Why Your Early Stage Startup Needs to Talk to Customers—Before It’s Too Late

​​I remember it was an uncharacteristically brisk August morning as I waited in a coffee shop for the first meeting of my day to arrive, nervously fidgeting with my phone and notepad.

Why was I so nervous? Because I had to tell our Head of Business Development that our early stage startup was going to move in a different direction because we weren't getting the traction we needed—and investors wanted answers.

This also meant we needed to save enough money in order to figure out those next steps and, unfortunately, he wouldn’t be a part of them.

This was the first of many similar conversations I had that day.

What Happened to Our Early Stage Startup?

Why was all of this necessary? Because it took us too long to talk to have real conversations with customers. Don’t make the same mistake we did. As the founder of an early stage startup, it’s important that you get out of your own head, out of the office, and go talk to actual users—in person if possible.

Whenever we talked to customers, the conversations were short, nimble—on the street or the phone—and very surface-level. What we should have done was go an inch wide but a mile deep and had really deep, meaningful conversations with a few customers.

As I've mentioned before, you need to put yourself in a position where you can communicate on a deeper level, especially because some users have actual expertise; some have tried seven different versions of your product, and it’s only in actual conversation that you can learn nuances. (For example, one of the things we learned was that a lot of senders were men that would send e-gift cards instead of cash to their girlfriends back home.)

Seeing as 87% of communication is nonverbal, you’ll ideally want to at least be on a video call with the person or, better yet, take them out for coffee. Put yourself in a situation in which you can really understand where the customer is coming from, what their hesitations are, and why they’re struggling with your product or service.

3 Things to Keep in Mind

1. Accept Rejection

As an early stage startup founder, it’s important to be okay with getting rejected by your users. Nobody wants to hear their baby is ugly. In fact, many times when I put our product out there, I was half-heartedly waiting for them to say something positive. After all, I’d worked so hard for this, raised capital, hired employees—my heart was invested in it, so I didn’t take rejection lightly. That’s why if something negative came up, I would usually dismiss it.

However, if you can put your ego aside and be self aware enough that your current solution isn’t where it needs to be yet, you will quickly learn how to fix it in order to make users love it.

2. Lift Barriers

While it's good to get feedback from many customers, it's better to get it from specific customers that had to overcome barriers and invested some type of capital: financial, social, and/or time into your product or service:

• Financial capital is when someone pays you for our product or service.

• Social capital is when somebody says, “Hey, this product is great. You should go buy it!” on social media or the like.

• Time capital is when someone spends time providing information and/or filling out an application in order to use your product or service.

Think about it this way: If they're not willing to invest anything into it, why should you? If you give away a week for free without any capital investment, a person may not be serious or know you're building a business.

However, if you notice any investment financially, socially, or of time, that’s a good indication that the person is really interested in your product or service and probably willing to provide more information about their user experience.

3. Take a Leap of Faith

We learned that Dominican immigrants were not good adopters of new technology because they simply didn’t trust it; they were skeptical. And it's really hard to change intrinsic customer behavior; you can improve it and maybe even nudge it along, but you can't change it.

If someone doesn’t trust the internet, you’re not going to be the one that makes them trust the internet—that's too big of a hurdle to jump. Investors will be wary if the thesis of your product is based on the fact that you’re going to convince X number of users to go from not using the internet to using the internet; that's a really big leap of faith.

So ask yourself: How big of a leap of faith do your customers need to take for your product thesis to be true? If it's too big of a leap, then you should reassess.