Something Almost Every Entrepreneur Does Wrong: Building A Product For Yourself Rather than Your Customer.

This doesn’t refer to simplistic UIs or customer friendly interfaces: most new startups do that perfectly. This is considering your product on a deeper level — your value proposition. Most entrepreneurs tend to look at a problem and think of a solution for it by themselves. They get validation from their friends, family, and maybe even other entrepreneurs and find value in their product from this advice. However, it’s very rare that these validators would have experience with the field the entrepreneur is targeting. Let me give you a personal example.

In my Intellectual Property Acceleration Challenge Lab class at Berkeley, we wanted to solve the problem of all these different companies getting sued and how this was impeding innovation. So, we talked to some speakers and validated our idea of performing a fast Prior Art Search frequently throughout the product development cycle. We thought this would be super helpful and almost finished building the entire product without ever double-guessing ourselves on whether companies actually needed this. Once we actually started talking to companies and started marketing this however, we got several input that this prior art search at every step is equivalent to a freedom to operate analysis, which leads to high willful infringement risk. No company wants this risk: it’s much better for them to say that they were unaware of this infringement. Immediately, the market need for our product went to zero and we changed our value proposition. However, if we had talked to potential customers from the beginning, we could have realized this in the beginning and avoided this issue.

To conclude, every entrepreneur should talk to potential customers before they even start spending time on their product and test their value proposition well. Most entrepreneurs don’t talk to potential customers but rather get validation from people (it doesn’t matter how high of a position they hold) they know. This leads to a pivot later on because they built with their own intuition rather than exact customer need.