You Don’t Know Yet

Founders don’t know what problem they’re solving yet, and neither do any of their customers, and the annoying part is that this is not actually bad news, because if you stay in it long enough, you will eventually figure it out.

The Product Is Bait

The way it usually goes is this: You build something that takes a particular angle on a particular problem in a particular industry (probably one you know pretty well, or think you do), and one of two things happens. You either get sucked into a kind of product development haunted house where it has to be just a little more complete before it’s ready, and the dashboard needs better onboarding, and what if it had a Slack integration, and maybe the logo should feel more “enterprise” (I have never once heard a satisfying definition of what “enterprise” means as an aesthetic), or you get a version out the door and into the actual market, where it doesn’t sell. Not selling is, counterintuitively, on ok outcome. It won’t feel good, it’ll feel like capitalism personally singled you out for a lesson, but what you have now is a real artifact that maybe 1% of your original intended market can react to, and that 1% is enormously valuable because real reactions are the only raw material that matters. You can now take that product (which is bait, more than anything else) and you start showing it to ten, twenty, thirty potential customers, watching their faces and listening to what they complain about.

Feature-Requested to Death

At first, they will try to feature-request you to death. These requests will feel very convincing because customers say things like “if it could just hook up to our QuickBooks instance, I’d buy it tomorrow” or “if the AI could handle this last piece of the workflow, this would be an absolute game-changer for us” (they will ALWAYS ask if it can export to Excel, a request I believe predates the spreadsheet and may outlast the species). So you go back to your team, you build as fast as you can, you ship version two with all the new features, you go back to those same customers, and if you are good, AND lucky they will tell you the exact same thing: there are just one or two more features they really need, and then this thing will fix the problem once and for all, and you are almost there.

The Roadmap Graveyard

I’m going to pause the loop here because it can go on for twenty iterations (and I’ve seen it go longer). The real tragedy is that a lot of founders never even get this far, because their demo customers have them trapped in feature-development purgatory forever… or their own brains trap them there, because the product has to be perfect before any real human is allowed to see it. Those products die in roadmaps and “just one more thing” conversations, and never get rejected by the market because they never actually reach it.

Eventually, You Start Seeing the Elephant

But if you can stay in the conversation long enough, past the feature requests and the individual customers and the literal words people are saying to you, something strange starts to happen. You become, through sheer accumulated exposure, the world’s leading expert on the problem your customers all have in common. Not the problem you thought you were solving when you started, and not the problem any one of them has described to you, but the actual structural problem that everyone is bumping into from different directions (Schlep Blindess) without being able to name it, because nobody has a view of the whole thing. One customer tells you it’s the accounting system. Another says it’s logistics. A third says the two systems don’t talk to each other. A fourth blames someone named Susan in operations (this may or may not be fair to Susan… but yeah, wtf Susan?) Each of them is holding a piece of the elephant, the trunk or the tail or the foot, and describing it with complete sincerity, and they are all correct about their piece, and none of them can see the animal.

You, Neo, Are The One!

You are the only person who has talked to all of them, which means you are the only person positioned to eventually see the whole thing. The insight doesn’t come in a meeting and it doesn’t come from a good customer interview; it comes sideways, usually while you’re not looking for it. You’re at lunch with a client and one of their direct reports walks in with a quick question, and two people start having a conversation right in front of you, and the boss asks why the system can’t do something, and the user explains the workaround, and a third person adds “we only do it that way because finance needs the numbers by Thursday,” and a piece clicks, and then another, and then another. You suddenly understand that the product you built wasn’t the product at all; it was the thing that got you close enough to understand what the actual product should be, which turns out to be a considerably more interesting thing to build.

Earning the Right to Understand

The first version won’t be right, and the second version probably won’t be right either, and that is not failure… that is the process of earning the right to understand what you’re actually building (see Paul Graham’s “How to Get Startup Ideas“). Most founders want to skip straight to the insight, want the clean customer discovery process and the tidy MVP and the market telling them in bullet points exactly what to build, and that is just not how it works. You build the wrong thing, you launch it, you survive, you talk to as many customers as you can stand, you resist becoming a short-order cook for every prospect with a credit card, and you keep looking for the pattern underneath all the noise until eventually you see the elephant.

That’s when the real company starts.