Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.
Never expect that your startup can cover every aspect of the market. The key is knowing what segment will respond to your unique offering. Who your product appeals to is just as important as the product itself.
One of the perks of being the founder is that you get to build the company in your image.
First and deadliest of all is a founder's unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them.
What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.
It is customers that decide if we succeed.
From the very first inkling of a concept, founders need to gather a target group of five to ten potential users to begin the feedback loop. We all think we know how the market will react to new ideas, but actual users live with the pros and cons of the existing market conditions every day. They are the market experts.
Customers don't just want to shop: they want to feel that the brand understands them.
Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.
Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.