What do you wish you knew about product ideas and execution?
Sneha Saigal
7 replies
I'll go first. There are so many things we do not know when we start out on this journey of entrepreneurship.
In the early days of ideating GEXPR, my co-founder VB and I were quite skeptical about talking about the product, the vision, and the audience, and in general, we shied away from the “build in public” movement! We protected this “brainchild” and yes, even thought of confidentiality when we spoke to mentors, advisors, investors, and so on.
Fast-forward to 6 months, and every opportunity to share the product story, roadmap, founder story, and challenges is a golden opportunity to increase our luck surface area. If I hadn’t come across books like The Mom Test and Do More, Faster I probably would have still been hiding behind my computer without doing the real leg work of getting out and speaking to customers with a clunky product or a not-so-nice pitch deck. Every chance to do so is less.
Replies
John Alimi@john_alimi
Thanks for this. From my experience building Loopify360 and working with founders, the importance of feedback and inputs from prospective customers cannot be overemphasized. It's so easy to build in isolation with very limited insights from real life users. I believe every single framework and feature should be built based on insights from prospective users/customers.
I would have personally saved a lot of time and resources if I had been more conscious of this earlier.
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@john_alimi Fantastic! Testing with different user cohorts is necessary.
@sneha_saigal It's been great so far, obviously with some challenges but generally positive. We are currently testing with a number of users and are now actively seeking a pre-seed raise.
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@siddhartha_dange For sure, Siddhartha. Educating users is a must!
I understand, sometimes we don't understand how important is it to come out and create demand for our products. Thank you for sharing your story.
@software_guy of course, so important to keep learning, Aarvy. What kind of products do you review?