How to build a product your users will love

How to build a product your customers truly want 🚀

As part of last week’s deep dive on Lempire, I found this video from Founder, Guillaume Moubeche, aka G.

It’s super actionable and breaks down how to incorporate user needs and feedback into your product and build something they truly want.

Here’s my summary of the video:

The best founders always talk to users 🎙️

The best way to validate your potential business is to talk to customers. Specifically, to talk to people who fit your ideal customer profile (persona).

When you talk to customers, your job is to find out what is the most important problem they can’t solve.

Identifying common themes in the answer to the above will make building a business a lot easier. You will know you are solving a true problem while also building up potential marketing materials and early adopters.

How to find and approach users 🕵️‍♂️

Split into three categories, based on degree of connection:

1. 📱 Easy to get in touch with: Look at your contact list and email or text people who fit your persona. Then do the same on LinkedIn.

2. 🔗 Warm connection: Don’t know them personally, but know someone who knows them. Make it as easy as possible for the connector to actually connect you - think about pre-writing a message they can just forward. A connection doesn’t have to be a person. It could also be something like the same university.

3. 🎭 Unknown: No connection. But this is where communities become critical (e.g., Reddit or Facebook). Give as much value as possible. Engage. Engage. Engage. Put your face everywhere in the community. And only then make the ask.

When approaching someone, mention the problem you are trying to solve, so you pre-qualify them as actually experiencing this problem.

Ask for only a brief chat, 15 minutes or so. This way they will be more likely to talk to you.

Ask the right questions 💬

Before starting your interviews, make sure you can answer these three things:

1. Who am I talking to?

2. What am I looking for? (do they care about the problem and why)

3. How am I going to interview people? (only do video call or in person)

Going into the interviews you need to be careful about a few key points:

• Do not talk about your product or service (this leads to bias). ⚖️

• Listen. Don’t talk. 🎧

• Always ask open-ended questions. Ask “why” as many times as necessary to identify route cause. This is the true problem to solve. 🙋‍♀️

So here are six questions you want to ask during your interviews (with X being the problem you are solving):

1. Tell me, how do you do X today?

2. What is the hardest thing about X?

3. Why is it hard?

4. How often do you have to do X?

5. Why is it important for your company to do X?

6. What do you do to solve this problem for yourself?

Then ask these follow-up questions to get more details:

• What do you exactly mean by that?

• Can you tell me more about that?

• Why is that important to you?

Record each interview so you can be completely focused on the interview and not worry about missing anything.

And then lastly, go through each interview to identify the common themes and to see how important solving this problem is.

Videos or articles to help your startup go from Zero to One 📽️

• New research shows how LinkedIn represents an unmatched opportunity for marketers, particularly for high-value goods (link).

• Business mentor, Michael Girdley discusses his top 11 pieces of advice that repeatedly come up (link).

• Lolita Taub looks at when to bootstrap and when to raise (from both VCs and Angels) (link).

Founder Opportunities 🛎️

• Raise on Republic: Gumroad raised $5M in 12 hours using Republic! Republic is a better way to raise capital, offering a full-service fundraising journey with a suite of fundraising tools. Investors have included Sequoia, a16z, and Kleiner Perkins. Link to apply.

• Y Combinator (YC) S24: Taking place from Jul-Sept 2024 in San Francisco, the world’s preeminent startup accelerator, YC, is now accepting applications to their Summer 2024 batch. Some of their past investments include Stripe, Twitch, Airbnb, Reddit, and Zapier. The deadline to apply is 22 Apr. Link to apply.

• Techstars Anywhere Remote Accelerator: Since 2017, Techstars’ original remote-first accelerator program has supported companies innovating across any industry. The program runs from Sep-Dec with three in-person meetups in various cities. The deadline to apply is 22 May. Link to apply.

• Ganas Ventures: Ganas Ventures is actively investing $100k into pre-seed and seed community-driven startups in the US and Latin America. Link to apply.

Tools of the week 🔨

• QuikMVP: Turn your ideas into MVPs.

• Mixo: Launch your product in seconds using AI.

• Findatool: There’s a tool for every task. Findatool helps you find it.

• Distillery by FollowFox: Transform your ideas into visually stunning realities.

Cool startup jobs I found this week 🕵️

• FlutterFlow is hiring in their BizOps team

• Fanblast is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Everlaw is hiring a Product Lead 1

• Complete is hiring a Chief of Staff

• Alloy is hiring a Technical Content Marketing Manager