In the early days of a startup, everyone is lying.

We lie to each other.
We lie to investors.
We lie to customers.
We lie to ourselves.

The lies we tell can be benign or damaging, but either way, they are lies, and the only way to get around them is to test them against reality. Talking to customers is problematic because it forces you to evaluate your lies. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this hard. Once you develop some basic skills for talking to customers, you’ll start getting the information you need without having to make stuff up or guess at it or rely on other people’s lies.

In the weeks leading up to launch, we had lists of people who we knew from earlier endeavours, they had either visited our website, or we’d sent emails to them. We’d posted on forums and Twitter and thought we were doing everything we could to find out if our idea was any good.
We felt like we knew something was wrong when not one person replied to our emails or tweets. Nobody opened the press release we sent out, and nobody came to the site. It didn’t make sense. We’d spent months writing code and getting ready for launch.

Everything seemed perfect. Why wasn’t anyone visiting the site?

My co-founder and I went into denial – we just pretended it wasn’t happening. We kept telling ourselves: ‘It will be fine once people start using it and they’ll tell all their friends about it and then everyone will want to use it because it is so awesome!’ We were afraid that if we admitted our business was failing, no one would ever believe in us again. We were scared that if we changed direction, no one would ever invest in us again.

Talking to customers is the best way to validate an idea.

It doesn’t matter how many potential customers you talk to, and you will always get an unbiased story.
The problem is that it can be tough to hear what they’re saying because everyone is lying. If you’re an entrepreneur, your mom will lie to you. If you’re a friend of the entrepreneur, their mom will lie to them. If they work for someone else, their boss will lie to them, and everyone around them will lie too. Here’s why:

1. Everyone Wants You To Succeed: The more successful an entrepreneur (or any business owner) is, the more people want that person to succeed.
2. We all want our friends and family members to be happy, which means we tell them what we think they want to hear.
3. We want them to believe in themselves, and we don’t want them to fail! As a result, we’re afraid that it might make it worse if we tell the truth, so we tell little white lies instead.
4. No One Wants To Be Blamed For Your Failure: This goes along with the first point, but it’s even more substantial. If you fail, not only do you suffer.

If you talk to customers, you get good ideas. If you get good pictures, your business becomes more successful. If your business becomes more successful, you get access to better resources and more talented people. If you get access to better help and more talented people, your business becomes more successful. And so on. This is the virtuous cycle of talking to customers. It’s how you get better at what you do. It’s how you build a business that’s worth investing in. It’s the only way to discover if your business idea is good because everyone lies to you about their true motivations, which are shrouded in rationalizations. I’m not saying this to be mean. Everyone rationalizes work because it’s hard work.

Suppose you are struggling with your success story and get inspired by this story. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We are here to help.