Under what circumstances would you not bother interviewing potential customers
Build, Measure, Learn, Repeat, I get that concept... but have any of you just worked on a hunch, built something based on that hunch and not spoken to any customers until you are presenting them with a solution and asking them to pay for it?
I feel like a lot of what I am reading about testing ideas is telling me to ignore my intuition and presume I am most likely wrong about what my potential customers need and want.
I wondered if anyone had any thoughts about this?
I did this just recently with my latest side project. I have not done any customer interviews around the problem and entered a very saturated market. I had a gut feeling, that what I want to build, people will like.
Needless to say I am running another company (CEO, self-funded, profitable), did a lot of customer interviews/problems/solution interviews back then. So that gut feeling was based on the previous experience.
I also didn't bet everything on this project. I still have my job, I invested about 280 hours since earlier this year and I was ok if this wouldn't work.
I shared the early access with my closest people around, then reached out to further audience with every new version, to validate further and get more motivation. Here are my stats, which kept me going - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/launching-on-product-hunt-is-hard-8eabd2b81a
All in all, this project has paying customers, I have invested ~281 hours into it and $50. So I can say it is profitable if I overlook my payments, it pays all its own bills for services, and there is a buffer now for a year ahead.
To conclude, reduce your project to a real MVP, what you would consider usable, if it won't take long time to build (or if you are happy it will) go for it. Build what you think will work, but get some motivation on the way. :)