As engineers who had never done this before, talking to people didn’t seem like real work. Real work was coding. But in reality, 20 hours of great interviews probably would’ve saved us an accrued 18 months of building useless stuff.

If you’re a technical founding team like we were, building it is the least useful way to reduce the risk in the company. You should be focusing the vast, vast majority of your effort as a technical founding team on making sure you’re really solving a problem. Because if you are, I’m quite sure you can build the solution.

Rather than months and months of engineering effort, all we needed in the end was a landing page built over a couple days. That little open source library (with only 8 incomplete integrations) was our minimum viable product:

once we found that initial sliver of a problem, digging in has been incredibly rewarding, fun and challenging in new ways.

if you’re not 100% sure you’re solving a real problem, you’re almost certainly not. Make sure you really validate the problem you’re solving.