When I was a CSM at SignPost, we used to lie about the product and what it does for customers. 

Why? Their product sucked. I didn’t believe in it. The truth is, no one did. And I hated my job. 

Just because the product sucked, no one was motivated to sell it. Only money motivated everyone. And there goes the company culture. 

I got out of ASAP but learned a very valuable lesson. 

No matter how big of a company you are, or how much you’ve raised in funding, if your product is not good enough then everything will eventually fall apart. 

So, in this email, we’re going to talk about how to build products that your customers love using so you don’t have to spend your life hard selling. 

Customers are always RIGHT:

I don’t mean to do every your customer says. What I mean is that they know what their pains are, they know what solutions they’ve tried, and they know why those solutions haven’t worked. 

Talking to your customers beforehand saves you a ton of effort and reduces the risk of failure. But getting users to see your product is one thing while getting them to pay for it is another. 

Use The Mom Test as a guideline for interviewing customers. Don’t have time for the book? Check out this awesome summary. 

Listen to this Y Combinator talk on how to talk to users. 

Watch video 

Start with a user-centric MVP: 

Build MVP with just enough features to satisfy early adopters and provide feedback for future development. 

Create a low-fidelity mockup or wireframe of your MVP using tools like Balsamiq, Sketch, or Figma. Or use an easier-to-use tool like Uizard, which also has text-to-design AI capabilities.  

Gather data and Feedback for Future Development: 

Now you have your MVP in place. Time to start collecting data and feedback to learn and improve. 

Set up HotJar to watch people using your website. The best practice is to tag people who click on elements, scroll down, stop and read sections, etc. Look at your numbers. Does this match industry standards? If not, interview people and figure out why they are not reading, scrolling, or clicking.

Set up a way to gather emails. You can create forms and popups for people to enter their email, name, and whatever other information you want.

Customers are always right, but now always: 

Remember I said customers are always right. Well, it’s partially true. You don’t want to build your startup for one person. The truth is, customers only care about their problems, not your product. 

Customers don’t care about your solution. They care about their problems. — Dave McClure

When you collect data from customer interviews and feedback, analyze all the common trends and pains that are enough to support building the product or feature. Only then build. 

Use Read.ai, Otter, or a similar tool or record in all meetings and analyze the conversations over time. 

A quote from Henry Ford fits well:

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Iterate and Improve: 

Sometimes you’ll have to fail to learn. Building a product is a continuous process of iteration and testing. You cannot create a perfect product and you don’t have to. Your products always suck, but by testing and improving you go from “SUCK” to “LESS SUCK” 

When you stop failing you stop being a startup. — Fred Lalonde

Don’t lose touch with customers: 

You are growing your startup. You’re getting customers. Now it’s important to not lose touch with your customers. 

Here’s what you can do: 

Ensure your executives, directors, and managers are truly putting customer success first. This awesome article has 9 questions you can ask yourself and your team. It ranks good answers against bad answers

Want to nerd out even more on 90 pages of tips, tools, questions, and playbooks on ensuring your company is aligned on customer success? Check out this guide.

Which Matrices to track: 

Customer retention and referral rate are good metrics to track that ensure that customers need and want your product. Here’s how Sam Altman put it: 

“… if you want to be a great company someday, you have to eventually build something so good that people will recommend it to their friends-in fact, so good that they want to be the first one to recommend it to their friends for the implied good taste. No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don’t have a sufficiently good product.” Sam Altman 

It’s easier to fall prey to ideas that you think can potentially help but don’t deliver any results. You can reduce such situations by simply staying true to customers’ needs 

I have a complete step-by-step guide that walks you through the entire product development journey broken by stages and operations (with a 100% money-back guarantee) 

If you’re serious about building your product the right way. Check out the guide here:

https://nobsstartupguide.com/

Hope you find this email helpful. 

See you next week. 

– – 

P.S. I’m launching my first-ever online course on Maven where I’ll be taking a limited number of people on mentorship and coaching sessions. 

If you’re an engineer with tons of great ideas, a wantrepreneur who has been dreaming of starting their own company or simply looking to be more scrappy and entrepreneurial, then this is for you.

Signup for the waitlist here