What kind of founder are you?
There are only really two kinds of founders:
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those who happily do lots of useless work to avoid talking to customers, and
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those who happily talk to customers to avoid having to do lots of useless work
Which group do you think is more successful?
And which group are you in?
I am too much in the first group that I am trying to break the habits so that I can reach out to more people (even if it is via online communities).
I think to be successful you need to be able to balance, understand and switch between both.
I do both 🤷♂️ Is that bad?
Haha I think as long as you're aware of it, it isn't actually that big a deal.
😂 ok. I am a solo founder of BuildFaster.io and the only worker. So I guess I'm the "one man band" for my business.
I m both :) depending on how my day is going.
Haha I saw this tweet!
Hopefully I'm the second type - I speak to at least one or two early adopters a week just to catch up and talk ideas/feedback.
Looking to ramp that up once my mvp is launched!
I do lots of talk to customers so I can know what to focus my lots of useful work on :D
2nd one, but normally/mostly talk via communities, obviously :)
It's a good question :)
Out of curiosity: what do you mean when you say "talking to customers."
Replying to Intercom? Cold outreach? Phone conversations?
Any and all of the above :)
Basically, do you build something and then see if your assumptions were correct? Or do you use customer discovery to inform what you should be building?
I'm like 80% first type. I don't like talking to strangers. Like, with voices. I'm cool with emailing and chatting though. Does that make me qualify as a millenial? 😅
I'm in the middle :)
Yeah a combination of both seems necessary - gotta also fix up the admin, taking care of the team and developing every now and then.
#1 haha talking to customers is quite hard if you've spent your whole career never talking to customers!
If this is the real question,
"Basically, do you build something and then see if your assumptions were correct? Or do you use customer discovery to inform what you should be building?"
then I'm the latter most of the time
I love the building phase. However, when I get a customer appointment, I change gears into the closer.
For 2 years before founding a company I was Director of Engineering where I constantly switched between hosting developer meetings and building architectures into customer appointments where I closed their tech staff.
Nasty.
And only somewhat helpful.
With 20+ years in product and entrepreneurial...I've made all these mistakes.
Everyone wants everything, they want it yesterday, they want it free, they want is simple...customers are part of everyone.
You can react or you can lead.
Listen to everything. Filter everything by your needs...business model, vision, desired positioning, desired customer base, etc...
Lead and talk to your customer...thoughtfully.
I've seen plenty of founders and the like spending a lot of time talking to prospects/customers to avoid doing anything useful (outside of talking to customers of course). Lot's of people have a certain amount of avoidance one way or the other; good to have a co-founder that is the yin to your yang.