Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

I have a call every week with two founders who are building something I think is genuinely good.

They understand their problem cold. They've been living in it for years. They've built a big chunk of the solution and it works. Really well. And this week the conversation turned into a version of the same conversation we've had a few times now, which goes something like: we know we need to get this in front of people, and we keep not doing it.

The reason they keep not doing it is that they sell to large software engineering organizations.

You know what that means. Security review. Procurement. A champion who has to go win an internal argument you'll never see. And then, at the end of all that, an implementation that costs somebody on their team real hours to stand up.

So the loop looks like this. Reach out. Wait. Get a call. Wait. Get told it's promising and they'll circle back next quarter. Wait.

Meanwhile you keep building.

Here's the part I don't think gets said enough. While you're waiting for enterprise-level people to complete enterprise-level processes, you are not standing still. You're shipping. Every week you go without feedback is a week where you build purely from your own ideas, and then the week after that you build on top of the week before.

You compound your own guesses.

Six months of that and you have a product that is an extremely faithful implementation of what you thought in January. Which would be fine if you were right in January.

Quick beats perfect here. Now beats perfect. If you have to choose between feedback that's a bit off and feedback that arrives in April, take the one that arrives this week.

My advice to them was to go find smaller companies.

Not as a customer strategy. As a feedback strategy. Look at your portfolio companies, your friends, your friends of friends, the ten person shop where the founder can say yes on a Tuesday and have it running Wednesday morning. Hand it to two or three of them. Charge nothing, or charge something nominal.

I want to flag that this is me contradicting my own standard advice. I normally tell founders to charge early customers, because free removes the pain of non-usage, and a product nobody feels obligated to open teaches you nothing.

The exception is when the customer's real cost isn't your price. For these guys, a hundred bucks a month is a rounding error against the hours it takes somebody to install the thing and get their team on it. The money isn't the ask. The install is the ask. So don't make them do both.

Yes. Some of it will be.

The five person shop doesn't have the SSO requirement or the security review or the org chart problem. So you have to interpret what they tell you through the lens of who they are, which is something you should be doing with every customer anyway.

But here's what I've found. When you're this far in, the feedback you get isn't a missing headline feature. You already sussed those out during customer development. You know the big obvious thing you're solving. Nobody at a ten person company is going to tell you your core thesis is wrong.

What they give you is end user feedback. The button should be here. There's no way to do this thing I need to do twelve times a day. Why do I have to retype this every time.

That's the last twenty percent. It's the stuff that makes it feel lived in, the difference between a prototype that technically does the job and something a person actually wants to open. And it does not show up in a discovery call. It only shows up when somebody who isn't you touches it on a Tuesday afternoon.

I've said before that even the person with the best possible insight into a problem is eighty percent right at best. The other twenty has to come from customers.

I keep proving it on myself.

I'm building a go to market tool. I've spent thirteen years in outbound. I've used every tool in this category. I've built one before. If anybody gets to skip the customer feedback part, it should be me.

Right now I've got about ten people using it, seven of them paying two hundred dollars a month, and I'm on a weekly call with every one of them. Once you count tokens, credits, and hosting, I'm underwater. Add my time and it's not close.

I've made my peace with that, because the profitability of a nascent product is the wrong thing to look at. I'm building a car and I've got a frame. Nobody looks at a frame and says this is a bad car.

What that money actually buys me is the weekly call. That's the trade. I needed two hundred dollars a month of their budget so they'd care enough to actually use it, and in exchange they get me on the phone every week asking what's broken.

A few weeks ago one of them asked if he could save his ideal customer profiles, his target contact profiles, and his offers, instead of retyping the same things into every run. That's it. That's the request.

I had considered it once, for about half a second, and filed it under not a big deal. Then a third person brought it up and I finally built it. It took about an hour.

That's my twenty percent. Not a strategic miss. A person who was tired of typing.

Once you've got two or three of these people, the question you keep asking is the same one, over and over.

What do I need to build to justify a price tag of X?

Then you go build it. And when they agree you've earned it, you don't stop. You move up a rung.

What do I need to build to earn three referrals?

That's the whole engine. You're not asking them what they want in the abstract, which people are terrible at answering. You're asking them what stands between your product and a specific commitment, which people are surprisingly good at answering.

And when you're setting it up, be clear about the terms. I'm not going to ask you for money. I am going to ask you for some of your time. Fifteen minutes a week for the next two months. Tell me what broke.

That's a cheap thing to say yes to, and it's the most valuable thing you can buy right now.

Getting your ideas in front of real users and iterating on what they say has never been easier than it is today.

Pulling your head out of Claude Code long enough to go do it has never been harder.

Collin

PS - if you made it this far and need a hand finding another customer or two, I have a beta that might be very helpful. Hit reply for more details.

PPS - if you made it this far and want to see where your AI engineering tokens are being spent on, hit reply and I’ll intro you to the founders I’m working with.

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