Accelerate your learning by caring for your customers
You sure know you must learn and understand the problem space deeply and come up with solutions. As a founder of an early-stage company, you may have a complex plan, maybe even one for the next 5 years. You may want to hire analytics, user experience experts, and designers for that, putting more layers between the customers and yourself, and spending a lot of money. However, you need to accelerate your learning by caring for your customers and working with some of them one on one.
As a startup, you probably have limited resources, and learning fast is crucial. And the best way to achieve this is by talking to your customers, understanding their motivation, and helping them solve their problems. You should talk with hundreds of your customers but you must definitely build a close relationship with some of them so that they can provide you with honest, specific needs. If they use your system in a way that you did not anticipate, go and help them. Let’s assume you build an e-commerce platform and the customers upload low-quality, unattractive photos of their product, then offer assistance shooting better ones. Invest time and energy, maybe a little bit of money just to ensure they can get the most out of your platform. Building trust in this way will lead to better customer understanding and more valuable insights.
Some founders believe that they need to hire people to understand the customers so they hire designers, user experience, and analytics professionals or talk to their investors. This approach often requires more spending and adds more layers between the founder and the customer. It does not mean that these are not completely unnecessary, but there is a faster way to learn about the problem space. As a founder, you spend time with your customers.
When your customer has an opportunity to talk to the CEO, CTO, or founder, they feel special and are more willing to help you. By helping them use your product more effectively, you gain valuable insights. Address their problems, and let them ask something else and fix that as well. This is how you build the fastest feedback loop. Caring for customers is the number one task of any founder seeing to accelerate learning.