The $12,000 mistake I made by skipping three 20-minute phone calls

I spent four months building what I thought was the perfect inventory tool for coffee shops.

Slick landing page.

Clean tech stack.

Great name.

Then I started selling and realized within 48 hours that cafe owners didn't give a damn about my dashboard.

They just wanted a way to stop their milk delivery guy from overcharging them on Tuesdays.

I built a solution for a problem that didn't exist.

Most founders go into customer interviews looking for a 'Yes.'

They want a high-five and a 'Wow, that sounds great!'

That’s a trap.

A 'Yes' from a polite stranger is worthless.

The real goal of an interview is to hunt for the 'No.'

You want to find every reason your idea won't work before you write a single line of code.

If you can’t kill your idea in the interview phase, it might actually be worth building.

I’ve been using a specific framework to map out these riskiest assumptions before talking to anyone.

It focuses on the 'Mom Test', never asking if an idea is good, but instead digging into past behavior.

I put the full validation playbook and the tools I use to vet these ideas into IdeaToLaunch.

It’s a platform that helps founders validate their startup ideas and find paying customers without wasting months on the wrong build.