This Week at YC

March 1st, 2024

There’s a new episode of Dalton + Michael this week. It’s a great one, primarily about the challenges of balancing (often negative) feedback with your own conviction as a startup founder. You don’t want to pivot at every step, but you also don’t want to spend years building something no one wants.

There’s a gem buried in that episode that I want to pull out. To quote Dalton, as he talks about helping founders who are having a hard time finding their first customers:

“So in your past job, your team evaluated different software to buy, right? So you have actually been on the other side of the customer conversation a lot. Which of the sales tactics you’re trying… would’ve worked on you? How often do you respond to cold emails on LinkedIn? Never? […]

What if you just tried to come up with tactics that would’ve worked on you, and would’ve made you buy your product? They’ll stop and be like ‘Huh. I never thought of that before.’”

——

Does that seem obvious? It should. And yet! It’s wild how common this is across … everything. People start to make a thing and somehow forget to ask: if I was the one using this, or paying for this, what would I want?

I saw it as a news editor all the time. Especially when working with newer writers on their headlines. I’d see big, boring headlines with way too many words (and acronyms. Don’t get me started on acronyms in headlines.) and ask them: would this headline make you want to read this?

“Well, no, but isn’t this how people do it?”

If the end product sucks, that doesn’t matter. Yeah, have some idea of what others do — and then make it the way you’d want it to be.

Build the thing you’d love to use. Design the game you’d want to play. Write the story you’d want to read. If you start by building for yourself, you’re probably building something others will want too.

- Greg

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