Startup Advice: Talk to more people…
If there is one piece of advice I can give other founders, it is to simply talk to as many people in your industry as possible to understand different perspectives. Many founders quickly gain conviction in their ideas but forget that they should be loosely held. Ideas evolve over time, and founders must understand that this is part of the process. New insights, customer feedback, and personal experiences lead different types of founders down different paths based on what shapes their view of the world. This is why we must stick to the facts and truth to remove personal bias when building something valuable.
Over the years, I’ve realized there are no shortcuts to building a successful company. It takes time, grit, and delusional optimism to keep going when everything seems to be falling apart. Talking to people and building your network within the industry is key to forming long-term relationships with people who can help your product evolve and uncover new opportunities.
The question I get asked most often is, “Where or how do I start?” While I’ve worked at other startups like Compstak and Playback, none of these experiences taught me how to start my own company. So I did what I thought was most practical — go find someone who might buy my nonexistent software and convince them that I have a solution to their unknown problem. Sounds stupid, right? Yes, that was my first mistake. I went into several conversations talking about a great idea I had, only to realize that no one cared about it at first. Once I shut up about my not-so-great idea and started asking potential customers more questions, I quickly began collecting insights into their struggles at work.
At this point in the story, I’m usually asked, “So where did you find these early customers?” Let’s step back for a second. I used every opportunity to talk to someone even remotely connected to the real estate industry and asked them what they did. From there, I would ask if they knew any real estate agents I could speak with. More often than not, my friends had other friends who were agents, or older people who had bought a house before would connect me with their agent. My real estate professors at Babson College would introduce me to someone they knew, or I would literally go to Eventbrite, search for “real estate events in Boston,” and drive to these meetups. To put it simply, I used a mix of different routes: my frat brothers, the real estate student club, my professors, friends, online forums like Reddit and Facebook groups, cold calling, email outreach, and in-person events that I had no business being at. Over three months, I was able to talk to over 150 potential customers.
Tip: Collect their contact information and take notes after every conversation in an organized Google Doc. This will come in handy later!
After the first 60–80 conversations, you start to see recurring patterns. Take note of things like age, gender, experience, location, struggles, etc. We noticed that our audience was divided into two key segments:
- Young and hungry agents (age: 19–26)trying to sell real estate to working professionals in their late 20s to early 30s.
- Older agents (age: 40-60) with a robust network of wealthy clients.
The similarity between both market segments was that they all struggled with generating new leads. Everyone was looking for more people to sell real estate to. At this point, we decided to start building a product that would help real estate agents generate new leads via social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Tip: Ask your potential customers what they are doing today to solve this problem. Their answers are crucial because they will help you narrow down how you plan to solve the problem for them. More often than not, you will learn about existing software solutions they use, which will help you identify your competitors.
At this stage, you should spend some time researching your industry. Understand what others are innovating and how much they are charging. Identify what competitors have missed and why customers aren’t happy. You can use these insights to start designing V1 of your product — your MVP.
Tip: Your customers won’t tell you what to build, but they can give you great insight into what they don’t like about other software they have used in the past. This is where you can truly be creative. Start by sketching different versions of your software on a piece of paper. You can — and often should — use this to get customer feedback before you start coding. Remember that this process alone took me 3–4 months, and I hadn’t even written a line of code yet.
Tip: Read Product-Led Onboarding if you want to learn how to build an MVP.
Remember when I told you to collect customer information after every conversation? This is where it comes in handy. I sent each person an email saying I built something that might solve their problem and asked to set up a Zoom call to share my progress. Use Google Calendar to hold each other accountable for making the meeting happen. During the meeting, let them do the talking. Ask them what excited them the most. Ask them what they didn’t like. Ask them how often they would use it. Ask them how much they would pay for it — this is the most important question. While you might be disappointed with your first few demos, don’t stop there!
Well done! If you’ve gotten to this point, you’ve completed one successful “feedback loop.” You created a set of hypotheses you wanted to test, spoke to 100 people to see if those hypotheses were correct, took their feedback and designed something new, showed them your idea, and received more feedback to implement. The goal of your startup is to reduce the time it takes to get through one feedback loop. This process is called iteration. The more iterations you can get through in the shortest amount of time, the closer you are to building a successful product that customers actually want to pay for.
From our early iterations, we learned a lot about our market. For example, customers’ willingness to pay was low, the technology challenges were high, the market size was too small, and the industry was saturated with competitors and many failed startups. This led us to pivot.
These insights and learnings led us to build VR/AR technology for commercial interior design firms. We believe this is a much larger market with low saturation and an opportunity to win quickly using AI. I have a ton of other blogs that share what we are working on now, so I’ll spare you all until next time!
I figured that writing this blog would be a good exercise for me to reflect on the early days of DesignAI and consider what we did right and wrong to help other founders build cool shit! Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or email if you’d like to learn more!
Cheers,
Saranga Pagadala, Founder @designAI
