Never, ever, ever, tell them what you’re building

Why so many builders suck at leveraging everyday interactions with users

There’s no simpler way to increase your odds of building something great than improving how you talk to users and customers. 

So why do so many builders suck at it?

Many skills you need to build something are obviously hard — fundraising, vision setting, hiring, etc. And when you fail at those things, it hurts…a lot. You didn’t raise the round. You had to let go of a bad hire. Ouch, ok, time to work on those skills.

Talking to users feels easy in comparison. It’s just a conversation after all, and most of them seem to go well! You talked to a user about your product, they loved it, everything is amazing. You are obeying the mantra of “spend time talking to your users.” This skill is in the bag.

Wrong. 

Talking to users in an effective way is very counterintuitive, even for experienced builders. It is an art. I interviewed Anton Troynikov the founder of rocketship AI company Chroma last week and he said something which is so simple that it is now stuck in my head:

“Never, ever, ever, tell them what you’re building, ever.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made this mistake myself and seen others do it. If you are building something, you probably care about that problem more than 99.999% of people on the planet. You could talk to a rock about that problem and have a great time. And not only that, you are very opinionated about how it should be solved. 

So the hard truth as a founder is that — unless you swim hard as hell upstream — you will constantly bias the answers you get from the people you most need to understand. 

Obviously, this is the reason the entire discipline of user research exists. But I’m not talking about capital U capital R “User Research” calls. Those carefully constructed calls are useful but the people that will join User Research calls are already incredibly biased. They either love you enough to do it or you’re paying them for it.

I’m talking about the dozens or hundreds of small interactions you have with users and prospective users every single day or week. That’s the skill to improve. Can you research people “in the wild” and steer them towards the insight you need without breaking the spell? 

One of the reasons this is so hard, as Anton points out, is that people generally love builders. They want you to succeed. So it’s kind of like trying to blend in as a celebrity — once they notice what you’re building, they will naturally tell you what you want to hear. 

It’s also hard because gathering insights in the wild is never going to be on your own terms. Some people will naturally have more prior context on what you’re building. Sometimes you’re trying to get them to buy something from you, and you have to pitch and probe simultaneously. 

So the most important thing to do is to simply acknowledge this is one of the most important skills you can build. Pay close attention to the interactions with users you have, plan for them before and analyze them after, and try to spend time with people who are great at this.

Treat the skill of talking to users as one of the most important in your toolkit, and it will be.

And on that note, I would highly encourage you to listen to the full episode I recorded with Anton.

P.S. One of my favorite hacks for doing user research is just finding and listening to a ton of podcasts with people in your target audience. It’s no replacement from getting great at talking to those people yourself, but the nice thing is that you can’t bias those conversations and these days there is basically an infinite supply of podcasts.