Dalton Caldwell: belief

Transcript context

…And you've also seen enough cases now, you've shared a few of these where all hope was potentially lost, but they kept going and then they turned into a huge success story. And I think most people don't see those examples. I guess is there anything you can share just how often that happens, how often you see that turn around? I would argue that if we define it as the company had a near death experience where it was going poorly and the founders seriously wondered if it was all going to be over, a hundred percent of the time people go through that where the founder's like, "Yeah, I guess we're done. I guess we should pack it in." And at least you feel that way at some point in your startup journey, man, everyone goes through that. And again, there's gradations, people that actually truly got down to very, very hard situations. It's still a high percentage, maybe 50%. I mean, you can ask founders, there's a lot of founders that come this close to it all being over and through sheer will just keep it going. 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?…

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