The Mint Recap: Early-Stage Product with Hooman Radfar of Collective
Shoutout to Hooman Radfar, Co-Founder and CEO of Collective, for coming in to talk to our Mint founders re: how to think about product at the earliest stages of building a company! Here are some of my favorite snippets.
1. Creating products boils down to deeply understanding customers to grasp their problems and deliver suitable solutions.
Just crafting solutions risks false positives. The danger: success without insight.
2. When deciding what to build, immerse yourself in the customer and space.
The more time you spend with the customer, the better. Spend so much time interviewing potential customers that you eventually can foresee their responses.
3. Let customers tell you what they want.
For instance, you can throw up a bunch of different landing pages to track traction and resonance. No need to build a product upfront.
4. Early-stage product requires clear expectations for early customers.
Communicate that you're evolving the product from scratch, possibly resulting in initial limitations, preventing disappointment.
Product maturity varies by a target customer's position on the diffusion curve — e.g., polish matters more for laggards.
5. Prioritize functional, imperfect products to swiftly reach customers.
Don't wait for perfection. Ship, gather feedback, iterate, and enhance until achieving product-market fit. When debating functionality vs. design, constantly ask if the juice is worth the squeeze.
