You are not the audience

Solo founders often find themselves making products, features, or entire platforms, off the assumption that they know what the audience wants because, "I used to be one of them."

I watched this play out firsthand. When I was a VP at a content company, the CEO and I disagreed on a service offering we were about to launch. I pushed back because we hadn't asked the audience if it was something they even wanted. He was convinced it was exactly what they needed, "based on his experience." I argued until I couldn't argue anymore and we pushed the product out anyway. It failed almost immediately.

Months after I left that company, I caught up with a friend who still worked there. He told me, "we went back to the version you suggested and scaled to about 40 clients." They had started asking questions to the audience it was intended for. The product started to match the audience. They pivoted to actual product-market fit and what do you know? It worked.

This happens in SaaS constantly. A developer reads Atomic Habits, can't find a habit tracker that works the way he wants, so he builds one. This guy had already shipped a game with something like 3 million monthly users. He knew how to build products. But the habit tracker flopped within two years because his personal frustration with existing apps wasn't shared by enough people willing to pay for a new one.

A lawyer who wants to build a SaaS platform for lawyers isn't going to make it if he sits there building without ever asking the actual market what they want or need. Let's take this lawyer example and expand it further. John the lawyer struggles with new-client intake. There's a lot of documentation and other things that need to be collected, and deadlines, and whatnot. So, he thinks "what if there was a tool for this?" He does some googling and doesn't find something that fits the need. He decides, "this is a great product idea, let's build it!" and starts investing money into the project.

Where did John go wrong?

The exact point he went wrong was, "this is a great product" followed by investing money in building it.

He moved forward without one of the core principles of marketing. Product-market fit.

Does the product have a market, and does that market need or want that product? Does it fit the market? That's the question to answer before assuming it's a good product worth investing in.

A group of founders who loved cooking learned this the hard way. They built a meal-kit delivery service based entirely on their own passion for home-cooked meals. Turns out, most of their target market preferred buying from the supermarket or just ordering something ready-made. The product was, by their own admission, a brainchild of personal ambitions. The market didn't share those ambitions.

John decided without any further validation that the product is good because it's something HE wants. But John is not the entire market. John is one in a million. Literally, 1 in about 1.3 million (the number of lawyers in the US per 2025 census).

Let's give John a chance to rewind time and backtrack a bit. He goes back to the idea itself. The next step is validating the product market fit to determine if other lawyers have similar struggles, or similar needs. If by a large portion he validated there is indeed a product market fit, the next step isn't to immediately build it.

After validating the fit, he has to determine the scope of what the product/service will actually DO. What is the EXACT outcome the market wants out of it. This saves him money in development. If he doesn't do this, he wastes time building parts of the product no one asked for or needs.

There are a dozen or so steps he can take after that to build a truly fantastic, workable, feature-rich, MVP that the market will resonate with quickly and rack up enough social proof right out the gate to hammer on more marketing and scale.

One suggestion I have for non-technical people attempting to build technical products (specifically SaaS) is to open a waitlist, then invite specific people to test the platform when it's in a good shape. Take the feedback from the testing and refine the platform until it's ready to open to the public.

This is normal routine for SaaS platforms, and technical founders know this is mandatory. Sadly, the non-technical side ship way too much vibe-coded slop to the public that isn't actually ready for them and it causes more of a PR nightmare than they realized.

And it's not just the non-technical side. I read about a real estate SaaS founder who had both the technical skills and the industry experience. Built his platform in isolation for six weeks straight without talking to a single potential customer. Domain expertise, dev chops, the whole package. Still failed. Knowing the industry doesn't replace asking the industry.

You can out-pace, out-market, out-perform your competitors by doing product-market-fit testing, scoping properly, and alpha/beta testing your platform before broad public release. You can also initiate pricing surveys to users who are testing it to find out the sweet spot they would spend on the platform AFTER they've been using it for a bit.

Now imagine John did all of that. His product then launches live, streamlined, addresses an actual market need, tested with real lawyers, priced perfectly. Will it win? Will the platform succeed? No one can definitely say yes to that, but I know it will do better than if he skipped all of those steps. He'll most certainly fail if he skips them.

Of course there are tons of other factors that determine if a product or service will succeed. If John had all his ducks in a row, he still needs to market it properly, sell it, refine it over time, fix bugs that come up, streamline the technical side as it scales to prevent tech debt from killing it as it grows, and so on.

But you know, John is set up for success. He's got the right idea now, and the right fit. Be like John. John knows he's not the market, he's one in a million.