When you are bringing a venture to life, it’s common for founders to get caught up in developing the solution before deeply understanding the problem. How do you ensure that you’re building the right thing for your paying customers?

Know your customer – your PAYING customer.

Founders often confuse their users with their customers, but it’s your job to know who’s paying for your product or service and what their most painful painpoint is… 

To do this, you need to actually talk to your customers – and a lot of them – and track your customer discovery data along the way.

Which brings me back to…

Ask really good questions

Ask questions that don’t inherently validate your own bias. The Mom Test is a really good book for knowing what to ask.

For example, when identifying a specific customer segment… instead of forcing the “who” you’re targeting, think of “when” they’d need it or “where can you find them if you had to talk to them in person” A small tweak but it helps think differently.

Once you know your customer and what their problem is, then you can start to tackle the solution…

Build fast and lean. Test. Iterate.

Be more obsessed with getting it right than being right.

Obsess over the problem. Obsess over your customers. Obsess over what the world needs. Obsess over adding value. Obsess over real life users breaking your perfect solution. Obsess over finding new ways to fail and learn and get better.

This process is NEVER done – so continue to rinse and repeat.