Talking with customers in B2B

We absolutely talked to potential customers before coding; in my case, for 4 months while getting unwound out of my prior startup.

I started with my own network, and reached out to VP Engineerings (our product replaces the notification infrastructure they often have engineers building or maintaining) with a 10 question TypeForm survey that asked them about the pain points related to what I was planning to build. The purpose of this was to generally validate my hypothesis: was there a "there" there. This originally went out to 15 people.

Next I followed up with a call with a subset of them – the ones where there was at least some overlap between what I wanted to solve for and their own pains. I used this as an opportunity to really dig in and understand the intricacies of the problem space, what I could solve quickly, and what the long tail might look like. This was only a handful of the original 15.

Finally I asked for referrals to peers in other companies that might have similar challenges. If you can get an average 2 referrals from each interview, you've just built an endless supply of market input!

(Thanks for the heads up @aydrian!)

You should definitely do that. It helps so much in long term on all aspects. Find out where your prospects hang out, if they are on LinkedIn, then that's the best and easiest.

One approach that works most of the time is, do some quick research on the prospect whom you are interviewing, write a cold email appreciating their good work and how their knowledge will help you.

Good luck!

I want to say that we did. @troygoode can confirm. I know he had many conversations before starting on Courier. I do know that we reached out to many potential customers to have conversations about needs as we worked toward product market fit. The conversations proved to be very useful as we drove development of the product forward. I think your efforts would be fruitful.