“You aren’t going to build what you think you’re going to build.”

This is my cheeky summation of all of the great teachings coming out of YC, 500 Global, Techstars, and every other early-stage startup accelerator. Being a GREAT startup founder appears to come down to one’s ability to understand this simple fact and roll with it.

Only the very best founders have the ability to abandon the ideals of what they were planning to build, and the endurance to ruthlessly iterate until they’ve built something a lot of people want

I covered the subject of overbuilding in a previous edition “Why We Overbuild” (TL;DR: We build too much before spending enough time talking to users because we LOVE to build and it feels like we’re doing work) and we aren’t going to do that anymore. Now what? What should we say to users? What questions should we ask?

Start by NOT showing users anything.

Whether you’re validating a new startup idea or just a new feature idea, start by identifying a problem you believe your users are having and go talk to them in person or on a video call. It’s obviously VERY tempting to show them product mockups and/or demos and get that dopamine hit when they say “Hey this looks great!” but to quote Gustaf Alströmer “Your job is to figure out what is in their head without putting anything in there first.” We’re just validating the idea at this stage! A true MVP comes next.

We’ve certainly done this part wrong at Stonks in the past. We were sort of “building in public” and had hundreds (or even thousands) of users using the latest iteration of our platform every week and often giving feedback LIVE in front of hundreds of other users. Brutal. (F’s in the chat). We saw this “Live” feedback as a supercharged replacement for 1:1 user calls. Don’t be like Stonks! We don’t do this anymore, our calendars are full of user calls now, I promise.

Ask the RIGHT questions.

YC teaches these simple Do’s and Don’ts for user calls. You can memorize these or print them out and stick them on your wall.

Ask these:

1. Tell me how you do X today.

2. What is the hardest/most annoying thing about doing X?

   (Just these 2 questions could take up a 30 min call)

3. Why is it hard?

4. How often do you do this?

5. Why is it important for you (or your company) to do X?

Don’t ask these:

1. Will you be a user of my product if I build it?

2. What features would make my product better?

Also, don’t ask any Yes/No questions, and don’t make them lie to you.

Ask follow-up questions!

MANY of your best insights will come from you asking a simple, stock follow-up question like:

1. What do you mean by that?

2. Oh, say more about that!

3. Gotcha, and why is that specifically important?

We can’t expect people to just give us the info we need without a little prodding. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box said this in 2013:

Watch the absolute Masterclass on talking to users:

This video from the YC archives (2014) shows Emmett Shear of Twitch giving a class at Stanford an amazing lecture about talking to users. All of it is still HIGHLY relevant today.

The End.

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Love you,
- John