What Most Founders Get Wrong About Customer Validation

One of the key mantras I've discovered is that you have to begin with an understanding of the customer need before you start a company. When I start a company, I want to deeply understand the need and the customer. The mistake I made the first time around was I came up with an idea. I went to people, they said, oh, that sounds great. But now I know if somebody says that sounds great, and I don't see either fear or greed in their face, it's not a good idea.

So not necessarily a check and a commitment, but you're looking for a visceral emotional reaction.

That's right. I am looking for an emotional response from a potential customer where it is like, holy shit, if you do this, I will give up my first child to buy this product. And until I see that reaction in a customer's face, at this point, I have a discipline where I won't start a company. You know, I think, you know, we're mainly a B2B company. So, you know, for us, that that's, you know, a business. But we have to speak to something which is a sort of a profound need. And, you know, when you get to that, we were talking about the flow state. What I learned from the focus groups was this notion of being in the flow state is something everybody understands. Everybody also understands what it's like to not be in it, to kind of be on, you know, what they call a tilt state. And the visceral hunger to learn to understand and access that state was so profound. What became clear to me is if we can go to people and say, we will help you reliably access that, people will do anything for it. That was part of the market research. Then there was also. This was five years ago. You saw the emergence of Fitbit. It preceded, really the Apple Watch, but you could see that this whole biohacking world was taking off. 50% of my work was really on the customer side, you know, and I actually didn't even start with neuroscience. I was just thinking about human optimization.

That's what I was going to ask. So you sold your company and your last one, and so you knew you wanted to do something else.

Actually, I did the classic, I retired for a couple years. I'm never going to work again. I hit my number, you know, I'm going to travel. And then I. Right. So. But then the itch came back. And then I spent a year kind of figuring out what my next venture would be.

I think what I heard you say is it was in the human optimization space.

And by the way, that's, that's because I have passion there. I didn't know how to do it, but.

Yeah, you didn't know how to do it. And it wasn't necessarily around flow state. The flow got discovered as part of your discovery. Once you said, I'm going to focus on human optimization, you started doing customer discovery research, talking to people. And then, and this is a great lesson, right, because, and this is what I try to help founders, first time founders, young founders understand. So I love how you've learned that in your journey. And so you found a space you're passionate about, but you didn't get biased by a solution, you stayed open, you talked to a bunch of people and that led you to the idea, the hair on fire problem of flow state.

Right. And I would say that's only half of it because the other half of what I do is tech transfer. So 50% was market research and 50% was, can I find some cool tech, some cool IP that is being underutilized? And what was so amazing for Opteos was what I discovered is that the US government, mainly through the DoD, has now spent $7.2 billion funding research around this idea of human optimization, particularly cognitively. And that that IP was just gathering dust, like the, the government funded all this research, like in the. For the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. You read these scientific articles, I'm allowed to swear on this podcast, right? Because again, it is like, it really is. You know, you read it and your eyes pop out and you're saying, that can't be true. But like the doubling of learning speeds for a DARPA project in language learning, taking a sniper and accelerating their learning speed and improving their performance by massive orders of magnitude. A threefold improvement in productivity for CIA intelligence analysts, like crazy shit, but built by a bunch of scientists who are not commercial in nature. And it was just like sitting there, that IP was just gathering dust. And so it was this kind of, okay, now I see a market need, now I see ip. I'm going to now bring those together and see if I can actually create a commercial application to build a bridge from the tech to the market need. So it was really that combination of things that, that sparked my decision to start the company.