Hey there!

It’s Sparsh here!👋 

In the high-stakes world of venture capital, we see thousands of pitch decks, but very few real businesses. Most founders spend a year building a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. 💡

This article explores the vital shift from "product-first" to "customer-first" thinking, drawing core insights from Adam Robinson (CEO of RB2B), whose original framework on X serves as our foundational roadmap. 📈

Let’s dive in to know more.🚀

💡 The $1 Million Hallucination

The graveyard of Silicon Valley is filled with "perfect" products that nobody wanted. 🚩

When you lock yourself in a room for 18 months to build, you aren't being diligent; you are being arrogant. You are betting that your internal intuition is more accurate than the external market reality, which is a gamble no seasoned investor likes to see. 💸

🧪 Six Questions to Audit Your Survival

➡️ When you finally get that prospect on the line, stop talking about your features. Use this exact diagnostic framework from the original source material to see if you have a business or a hobby:

1. "Do you understand the problem I'm trying to solve?"

2. "Do you have this problem?"

3. "How are you solving it today?"

4. "Would you pay for this solution if I could get it to you tomorrow?"

5. "What else would it need for you to pay for it?"

6. "I'm thinking of charging X per month. Would you pay that?"

The goal here isn't to get a "yes" to be polite; it is to find the friction points that make a customer desperate for your help. 🔍

🏗️ The Risk of Building in Public

You’ve heard the advice: share everything. But as an investor, I see the double-edged sword. While it builds a 1,600-person waitlist for some, it can "ruin" your position if handled poorly. If you pivot every three days in front of your audience, you look unstable, not agile. 📉 

The key is to share the learning, not just the change. If you provide too much "startup noise" without value, you dilute your brand equity before you’ve even earned it. Transparency should serve as a lead magnet, not a diary of your indecision. 🚧

🕵️ The Ethics of Identity

The landscape is becoming increasingly hostile to deanonymization. With GDPR, CCPA, and a general consumer push for privacy, tools that identify website visitors at a "person-level" are under a microscope. 🔬 

🏃 The Lean Manual Advantage

If it takes more than 4-6 weeks to deliver the core value, you are over-engineering. In the early days of RB2B, they sent spreadsheets over email for five months. 🗒️ 

This manual labour isn't "unscalable" waste; it is a front-row seat to your customer's behaviour. It allows you to iterate 10x faster than a competitor who has to rewrite 10,000 lines of code every time a customer changes their mind. 🏃‍♂️