Build What the Market Truly Needs
Chosen theme: Understanding Market Needs for Startup Success. When founders tune into real customer pains, roadmaps align, adoption accelerates, and growth compounds. Dive in, subscribe, and share your toughest customer insight challenge so we can explore it together.
Start With Listening, Not Lines of Code
Replace leading prompts with neutral, past-tense questions. Embrace silence, ask for specific examples, and reflect back what you heard. Try this on your next call and tell us what changed.
Start With Listening, Not Lines of Code
Shadow customers in their environment to observe workarounds, constraints, and unspoken pain. A founder once discovered a critical bottleneck from a sticky note on a monitor. Share your favorite field-learning moment.
From Noise to Insight: Reading Market Signals
Leading signals include waitlists, demo requests, and repeated problem keywords; lagging signals include churn and shrinking session depth. Define yours this week and comment with one metric you will monitor.
From Noise to Insight: Reading Market Signals
Scan support forums, job postings, and procurement documents to spot emerging standards and unmet needs. A healthtech team found regulatory worries hidden in FAQs. Share a dataset you plan to explore.
Composite Personas From Real Conversations
Create personas using verbatim quotes, goals, constraints, and purchasing authority. Avoid stock photos and clichés. Drop one persona trait you recently revised after interviews, and how that shifted your priorities.
Map the Job Journey
Chart trigger, search, evaluation, purchase, setup, usage, and renewal steps. Surface anxieties and desired outcomes at each step. Share one step with the biggest friction, and we’ll suggest experiments.
Avoid Vanity Segments
Segment by habit, urgency, and willingness to pay, not titles or vague demographics. A startup doubled activation after refocusing on daily power users. Comment with one behavior-based segment you will target.
Sizing the Real Opportunity: TAM, SAM, SOM Without Wishful Thinking
Count actual buyers, frequencies, and realistic prices from early tests, then extrapolate carefully. Replace grand totals with reachable customers this year. Post your math, and we’ll help stress-test assumptions.
Sizing the Real Opportunity: TAM, SAM, SOM Without Wishful Thinking
Choose a narrow segment where the pain is acute and switching is feasible. Win there, build references, then expand adjacent. Tell us your beachhead hypothesis and one adjacent market to watch.
Prototype to Learn: Experiments That Reduce Risk
We manually delivered the service for eight pilot customers, discovering the real blocker was onboarding, not algorithms. That pivot tripled retention. Have you tried a concierge approach? Share your lesson.
Prototype to Learn: Experiments That Reduce Risk
Present the value proposition and ask for email, demo, or prepayment. Make it honest, then study drop-off. Comment with one hypothesis you will test this week using a simple page.
Make Discovery a Habit: Feedback Loops That Compound
Invite a rotating group of users for monthly sessions, plus lightweight weekly check-ins. Publish decisions and what changed. Share your cadence plan, and we’ll send a facilitation agenda to try.