Stop asking people what their problems are.
Last week I was talking to a founder of a well known productivity SaaS.
They’ve gone from $1m to $16m ARR in 8 months.
I asked him for the biggest product learnings were since starting the company.
Honestly I’m not sure what i was expecting him to say but what i heard was definitely not it.
In a short WhatsApp voice recording he said the simplest tip:
“Stop asking users what their problems are and just watch them work.”
In the age of AI its easy to want to “reinvent” things and pursue sexy agentic solutions to problems.
You’d think this is what would lead to such rapid growth, but the opposite was true for them.
Much of their product approach is workflow based.
Watch someone work.
See where they spend most of their time.
Validate that they don’t in fact actively enjoy that work.
Then automate it end-to-end.
“We’ve done this and users have been grateful to get pay to get that time back.”
So much of what we’re told in accelerators, by investors and peers is to “talk to customers” but this can be deceiving.
You face two issues:
you’re probably not good at asking questions
your prospect is unlikely to answer accurately (or at least in the way that you need)
You can get around this by watching them work.
You don’t need to rely on them to describe what they do and the problems they run into when you do this.
Best of all, you don’t need to ask great questions, you just need to be observant.
In short. Ditch the ego (no sexy solution needed), watch the work, build the tool that does the work.