Talking to customers and our “can’t not”

We’ve spent the past 3 weeks gathering feedback from potential customers and working on our minimum viable product (“MVP”). It’s really important to talk to customers early on. There are so many different directions we can go and features we can build. It’s not like they are telling us exactly what path to take but they are helping us understand what is most important to them. This guides the path we take.

So how did we find people to talk to? We started by reaching out to some former co-workers who have started companies. These companies are all early stage so we decided to try to meet with some larger companies that would make good early customers. We chose 3 companies who have already raised at least $10 million and could benefit from our product. We got introduced to one by a mutual connection and decided to cold email the other two. We were pumped when we got responses and meetings with all three. So far, we’ve spoken with 6 companies varying in size from pre-seed to $50 million in funding.

We’ve learned how our product needs to vary across different categories of apps and we’ve decided which type of customers to target initially. Our hunch that there is often a strong push to build things internally has been reinforced.

Shortly after our first meeting with a potential customer we chatted with Andrew Kortina, a co-founder of Venmo. He asked us “what are you building that makes it so they can’t not use your product?” After meeting with more customers it became clear that this was a very important question to answer. We considered all the feedback we’ve received and identified 3 or 4 different options. Yesterday, we agreed on an answer.

We have our “can’t not” and it feels great. We’re sure there will be diversions along the way, but our vision is clear. We’re not ready to share our vision with the interwebs but we’d love to get your feedback in person.

In case you were wondering: Yo, Grammar: “What’s Up With ‘Can’t Not’”?