Michael Seibel advises startup founders to pursue the most desperate customers first — people or organizations who literally cannot operate without the solution — rather than seeking validation from friends, investors, or impressive but non-desperate customers. He frames an MVP as inherently imperfect and recommends finding users willing to tolerate a bad product because they urgently need it; he illustrates this with a Socialcam anecdote and a warning against relying on friends or investors for feedback.
Chapters
Which customers should you go after first? A lot of founders are very confused by this question. What I find interesting is just like the instinct is to go after customers by making the product free. For some reason, I find a lot of people think that their instincts should be to go after the hardest customers first. Almost as if it's like a proof, like if I can get this impossible person to use something, then like it'll be easier. I know that I made something good. I like to start from a different point. It's an mvp, you know you've made something bad. Like that's the definition of mp. It's bad. So the real question is like, how do you find people who are willing to use a bad product? Right? They have to be the most desperate, the most desperate. And so a lot of times I talk to founders, I really push them towards who are the most desperate customers and how do you talk to them first. That's what I define as easy desperate. If you're having like a, you know, if you're trying to sell a simple piece of software to someone, thousand dollars a month, and you're engaged in a six month conversation with a company that's not a desperate company, move on. In fact, when you're doing enterprise sales early as a startup, like you're looking for even more desperate customers just because literally it takes so long to sell them. So if you don't feel like you're dealing with desperate people, if you feel like you've dealt, you're you are trying to get impressive customers who aren't desperate, you're probably doing it wrong. Literally the number one thing I often tell founders, just like, whose business is gonna go out of business without using you? Which people out there are not gonna be able to get to work or to watch their kids. How do you find the people who are just literally are screaming for something like this and then how do you talk to them and not talk to your friends? I had a whole bunch of friends who were using socialcam, right? My company was doing video for sharing with friends and they weren't really using it. They were using it because it was like my app and they were friends with me. I literally had one friend who was like super honest about this, Steve, CEO of Reddit. When we sold socialcam, he literally said, thank God, now I can delete this app from my phone. So the perfect definition of someone you should not be trying to get product feedback from, right? And so he didn't have the problem we were solving. Many of your friends won't have the problem that you're solving, make sure you find the. And by the way, the kind of community of startup people and, or investors usually don't have the problem that you're solving. So if you're using investors as a, as a trigger for am I solving the right problem? Or, like, do they find this useful? It's almost never the case. I'm almost never the user of a product that comes into yc. And so ignore your investors, ignore your friends. Like, they will lead you 100% astray out of good intentions. They'll try to be helpful. Well, you know, I've never lived in the Sahara. I've never been thirsty. But maybe it should work like this, right? Like horrible. Run away. Run away.
