The First Ten Customers Change Everything
Why your earliest users teach you more than any market research ever could.
In the beginning you do not have a market. You have a handful of people willing to take a chance on something unfinished. Those first ten customers are worth more than any survey, because they are voting with their time and their money.
Treat them like partners, not transactions. Talk to them often. Watch where they get stuck, where they get excited, and where they quietly give up. The patterns that emerge from ten real relationships will point you toward the product you should actually build.
Resist the urge to scale before you understand. Growth applied to the wrong product just spreads the problem faster. The slow, unglamorous work of earning ten people who love what you made is what makes everything after it possible.