Jason M. Lemkin's former boss Mark Zelko told him to visit customers in person. Lemkin did, discovered feature gaps and pain points that mattered most, and used that to prioritize product work. Most founders skip this step.
And I went to my old boss, Mark Zelko, who is now a general partner at Costa Noa Ventures. But he had been my. One of my first Internet boss. And I went to Mark and I said, what to do? And he kind of. And he's one of the nicest, most generous people, and he kind of gave me a scowl. He's like, well, how many of your customers and prospects have you visited in person this month? It's like, you got to go visit your customers. And it was an aha moment for me. And I got out there and I visited all the tough top customers and just talked to them. Your existing customers, if they've renewed, if they're using your product, if they're active, they're highly engaged. They are thinking about the problems you're solving. They know your feature gaps, not all of them, but they know the ones that matter to you. And they know the things, at least from their perspective, that if you could just get that done, if you could just get there, it would be a game changer. It worked. And I give this advice again and again, and I see way too many founders. They don't get out and visit customers. But I ask founders that are going through tough times. I asked what my old mentor told me. How many of your customers have visited.
