Jesse Zhang

How do you tell if that's the case?

You can just go really deep asking them.

And I think people are usually a little bit almost embarrassed or not comfortable going super deep in these questions.

When you talk to a potential customer, they actually don't mind answering questions such as, okay, if we built this for you, exactly how much would you pay for it?

Would your boss need to approve it or your boss's boss?

Who needs to approve it?

How would the entire organization think about ROI?

How would you present ROI to the leadership to protect yourselves and also make you look good?

And I think if you really go deep there, it's almost like you're basically asking like classic sales qualification questions, but in founder form.

And because you're a founder, it's like it just feels a lot less salesy for you to go deeper.

That process is what gives you a lot more signal.

When we first started, we fortunately were able to get in front of a lot of large companies, mostly digital native ones.

And we just asked these questions and we kept digging in.

We had a bunch of different ideas right at the time.

We're not tied to any idea and it's just kind of open exploration.

We're looking at things ranging from like data analysis to like security to presales to ops stuff and

That process was very helpful.

It just shows you that there's a lot more signal to gain than just talking to customers, which is the general advice or building something that customers want, building something that people want.

Like, yes, that is true, but it's very hard to just know that.

Yeah, like they'll just tell you what they want, but then it turns out that that's not useful.