Startup lesson learned - Talk to people facing the problem you're trying to solve

Why you should talk to users

You can only truly understand the problem you are solving if you speak with people who experience it. Of course, you could be experiencing this problem yourself and have sound intuition around it, but I believe there is a lot of nuance around the problem that you cannot discover unless you speak with other people who face this issue.

We didn't talk to users at first

We conducted a lot of market research with EnVsion, especially at the start of our journey. By market research I mean we read reports by consulting firms, research agencies, etc. Basically the high level stuff that we thought we needed to know in order to justify what we were doing to investors, and ourselves. We really thought we had a solid grasp of the market we were in, and thus neglected speaking with enough prospects to get more granular information and validate or refute or hypotheses.

We built it. They didn't come

Instead of speaking with more people facing the problem we were tackling, we focused on building what we thought was an irresistible and very good looking product powered by solid software engineering.

We were wrong. Very wrong.

We're talking to users now

We’ve been learning the hard way since these times. Now we strive to conduct more user research to better inform our business, product, and engineering decisions. I still don’t think we do enough of it, but we’re certainly improving.