Working in early-stage SaaS, we hear more about product visions than usage. The founders at DWP Capital are generally experts in their particular domain, so they know their customers’ pain points well. What is funny to me is how once said founders get their first slug of institutional money, they become more detached from their customers.
Some pithy sayings in VC are probably annoying for founders to hear but always ring true. One of my favorites is – becoming problem-obsessed, not product obsessed. If you become product obsessed, you run the risk of running out of money because of your own founder bias. Founders would generally respond with another pithy saying: “if we always relied on customer feedback, we would be trying to make faster horses.” Accurate but less true in a risk-off capital environment.
One of my favorite sayings is less well-known, but I heard it first from the founder of Fullbay- a vertical SaaS company in Phoenix. He told me – “You need to move from plan A to the plan that works without running out of money.” Did you hear the mic drop?
Founders need to simplify their product to find a wedge and ship it to customers for feedback as quickly as possible. I don’t think any tried and true founder would argue with that. You can point to Figma, which didn’t have a product in the market for five years and sold to Adobe for $20B, but that is a very rare case. You must fail. Failure in this business is synonymous with learning. You need to fail less than your competitors and not run out of money. If you hit the nail on the head with your product right out of the gate, than you are just lucky.
