/market fit.

Not to mention, ensuring not overbuilding.