Eat your soup
Either you are building a new business or growing an existing one, there is one thing you should be obsessed with: your users. Users are your North Star along your journey.
It is so easy to get distracted from what is best for your users: you start building the product and quickly stop putting you users in the product loop, you stop calling your user to understand what were they doing when the bug happened and prefer to try to solve the bug facing your screen from your comfy chair, or worst, you stop taking feedback and don’t realize you are solving a problem your user don’t care much
Talking to your user is uncomfortable. But you should at least talk to 6+ users per week and dedicate a lot of time to understand how they interact with your product, who they are, what’s in their mind, etc… preferably in person, if not on the phone.
Some founders get lucky and get traction starting a new product or a new feature with no user insight. But ultimately reality will catch up to them. If you look to successful businesses, they all are passionate about their users. There are no exception. And there is no other way.
Yet, most of us don’t spend enough energy, time and resources to try to understand users. We need to put yourselves in their shoes. The best of it is that payback is quick and the return is great. Let’s say you have stopped being obsessed with users those past 2 months and you decide to talk to 3 users this week. You can be sure those 3 chats will get you invaluable insight, correct your course and fuel your business strategy.
Remember, the human brain is predisposed to let you evolve in your comfort zone and talking to your users is everything except comfortable. Most of the time it will hurt, but you need to put your ego on the side and face the truth. As a business, nothing should feel better than facing reality especially when reality hurts. You need to be on a continuous quest for the truth: you better learn today that your new feature sucks rather than in 3 months.
Being obsessed with your users doesn’t mean being extreme. I’m not talking about spending thousands of dollars and entire weeks dedicated to your users. What I’m saying is to take just 20 min a day to make sure you learn something new about one of your users. And trust me, user insight compounding interest is extremely powerful. More you learn, better you 'll understand what really matters to your user from what doesn’t, you will start connecting the dots and see things you were unable to see before. It will help you reach a certain form of clarity.
So eat your soup: develop a genuine interest in users.
