Back in the 90s, there was a movie called Field of Dreams. ⚾ In the movie, some sort of ghost voice keeps telling Kevin Costner, "If you build it, they will come."  

Newsflash: that’s terrible advice for founders.  

Instead of jumping right into building products, doing rigorous work around customer discovery and testing assumptions is the best initial investment of a founder's time and resources.

But first, a cautionary tale

Take Tai Huynh, for instance, the awesome co-founder and CEO of ACTA Solutions. Tai’s first product failed because, even though he knew he had to do customer discovery, he didn't do it well. He had a lot of confirmation biases and was just teasing out the things he wanted to hear.

The team had some initial traction with that first product. But then the pandemic made it very clear that it was all wrong. It was a very nice-to-have product, but hardly critical.  

And so that drastic failure drove him to seek out new frameworks and then apply them diligently. With that first product, he struggled to get past $3K ARR, but with his second, developed using these frameworks, the company hit $100K ARR within 10 months.

What to learn from Tai

Tai still believes that distribution—getting your product/service into the hands of users—is everything, but that it’s also critical to be flexible in your product and strategy. He has a 2-part approach that all founders should steal:

1. Understand the job your customer needs to get done. One of the old core tenets of doing customer discovery is to focus on personas and getting really detailed. You know, like, Tai, 20-something, Asian-American, male. But instead of focusing and drilling down on that, you should be really looking for the situation and the context where Tai is actually going to buy or look for your service: the job to be done. The team at Intercom is one of the most successful instances of using the Jobs-to-be-Done framework and you can see how they break it down here.

2. Test your go-to-market strategy. Start with these two books:

• Talking To Humans, which discusses how to do customer discovery interviews in an unbiased way & how to track your interviews
• Testing with Humans, which offers an experimentation matrix you can run across the curve to try and prove out your go-to-market strategy

Testing with Humans really forces you to set metrics up front for what success looks like. And it's very unemotional—great for founders who get attached and sentimental about their initial hunch. These frameworks are a huge help for founders looking to create a go-to-market strategy.

Beware the ol’ confirmation bias

One of the strongest forces out there is confirmation bias. And sadly, founders are quite susceptible. One safeguard is having co-founders who continually challenge your assumptions, blind spots, and approach.

On the more tactical side, going back to that experiment matrix and being able to set out what you’re expecting to happen up front can be critical in determining success.

Turns out, if you build it, they will come…but only if you built it right.

All the best!

Elizabeth

This article was written by Elizabeth Yin, our co-founder, general partner and lead hippo enthusiast at Hustle Fund.

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