Dalton Caldwell: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is really empowering, I imagine, for many founders hearing this of just knowing every single founder goes through, okay, I think it's actually over. Following on this real quick, the advice that Gustav shared, which is about talking to customers. I'm just going to keep trying to pull wisdom out of your head. Do you have any advice for just how to effectively talk to customers? We're always hearing, "Talk to customers. Build things they want." Easier said than done. You get a lot of asks. You get one customer asking for a lot of stuff. There's a big company that's like, "Build this thing, we'll pay a million dollars." Just do you have general guidance of just what to pay attention to and what to build versus avoid? Yeah, I think when I talked to aspiring founders about this a lot, they're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I talked to customers. We get it. Cool." And I'm like, "Cool. Well, how many customers do you talk to?" And they're like, "Well." And they get really quiet. And so I think this is one of those things like, hey, you should have a healthy diet and exercise every day or whatever, where people know it and that doesn't mean they do it. And so I think to start with, you have to get out in the world and talk to people in person. And you can't just hide behind your keyboard and call that talking to customers. Right? I think a lot of folks, the inclinations are to build a landing page and buy some Instagram ads and try to get people to sign up for something. And again, maybe that's something, but I think a lot of the reason people do that is they're just shy and they don't want to put themselves out there because it's a little awkward to go talk to people. And you have to set yourself up to go out in the physical world, get people to meet with you, get them to take you seriously, show them a product you're building. And so again, it'd be very tactical here. You can do a self-assessment. In the past month, how many in-person physical meetings have I had with potential customers? Maybe you've done a lot, I don't know, listener, maybe you have, but it's shocking how many companies I talk to, they're like, "Well, we're focused on raising our pre-seed round before we talk to customers." Things like that. And again, I think the core, core thing going on is just social anxiety and looking stupid. And I think you just got to get past that. You just got to start doing it until it doesn't feel bad anymore. Think about how stupid the Airbnb founders must have felt. They were like, "Hey, you should rent out your house and I'm going to come and sleep in your house, and here's an airbag." The whole thing is a little awkward, right? So you got power through the awkwardness of talking to people, and once you start doing it's actually fun. And so once you get used to overcoming this awkwardness, I think people do much better at talking to customers. When someone does this self-evaluation, is there a heuristic that tells you this is enough? What do you look for? Is there a number? How many per week? How many per month?…

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