Build a repeatable discovery engine before writing code

Adam Robinson and his COO Santosh Sharan conducted 300 discovery calls over six months, talking to ten people daily to identify a recurring pain point among B2B sales leaders (The VC Corner). This process revealed that sales teams struggled to identify the specific person behind a website visit, a problem that became the foundation for the product RB2B (The VC Corner). The team launched a rough version that emailed a spreadsheet of visitors, but it gained zero buyers until they pivoted to a Slack-based solution that delivered headshots and LinkedIn URLs.

Neal Bloom suggests a dream bench strategy to accelerate this validation, where founders list specific experts to interview about features they killed in past projects to save months of development (Neal Bloom from Rising Tide Partners). Founders can also match potential users by hand to see who follows through and asks for further help, providing evidence that the problem is pressing enough for customers to spend time or money (Neal Bloom from Rising Tide Partners). PostHog now tags every event with human or agent identifiers to ensure the team only builds solutions for problems that customers actively query through agents (TLDR Founders).

"The best problems to solve are the ones worth solving but hidden in plain sight, and those who stay problem-focused unlock insights their competitors miss." (Barry Winata from Alpha Work)