A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of talking to your users. Product leaders and entrepreneurs write about it with good reason: If you don't talk to your users, you don't know how to solve their problems.

Founders have two starting points:

They want to build a product for themselves
They want to develop a product for other people based on an idea they have

Building for Yourself

If you are building a product for yourself, things are a lot easier. When I was building Wallaby, I was my key user. I loved to optimize rewards points and understand personal finance. As a result, I had a lot of personal experience and intuition about product needs and what I thought would matter.

That is far from saying that I never needed to interview users. We did a lot of this. When people wrote back to us with support tickets, we would engage with them. We surveyed them (and incentivized them with survey giveaways). I took local users to coffee to talk to them.

I knew how I used Wallaby and what I wanted to do with my cards, but I certainly didn't know how these other folks used their cards or what they wanted to do.

Interviewing users was a never-ending project for us. It was fun; I loved to learn what people liked and didn't like about my product, the industry, and the cards we were helping people manage.

Building for Others

Building for others is very difficult.

When I started in payments at Green Dot in 2006, no one on the business team was a core Green Dot user. Our users were primarily lower-income, with limited access to traditional banking. As far as I know, everyone at Green Dot in product, technology, and marketing had a traditional bank account and access to various financial tools.

We had to develop empathy for our users and understand them. At the larger scale of that later-stage company (Series B at the time I joined, with more than 1 million cards issued), we had a lot of resources to learn from:

User surveys
Data at scale
Focus groups
In-person research

I spent days and days at our retail partners. Sometimes, with the help of a research firm, we would set up a table outside a CVS or something and talk to people as they walked in, asking them about our packaging, products, and more. We conducted focus groups and learned how people used our cards. There were a lot of variations, and our challenge was to build the most universal product possible.

When I started Vertical Finance, my concept was to build a series of industry-specific rewards cards around people's hobbies. As the joke goes, my hobby was the card itself. We chose to focus on wine initially. My knowledge about wine was basically, "It's good; I drink it sometimes."

Over the next few years, we immersed ourselves in the industry. We went to wine country. I cold-emailed and called thousands of wineries. At one point, I spent most of my days talking to winery managers and owners to better understand their needs on the partnership side.

I dug into forums on the consumer side, went to wine-tasting events, and more. I do not like online forums, but I hung out there and got flamed occasionally. I tried to make friends with the forum owners. I met other entrepreneurs in the space to get their perspective.

I didn't mean to become a wine collector, but here I am. I put so much time and effort into learning about wine that the outcome was probably inevitable.

The card didn't work out, and we didn't scale it successfully, but we did build a good product for early users. Our usage metrics were fantastic, and people were happy to have the card (and disappointed when we closed the company).

Go Out and Talk to People!

This is a reminder that there is absolutely no substitute for a founder speaking to their users. You must get out there. If you don't want to do this, I am not sure you belong in the founder role.

If you are running a B2B2C business like I did at Vertical, you must double down on these efforts and get to know your users and business partners. If you are starting a business in a space you don't have a personal passion for, be careful. It will be a long slog.