Love this Mathias! I work as a fractional CTO helping founders establish MVP. The number 1 problem that I see is them not validating their ideas and establishing product market fit! I know about a guy in my network who spent 2 million before he talked to a single customer!
Wow this is wild. I remember during my Stanford class (MS&E273 Technology Venture Formation) where we had to start a company in 1 quarter, we had every week the homework to talk to 10 users. Sounds so easy & straight forward in hindsight.
You'd think so! What happens is founders fall in love with their idea and it blinds them to the reality of the market. Just because you love your idea, doesn't mean that everyone else does, the reverse method is honestly better. Build up community and talk to potential customers to find out what they like/need, and then build around market input to do data driven product development.
I agree on that. Especially once someone has invested significant time into a project/idea they grow attached to it. I think what's better is to fall in love with a problem and then be open minded how to solve that. But obviously here you still need to validate that this problem is real for users and that people are willing to pay for it getting solved. This problem centric approach also helps people to avoid the tech fallacy trap e.g. "I wanna do something with AI" and then people search for ideas where they can use AI.
Right. The idea that you as a founder might love, and the idea that solves poeple's painpoints can be two ENTIRELY seperate ideas. It's great when you also fall in love with an idea that also solves peoples problems, but founders should never assume that they are the same without talking to the market first!
Love this Mathias! I work as a fractional CTO helping founders establish MVP. The number 1 problem that I see is them not validating their ideas and establishing product market fit! I know about a guy in my network who spent 2 million before he talked to a single customer!
Wow this is wild. I remember during my Stanford class (MS&E273 Technology Venture Formation) where we had to start a company in 1 quarter, we had every week the homework to talk to 10 users. Sounds so easy & straight forward in hindsight.
You'd think so! What happens is founders fall in love with their idea and it blinds them to the reality of the market. Just because you love your idea, doesn't mean that everyone else does, the reverse method is honestly better. Build up community and talk to potential customers to find out what they like/need, and then build around market input to do data driven product development.
I agree on that. Especially once someone has invested significant time into a project/idea they grow attached to it. I think what's better is to fall in love with a problem and then be open minded how to solve that. But obviously here you still need to validate that this problem is real for users and that people are willing to pay for it getting solved. This problem centric approach also helps people to avoid the tech fallacy trap e.g. "I wanna do something with AI" and then people search for ideas where they can use AI.
Right. The idea that you as a founder might love, and the idea that solves poeple's painpoints can be two ENTIRELY seperate ideas. It's great when you also fall in love with an idea that also solves peoples problems, but founders should never assume that they are the same without talking to the market first!