Building Confidence In Yourself and Your Ideas | Dalton & Michael Podcast

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
They will take something, you know, anonymous Aardvark 42 saint as like gospel and base their entire life philosophy around it. Don't do that.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
Don't do that.
All right, welcome to Dalton Plus Michael. And today we're going to talk about how fast is too fast for moving a startup. I'll start with a story. I was talking to a YC company. Could have been this batch, could have been a previous batch.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
Yeah, let's anonymize it. We don't want to...

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
Probably every batch to be honest. A common story.
And a summary of what they told me was, we got into YC with this idea. We called 25 companies, mostly startups, of course, over the last two weeks.
None of them want to buy our product, which doesn't exist.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:49)
It's just an idea.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
And so we decided to pivot. And so can you help us?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:58)
People may not know why we think that's funny. Okay, please explain. This is funny to us, because that was very low effort. Trying to contact 25 people and be like, well, I guess we're done. I guess no one wants it. It is so low effort as to be funny to us.
So carry on with the story.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
What was interesting to me about this was that these two founders had a vision in their head.
And the second that the path and the startup didn't line up with this vision in their head, which was that, well, I think this idea sounds good.
Well, I see fun of this idea. So everyone I talk to must think this idea is good. They got a little freaked out. But then the second thing that I love is that the instinct to talk to startup founders, it was like, I want to vet this with startup people, often because I feel like it's easier to sell them, even though this isn't a problem that startups have. The overarching thing was like, this was not even rigorous thinking. Where these people used to work, if someone they hired said this to them, they would laugh at them. They're doing it themselves. Why do they do this?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:11)
The version of this that I see a lot is people, the way they start with their company is to cold email a bunch of people on LinkedIn. They're like, okay, we're doing our startup. We're going full time. Well, so cool. Well, what are you doing? Well, we LinkedIn in mailed, we spammed a thousand people, and we only got three responses. So I guess no one wants this. And that doesn't work, friends. Like that's not sufficient.
This is very superficial validation that people are doing, right?
And so I think people do this because no one told them differently. Actually, here's another one for you on this topic. I think that a lot of people are trained as PMs, and they're trained to do user research.
And being trained to do user research, I remember taking a user research course in college, is you're trained to sort of like interview people rather than sell products to them. And if you can't even interview people, you're not really sure what to do. And so I think my argument is if you've been trained to be a PM or trained to do user interview research, you struggle with getting first customers because the skills that you learn to do this research don't help.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:26)
I also think that if you come from a big company, either in product or engineering, more often than not, you've never solved your own problem.
You're working on other people's problems.
And so I think that your instinct when you start a company is almost a consulting insight. I need to go around, I need to talk to a lot of people, I'd figure out what their problem is, and I have to solve it, which I think is tricky because it resembles what you did in BigCo, but it probably doesn't represent what the founder of your BigCo did to start their BigCo. It's like, who should you copy? Like, yourself, employee 10,000, or what about employee one? What did that person do? So, you know, you talk a little bit about this concept of when people pivot quickly, they're not building the muscle of building conviction. Talk to us about that.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:20)
You know, we have a few different metaphors, I'll mix them. So one of the metaphors is what constitutes a high-quality rep.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:26)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:27)
What constitutes completing a full pivot cycle, and to learn anything, you need to complete it all the way. So again, being like, we built a product, we spammed 10 people on LinkedIn, none of them replied, let's throw it all in the trash.