Two weeks ago I delayed my own launch because demand was zero. Here is what 30 conversations taught me instead.
A couple of weeks back I made a call that felt bad in the moment. I was about to open early access for the thing I have been building. Almost nobody was asking for it. So instead of pushing a waitlist nobody wanted, I gave myself two weeks to just talk to people.
Thirty conversations later, I think it was the best decision I have made on this project.
Here is the shift. When you are collecting emails, you optimize for a number going up. When you are having conversations, you optimize for understanding the problem. Those are not the same thing, and chasing the first one almost had me building features nobody asked for.
The pattern from those calls is brutally consistent. Owners are not short on dashboards. They are buried in them. Not one person I talked to could remember the last time a marketing number made them change a decision. They open the tab, feel vaguely guilty, and close it.
That is a much sharper problem than "people want another analytics tool." It is "people want to be told what to do next, and nothing on their screen does that."
So I am not in a rush to reopen a waitlist. Demand you can hear in a real conversation is worth more than a signup count I would only be staring at to feel good.
Question for anyone who has launched: did you validate with conversations first, or did you build, ship, and find out? And if you waited, how did you know when you had heard enough to actually build?
This is gold, Chris. The distinction between "collecting emails" and "understanding the problem" is something most founders learn the hard way (if at all). The buried-in-dashboards insight really hit home. I've built 17 SaaS tools and the ones that succeeded all started with conversations like these. The ones that didn't? Built in a vacuum. To answer your question — I validate with conversations first now. I aim for 20+ before writing any code. It's saved me months of building the wrong thing at least 3 times.
17 SaaS tools is a serious sample size. The fact that the ones that worked all started with conversations and the ones that didn't were built in a vacuum is exactly what I needed to hear during that two-week pause. The 'buried in dashboards' insight came directly from those 30 calls. Almost every agency owner I talked to said some version of 'I have the data, I just don't know what to do with it.' That sentence became the whole product thesis.
Good call delaying. 30 conversations also force better vocabulary. With Kinetic Override, the useful language came from users saying “record taps,” “no root,” “loop timing,” and “safe auto clicker,” not from my internal feature list. That changed the landing page and where I look for early users.
That is a great point about vocabulary. The language your users hand you is worth more than anything you'd come up with internally. I had the same experience. I kept calling it 'actionable recommendations' and every agency owner I talked to called it 'just tell me what to fix.' Guess which one ended up on the landing page.