Read this series in order
Finding and Hearing Your Customer
I treat customer understanding as something that changes shape as a product grows. Early on, you do not yet know who the product is for, and requests are probes. Later, you may be serving more than one audience, whether you admit it or not. Once customers are real, the risk becomes losing contact with them through automation and siloed teams.
Who this is for
Solo founders and small product teams who have real users, several plausible customer groups, and growing temptation to automate support and outreach. It speaks most directly to people told to pick one ICP before they could see one.
Why follow this series
Four essays from my experience with a 90s dating app, a twenty-year courier business, and years of support queues. They cover why prioritization frameworks arrive too early and how building requests as reversible probes reveals who adopts, how one shared backend can serve several focused products now that AI has lowered the cost, why automated support hides the product truth inside tickets, and why every team can hit its metrics while the customer still feels unheard.
Recommended order
Each article carries the argument forward. Start where you need to, but the sequence is deliberate.
-
Prioritize Feature Requests Before You Know Your Customer
Several users are asking you for different features, the advice says protect the roadmap, while you can't yet say who your product is for. In the 90s I buil...
-
You Didn't Choose One Market. You Could Only Afford One.
You keep almost-building a second product for a second audience, and keep deciding you can't afford it. Here's the part of that calculation that quietly chan...
-
Satisfied Customers Have Nothing to Say
For every customer who writes in, twenty had the same problem and said nothing. I've never had AI solve a customer service problem for me. Not one. Not even...
-
Every Metric Is Green. The Customer Is Lost.
Every metric across every team is green, and the customer still feels like nobody's listening. A customer emails support about a billing question. While the...