Become your users

Most founders approach user research through interviews and surveys. While not wrong, this is like trying to understand what it's like to ride a bicycle by reading about it. Sure, you'll learn things. But you won't deeply understand it until you actually ride one.

When you actually do your users' jobs, you discover all sorts of things they never mention. Users are bad at articulating their problems. Not because they're incompetent, but because they've normalized their daily inefficiencies. Taking a screenshot of a map and trying to scale it to show a simple charging layout? "Oh that's just part of the job." Or spending an hour to find the utility company or the number of registered EVs in a county.

Users can't tell you about these complexities because they've never thought about them. They're too busy doing their jobs.

Breakthroughs come when you sit in their chair. Suddenly you feel the frustration of having to reformat the same data three different ways for three different stakeholders. You discover that what they called a "quick daily check" actually takes 45 minutes because they have to log into three different systems.

I think the most successful B2B founders often start by doing the job they're trying to improve. The best payment processing software was built by teenagers, the Collision brothers, who were frustrated by how difficult it was to accept payment on the internet. The best e-commerce platform was built by a snowboard enthusiast who couldn't find a good way to sell their gear online. Tobias Lütke wasn't trying to build a multi-billion dollar platform that would power millions of businesses. He just wanted to sell snowboards. They were users first, founders second.

This approach is particularly powerful because it helps you distinguish between what users say they want and what would actually help them. Users might ask for a faster way to do X, when really X shouldn't need to be done at all. You only realize this when you're the one doing X.

The other advantage is that it gives you confidence in your decisions. When you've experienced the problem firsthand, you don't need endless customer interviews to validate your solution. You already know it's needed because you lived it. This also speeds up product development. You already have the answers, so you can skip the guesswork and get straight to building.

This might seem time-consuming and difficult, well it is. That's why not many founders do that. But when you think about it, it's far less time-consuming than building the wrong thing. A couple of weeks doing your users' job can save several months of development time. In any product business, building the right thing is everything.

The best products don't just solve problems, they eliminate them entirely. But to eliminate problems, you first have to deeply understand them. And sometimes the only way to fully understand a problem is to live it.