Why Startups Shouldn’t Be Their Own Customers

Let’s talk about who your best customer is, because it isn’t you.

Of course, I’m not saying that startups shouldn’t use their own product. We absolutely should. But regardless of how familiar we are with the problem or how experienced we are with the market, when we’re the creator of the solution, we tend to turn into a terrible customer. And our behavior bleeds into the product.

Entrepreneurs invent solutions by making a lot of assumptions about the symptoms and the cause of the problem. When we’re actually building the solution, those assumptions can quickly eclipse reality. Features that are invaluable to us might not be ideal for our target customer. Defects that bug us to no end might not be a big deal to everyone else.

And most dangerous of all, while we’re focused on the specifics of how our product addresses the market, our customers live in that market. They’ll be following trends and adapting to changes that we might be late to pick up on.

So while we should definitely be using our own product, we have to constantly be aware of what makes our usage vastly different than our target customer’s usage.

We’re Unscientific

When we think like a customer and act like a customer, we see flaws and opportunities that we wouldn’t…