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independence7 unconnected · 1 more author in those circles
standing

contested · 8 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

high

evidence

9 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2017-04-03 → 2023-08-08

7 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Do the boring market homework yourself

Work out who the buyers are, how they buy, what the category costs and how big it is, gathering your own numbers rather than compounding someone else's assumptions. The opposing account is that sizing, interviews and models built from comparable businesses all stop predicting anything the moment you try to sell.

Where this splits

Pre-launch research is presented both as the homework that prevents an expensive mistake and as something that stops predicting anything once real selling starts.

8 claims against 1

Andy Bowie · Cory Zue · Greg Kogan · Lenny Rachitsky · Preetam Nath · Tomer London · Wit Sumathavanit

Research the market properly before you commit to building

  1. 01Answer the boring questions about the market before you launch: who the customers are, how they buy, what the market actually looks like and how large it is.
  2. 02Collect your own numbers rather than reusing someone else's, otherwise you are just compounding their assumptions on top of yours.
the objection · 1 claimJustin Jackson

Pre-launch research stops predicting anything once you sell

Treat pre-launch research as unreliable no matter how good it looks: market sizing, customer interviews and cash-flow models built from comparable businesses all stop predicting anything once you actually try to sell.

  1. 03Study the established market before setting go-to-market: where buyers get information, what they search for, what current tools cost, and which tactics competitors are getting results from.
  2. 04Quantify the pain with an industry statistic before you pick which wedge to build, so you know the problem is expensive and recurring.
  3. 05Size a niche by counting how many people are visibly doing a painful manual task at a fixed moment, and build for the version of the job that has a deadline attached.

What it returned

  • The founder lists customer demographics, purchasing habits, the shape of the national vehicle market and total addressable market as the things to understand first, and admits they jumped in before finishing that work.

  • Gusto's founders whiteboarded many small-business problems, then learned that a third of companies get payroll wrong every year and are fined for it, which decided the starting point.

  • Zue watched brides and family assembling place cards by hand two or three days before several weddings, including his own, and noted the last-minute timing meant buyers would pay for fast turnaround or print-at-home

  • These waitlist figures were assembled by asking founders with long waitlists directly, over Twitter, over email and in person.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in positioning

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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