You have to continue to engage with those customers and your trusted partners to iterate your product, even when you’re in the market. Because just because you found a fit today, it doesn’t mean tomorrow some kid in Palo Alto hasn’t come up with something that’s even better than what you’ve got, and he’s already knocking on the door of your customers.
Trying to boil the ocean, trying to sell their product to literally everybody–that’s obviously not the most effective way to go about it. I really want to see a company that is clearly thinking about that beachhead market or target market, and knows who really is feeling this pain the most, that they’re solving, and how they’re going to specifically target those customers.
You can have all of those policies. You can have all of those ideas. And people do want them and they respect them. And that matters. . . . But what they really want is to be inspired by what they’re living in. They want to know that there’s a future that is exciting
There’s so much competition out there, it’s so difficult, that really you’re playing with a losing hand already. So when you find something that actually takes hold, when you’re able to find that product-market fit or that set of customers that are really passionate or you’re solving a problem that is really needed within a marketplace, you almost have a responsibility to just run after it as fast as you can.
You’re not just listening to your customers, you have to have enough ego at play to say, like, “I feel really confident about this thing I’m trying to do, and I know that you will like this. And here it is.” But conversely, … You have to really be able to set that ego, the same ego that drove you to do this in the first place, you have to set it down and be like, “Okay, I was definitely wrong in this regard,” and, “Oh, we seem to be on target over here.”
For us, it was people within their Twitter community who are gatekeepers saying, “This is a great product.” The people who understand what resonates with that fan base saying, “This is great.” They get it.
So that was an indicator for us that we had hit the people and product, and now time and place was to follow.