Every founder claims product-market fit. But it rarely starts with the product.
It starts with being unusually obsessed with the customer. Ironically, this is usually buried on slide 9, right after the TAM.
Real customer obsession tends to produce slightly unhinged behavior. Here are 6 signs you have it:
- You lurk in LINE OpenChat and FB groups as part of your doomscrolling. vein, a marketplace for doctor shifts, started by watching doctors manually swapping shifts on OpenChats.
- Your entire social circle is an unpaid user-research agency. Traction didn’t replace customer research. It gave Paypers’ founder more reasons to do it.
- You still do the frontline job even though you are now technically “too senior” for it. Eatwellconcept’s dietitian co-founders still advise customers.
- You’ve done something for customers that your finance team still brings up in meetings. DoorDash refunded every affected order with three weeks of runway left.
- You watch what they do instead of believing what they say. Segment rebuilt around a 50-line script developers actually used.
- You have a favorite duct-taped workaround. If your customers run their business on a Google Sheet or “just LINE me”, they’ve already written your product spec.
So, how many do you have? If you haven’t hijacked a casual weekend dinner to interrogate someone about their workflow, are you even building a startup?
