Startup lesson learned - Talk to people facing the problem you're trying to solve
If you don't talk, you can't learn.
You can only truly understand the problem you are solving if you speak with people who experience it. Of course, you could be experiencing this problem yourself and have sound intuition around it, but I believe there is a lot of nuance around the problem that you cannot discover unless you speak with other people who face this issue.
We conducted a lot of market research with EnVsion, especially at the start of our journey. By market research I mean we read reports by consulting firms, research agencies, etc. Basically the high level stuff that we thought we needed to know in order to justify what we were doing to investors, and ourselves. We really thought we had a solid grasp of the market we were in, and thus neglected speaking with enough prospects to get more granular information and validate or refute or hypotheses.
Instead of speaking with more people facing the problem we were tackling, we focused on building what we thought was an irresistible and very good looking product powered by solid software engineering.
We were wrong. Very wrong.
We’ve been learning the hard way since these times. Now we strive to conduct more user research to better inform our business, product, and engineering decisions. I still don’t think we do enough of it, but we’re certainly improving.
Thanks for reading this post! I share my learnings and progress while building my startup EnVsion! EnVsion helps UX researchers & founders to create clips of key moments in user interview videos in seconds!
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