Dalton Caldwell says founders should spend 20-30% of their time meeting customers in person. He shares how Patrick from Stripe checked in regularly with early users, and suggests counting your in-person meetings this month to see where you actually stand.
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You have to get out in the world and talk to people in person. And you can't just hide behind your keyboard and call that talking to customers. Right. And I think a lot of folks, their inclinations are to, like, you know, build a landing page and buy some Instagram ads and try to get people to sign up for something. And again, maybe, maybe that's something. But I think a lot of the reason people do that is they're just shy and they don't want to put themselves out there because it's a little awkward. Go talk to people. And you kind of have to psych yourself up to go out in the physical world. Get people to meet with you, get them to take you seriously, show them a product you're building. And so, again, to be very tactical here, you can do a self assessment. In the past month, how many in person, physical meetings have I had with potential customers? Maybe you've done a lot. I don't know, listener, maybe. Maybe you have. But, you know, it's. It's shocking how many companies I talk to. They're like, well, we're focused on raising our precede round before we talk to customers. Like, things like that. And again, I think the core. The core core thing going on is just social anxiety and, like, looking stupid. And I think you just got to get past that, you know, you just got to start doing it until it doesn't feel bad anymore. Think about how stupid the Airbnb founders must have felt. They were like, hey, you should rent out your house, and I'm going to come and sleep in your house, and here's an air bed. Like, like, it's. The whole thing is a little awkward. Right. So you got to power through the awkwardness of talking to people. And once you start doing it, it's actually kind of fun. Look at your calendar, and there should be, you know, 20 or 30% of your time that the calendar says something like customer meeting, customer call. And when the calendar is not that or it's all, you know, again, what you're actually doing is just buying ads to try to validate your idea. That I don't. I don't think that's talking to customers. You know, I think that's something else.
That's an awesome heuristic. So roughly fifth of your time, at least, should be talking to customers.
Yeah. And again, it depends on the idea space you're working on. Some are more, some are less. It should be a fair amount of time. And nothing substitutes for an actual conversation versus just staring at analytics data dashboards.
Makes so much sense.
I was an early stripe customer at my startup, and Patrick would be sending me messages, like, on a weekly basis, just, like, checking in. And so again, it's funny how successful these folks get, but, yeah, Patrick was very hands on with all of his customers and was extremely available. Like, I can say that because I was one of them. Yeah.
And I'm sure he had social anxiety going through all that. That wasn't a comfortable thing to do. Just, like, keep pushing people to install your software and deploy.
Oh, surely not. It's just you got to do, like, if you want your startup to work, this is just what you got to do. Comes with the territory.
