Early-stage founders should talk to three to five potential customers daily, recording conversations and directly asking if they'd pay. This reveals real pain points and finds your first paying customers faster than any other method.
I always say talk to 3 to 5 customers or potential customers every day. Like every single day as you're getting started, talk to like 5 people that might potentially be interested. It could be your cousin. Okay. It could be a friend of a friend. It could be like somebody you've met on the street. It could be like somebody you reached out to on LinkedIn, whatever it is, just talk to 5 potential customers you think might be interested in what you're building every single day. And you'd be surprised how often you'll like, what kind of signal you'll get from that. So, I mean, record the calls if you can on one of these like note takers, like do whatever you need to do to kind of figure that out. But you'll realize pretty quickly as you talk to so many people that might be interested in this, what they want. And they'll say, oh, I need this. And then you basically say, would you pay for that? Oh no, no, no. I just like think it'd be interesting. Okay. That's signal. Or like, I need this. Or if you had this, I'd pay you $1,000 a month tomorrow. Like, really? Mm-hmm. Yeah, 100%. I'd do that. Okay. There's your first customer. Like that. Like you just, you have these conversations, you realize that there's such a pain and a need and you might not realize what that is and you might think you know, but by talking to the customers, you can either validate your opinions or Maybe it doesn't validate it, but it says something else, or you learn something else, or things that you might be interested in, like they could potentially build like tangentially.
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Keith Gillispie: Why Most New Investors Fail & How to Avoid the Common Traps #250 | SaaS District
