Building without talking to customers?
I want to build approval workflows as a service (for example, hook a Google Form submission into a series of approvers set up through the platform). I have a background in this area and know that getting approvals is a problem for many organizations.
I know that ideally I would find potential customers and talk to them about their pain points and prototype some stuff out but I just really want to build. I know there are many tools attacking this problem so I feel confident saying it’s not a made up problem. But I don’t know where I’m going to end up finding my customers and trying to start with that problem (rather than the fun part of developing) makes me feel like giving up before starting.
I suspect that at some point, I will have to figure out who and where my customers are. But I am tempted by the idea of content marketing and maybe never really needing to talk to anyone on the phone. I understand that for most businesses that doesn’t work but I don’t know...
Can anyone relate? Would it be the worst thing to just start building? Any suggestions on how to get started? If I have to start with interviews, where do I even start?
Hi Skyler,
If you're not willing to talk to customers; you should really seriously consider if starting and running a business is truly what you should be doing. If all you want to do is build cool stuff, then I would suggest finding a good paying dev job and continue building stuff on the side.
Building a business entails so much more than just building something cool and writing a few articles on your blog. Even if you were able to market your product without talking to customers, without a serious attempt at collecting customer feedback, doing sales calls, providing support and generally being willing to talk to customers, the changes of your project succeeding as a business are slim to non. Sorry if this comes across to blunt, I generally believe you're shooting yourself in the foot here.
To answer your last questions; if you want to try to and turn this into a viable business, then yes, it would be pretty bad to just start building (just ask all those other "startups" that just start hacking away at their "mvp" without a single customer involved). If you're just wanting to build cool stuff and don't really care where it ends up, than no, it wouldn't be the worst thing to just start building.
Just out of curiosity; why the resistance against talking to customers?
Thanks for your feedback.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I intellectually understand what everyone is saying. I tried to explain that in my original post. My main motivation for posting was to hopefully connect with other entrepreneurs who have ever felt this way before. A lot of these comments have focused on details of the business or on me personally. I only posted on here in the first place because the IH podcast on founder pyschology recommended connecting with others instead of bottling it all up. Has no one here felt this way before? I get that the ideal is to talk with customers but it’s uncomfortable and it’s difficult to even know where to look or how to start. I don’t want to just build cool stuff. I want to build a better life for myself and my family. I don’t think I should resign myself to a lifetime of working for The Man just yet.
Hopefully I’m not the only one feeling this way.
Oh man, I totally totally understand how you feel and I definitely have been through the same. When starting out many years ago, I dreaded speaking to customers, or petty much anyone for that matter :)
And during my freelance/contracting career, I was able to get away with it, to some extend.
However, for me personally, the urge for freedom was so big that it helped me overcome my fear of talking to people, to a certain extend. Because, to be honest, even though I have accepted the need to talk to others (and this does not only apply to customers, the same goes for my employees as well), it still often takes a lot of effort and many times I find myself in the position I'd rather just keep on coding than taking that sales call or helping one of my employees with an issue they're having.
At the end of the day, I so desperately wanted to run my own show that I just kind of sucked it up and did what needed to be done.
As for where to start; common sense gets you a long way. For me, I started when people reached out to me (it took a lot longer for me to actively start reaching out to people). When potential customers for example, reached out I would started by sending a few emails back and forth before accepting to scheduling a call. Doing some emails, or text chats, gave me the feeling the person on the other side wasn't a total stranger anymore and this helped a bit.
It's hard man, I get it, truly. But it's also the hardest things that offer the greatest reward and opportunity for growth, both in your business as well as personally.
If you'd like to chat about this more, feel free to reach out to me personally (you can get contact info from my profile).
Thanks Mattijs. It means a lot to hear that others have felt this way and found a way to make it work :)
You're definitely not the only one to feel that way. I feel that way all the time. I've just done been there and done that and having had that experience and I now go out of my way to remind myself that yes, naturally that's what I'm inclined to do because I love dev and don't so much love the customer development side of things but, if I want a serious shot at succeeding then it's a skill I need to push myself to develop because it's what works. I find it super uncomfortable as well and when I reflect on how I feel about it I think back to all the other things in my life that I was terrible at and that were hard and that I suffered through the grind to get better at and eventually went on to master and I wind up thinking "I'm just at the beginning of another challenging, yet rewarding journey and I have to put in the work and stick with it."
Build it and find out! Talking to too many people can lead to paralysis. This has clearly been a pain point for you so if you build something even to scratch your own itch then imho it's worth it
Hi,
The thing that jumps out at me is that approval workflows are a form of bureaucratic control used in large organizations. In my FT day job, no less than 5 people have to sign off on my expense reports. But this would not be the case if I worked in small org.(I've worked for orgs with as few as 10 people and as large as 50k people.)
I'm not saying approval workflows are not useful, I'm saying they are ONLY useful in larger organizations. In the smaller orgs you reference in your thread, the approval workflow is shouting over your cube wall "hey, I got that task done, will you take a look? or even more likely, no specific approval is required to do your job. You just do it.
So, you might consider that the need you've witnessed for approval workflows doesn't actually align with small organizations.
As for 'what is the worst that could happen if you built without validation'? Take a look at failory.com and that could give you some insight. Hundreds, thousands of dollars lost and time wasted because no one wants to buy the product you have worked so hard to build. But good thing about being a developer - you can build whatever you want. You don't need permission from anybody. Build it. Prove us all wrong. :)
Good luck!
-Pmox2018
There are a lot of smaller orgs who are more informal like you suggest but not all of them. I originally got into this space exactly because of small organizations who live and die by bureaucratic approval workflows.
In terms of B2B research methodology Lean B2B pretty much has it covered.
Building without researching is deliciously dangerous. I heard about a local startup of about 8 people making a product for approval workflows and they were engaging with some big names locally. Don't remember the name of the startup. It's definitely not a made-up problem but it's naive to think you can build something the user buyer, technical buy and economic buyer will sign off on without even talking to them. Development is the easy part.
Naive is a word I would second here. You will not get your product right first try. You're not doing yourself any favors by delaying contact with the customer.
Something I neglected to mention is that I believe my customer would be smaller organizations where the user and decision maker are the same person.
I believe that for a small tool that essentially adds approval workflow functionality to whatever system you’re already using (like Google Forms) is not going to be seriously considered by bigger orgs. They typically want a holistic solution i.e. form builder, hosting, workflow editor, etc.
In light of that, I currently believe the business can be slowly grown through content marketing and focusing on “How to add approval workflows to X” pieces. Part of my struggle is feeling like I can’t write those articles until I have an MVP.
Don't believe yourself.
What do you mean by this? It sounds like a harsh thing to say. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
It is an it isn't. I'm not talking specifically about you or specifically about this situation, but in general human beings have a very poor track record at predicting the future based off what they 'think' will or won't be the case. Our psychology is disastrously flawed. Hence 'don't believe yourself'. I have to constantly remind myself of that these days and try to use the most objective data I can find in order to get the best quality picture of what is likely to actually be the case.
Ah, I see. Makes sense.