How to build a winning product — without wasting time & money.

It's known that 74% of startups fail because they scale prematurely.

Through consulting, coaching, mentoring, and ecosystem building, I've interacted with thousands of founders — and this stat is depressingly accurate. It frustrates me, because the problem is so easy to fix.

It mostly evaporates for founders who grok this core realization:

Winning products are co-created with customers.

They're not built secretly and launched big, but built incrementally, alongside customers.

Too many founders put tons of time, effort, and cash into growth before there's evidence it's worth growing. You have to know customers will desire it. Else, it's just gambling.

Here's how to know if you're building something desirable.

First, find a really painful problem that a lot of people experience.

This is the first step, and too many entrepreneurs just skip right over it.

Before concluding your app is brilliant or your service divine, you must first talk to customers and understand their experience. What are their pains? How acutely do they feel it? How many of them are out there?

A solution that doesn't solve something for a large population isn't much of a solution.

Second, design a compelling solution to their problem.

I said design — not develop.

There's no point in building the wrong solution to the right problem. Just as before, you have to go back to the customer with an hypothesis and validate it. Put your value proposition in front of customers by running an experiment — landing page, paid ad, etc.

Prove that it resonates. If it doesn't, keep tweaking and iterating until it does.

Third, get customers to buy your solution — before you build it.

Most founders skip step because they think it's not possible to sell what doesn't exist.

Hogwash. I've literally built a career selling what doesn't exist — and I'm not a salesman! If people won't buy it, I don't want to waste my time building it. And the only way to really know if they'll buy it is to ask them to buy it. You can pre-sell, get letters of intent, run concierge tests, create wizard of oz prototypes, crowdfund, and more.

Sell it, then build it. Because life is too short to waste it building something that no one wants.