What would you do if you…
- Interviewed 40 people in your target customer base
- 5 were excited and show specific interested in using your product, including 3 of them making statements like, “I would switch tomorrow if…”
- All 5 expressed a willingness to cross the penny gap and pay something (with varying prices that related to the size of their company)
You then went out and built your MVP and started working on getting each of the 5 onboarded.
3 weeks later, 0 of them had onboarded.
All of them had reasons to delay…
- “Give me a couple weeks”.
- “Check back in about 20 days.”
- “Now isn’t a good time. This is probably a better fit in a month or two…”
Put simply, I just learned a painful lesson in problem urgency.
You can call this a startup post-mortem, or simply a reflection of the harsh realities of business. Regardless, I write to help me think, learn, and understand, so this is as much for myself as anyone else’s benefit.
Here’s the hard lessons I just learned.
Having a problem != wanting to solve a problem right now.
If you look across my customer development interviews, in the “best” calls I had you can see where people understood the problem, had hacked some kind of solution they weren’t totally happy with, and that they were asking for functionality I was planning to build.
I thought I was way down Steve Blank’s classic validation list:
Many of the best calls I had even expressed a willingness to pay, so I thought I had made it all the way to the top of Blank’s pyramid.
But I forgot something important: problem priority matters, too.
Urgency is oxygen for startups.
Unfortunately, what I lacked was urgency from these potential “customers”.
While they all did feel pain when I dug into their views on product feedback, and loved the idea of having AI based follow up doing some root cause analysis for them, it’s not their biggest problem right now.
In fact, their biggest problems became why they wanted to put off starting to use my customer feedback widget. These included launch delays, fundraising, already packed product sprints, and a critical initiative they wanted to ship first. It didn’t matter how fast and easy the set up was, nor the size or type of business; they all had reasons to put it off.
As a startup you need urgency. You need people to want to use your product. Not only does it bring in precious revenue, but they give you feedback, so you know what to build and add to your product next.
With all these delays, Product Arrow was suffocating to death.
Just like the Genie in Aladdin can’t make someone fall in love with you, as a founder, you can’t make people want to use your product. The either are willing to dive in and need it to help them now, or they don’t.
Yet, this cold dose of reality left me wondering how I went wrong in my customer interviews, which led to my next lesson.
Founder enthusiasm can be a detriment sometimes.
When you’re building a startup, you have to be optimistic. You need to see a problem and want to fix it so badly that you can look to the future and see a solution you create that makes everything better.
And of course, being passionate and enthusiastic about what you’re building is also a great sales tool. It’s why founder-led sales is so important.
But there is a downside.
Sometimes your enthusiasm can excite the other person, too.
And that enthusiasm can make them seem more into your idea than they are once they’re back in their day to day work.
Or at least that’s what I think happened here.
I was so pumped to talk about this problem, that I think I got some of the better fit interviewees excited in the moment in ways that back in their job, they just weren’t as excited.
And that enthusiasm hid the lack of urgency to solve this problem, which I should have validated more aggressively.
But what about…
I know what you’re thinking, and I had those thoughts, too as I tried to figure out why this wasn’t working:
- “Maybe this was just your friends being nice?” I wish that were true, but 3 of the 5 interested PMs/Founders were not people I knew before interviewing them.
- “Are you sure they are representative of the whole market?” This is a fair question, but when you look at the demographics of both those that were interested, and why they weren’t interested, it becomes clear it’s not just them. There was always a bigger priority at the enterprise, medium, and especially startup stage.
- “Have you tried marketing this other ways? Maybe this is urgent for someone else?” I tried a lot of methods: Writing tweets, blog posts, and Linkedin posts, as well as making videos, and even sending personalized cold emails. They all struck out. I got my first 100 customers writing content on leadership and management for Lighthouse, so this was particularly sobering to see fail here.
It still shocks me as I write this, but it’s true: posts about this topic got some of the fewest reads I’ve ever gotten on anything I’ve written on my blog and other accounts.
The truth I’m coming around to: Most people just don’t care about feedback the way I do.
And that’s why after 2.5 months of focused effort, I’m ceasing efforts on Product Arrow.
What’s next?
I’m going to pause and consider what I want to do next, but I do know that I will continue to learn, experiment, and use AI.
I’ve learned so much about models, evals, training data, and the myriad of tools out there, that I now use AI in every aspect of my life from soccer rehab to wedding planning, and of course every aspect of startups. And now I’m sinking my teeth into Claude Code to go even further.
If you’re reading this and you’re experimenting with AI, please get in touch either with a Linkedin message or Twitter/X DM, especially if:
- You’re interested in working together (whether you need product leadership, or a co-founder)
- You have a big problem you wish *someone* would care enough to fix
- You want to trade lessons learned on AI tools, or would like me to teach your team how to start adopting AI in their day to day work like I just did for Tiny Health
I’m casting a wide net to see what I’d most like to sink my teeth into next, so would love to speak with you.