I'd Take One Fifth The Money

I was building an early customer validation system.

Not thinking about building one. Actually building it.

The idea was sensible: lightly market to potential customers, find the ones who are a fit for the product, learn from them, build with them, and get the feedback loops rooted before trying to scale.

Get the core fundamental right before pouring fuel on it.

Then, while building it, a less sensible thought arrived.

I do not really care that much about this kind of customer.

Which is not a very LinkedIn sentence.

But it felt true.

Not in a cruel way. Not in a “customers are annoying” way. More like: for me to get in their brains is quite hard. Their problems may be real. Their money may be real. Their market may be real. But their mind is not somewhere I naturally want to live.

And if the whole business depends on entering the customer’s mind again and again, that seems like a problem.

A lot of business advice says: solve the customer’s problem.

And yes. Obviously.

But maybe there is a step before that:

Choose a customer whose problems you can actually care about.

Or maybe even stranger:

Start with the flavour of the founding team.

What do we like making?

What do we keep thinking about when nobody is rewarding us?

What sort of product feels like an expression of our inner world?

What would we still want to improve after the first sensible version already works?

That sounds artist-brained.

And it is.

But then the businessman gets to enter.

Once we know our flavour, we can look outward and ask: who would resonate with this?

Not vaguely. Properly.

Audience size.

Pain.

Purchasing power.

Targetability.

Urgency.

Existing behaviour.

How easy they are to reach.

Whether their world gives us energy or slowly makes us go grey.

The artist does not get to ignore the market.

The businessman does not get to murder the artist.

That feels like the middle path I am interested in.

Most advice seems to bend toward “do whatever the market wants.” Find the painful problem. Serve the buyer. Become useful. Make money.

There is merit in that.

But there is also a cost if you bend so much that the thing you are building no longer has any of you in it.

The artist is not just being precious. The artist is the part that expresses the inner world. It is the taste. The strange preferences. The unreasonable energy. The part that can play the same game for years because the game itself is alive.

And the businessman is not the enemy. The businessman stops the whole thing becoming a private art project that nobody asked for.

I think I want both at the table.

A fun artistic game to play which still leads to profit.

Maybe that is less optimal on paper. Maybe there is some horrible spreadsheet where the “just do what the market wants” version makes five times more money.

But would I be happier making less money, still good money, on a project I actually enjoy showing up to?

Even if it made one fifth the money?

If I felt five times more alive creating it?

I think that is a bet I would take every time.