🔀 Enthusiasm isn't validation

In this week's The Pivot: customers are asking “when can I start using this”, with one even saying “if you build this, I’ll be your first customer”—and you think that means you should start building.

Happy New Year, friends 🥳

Every Monday in The Pivot, we share one anti-pattern we’re seeing from founders in the Traction Lab ecosystem, and the quick redirect that makes all the difference—in just 250 words.

Here’s this week’s:

The anti-pattern: over-reading customer enthusiasm.

Founders often celebrate that “41 out of 47” customer interviews said they’d “definitely use this”.

Customers are asking “when can I start using this”, with one even saying “if you build this, I’ll be your first customer”—and you think that means you should start building.

Product validated! … right?

No, that’s just people being polite.

41 out of 47 saying they’d use it is a red flag. Garbage data. Worse than wrong. Worthless.

We’re seeing founders mistake enthusiasm in discovery calls for buying intent, then building products for people who ghost them in pricing conversations.

The fix: make an ask.

Customer interview feedback is hypothesis generation, not validation.

When someone says they’d use it, immediately test that with an ask:

• Can we do a paid pilot?

• Will you sign a letter of intent?

• Can you introduce me to your procurement person?

• Give me access to your current contracts so we can run an analysis?

The distance between “I’d use this” and “here’s my credit card” is massive.

Close that gap with asks before you build anything.

The tool: the “TEAM” framework

Every discovery conversation should end with one of these four asks:

1. Time: commit to a pilot/onboarding/etc;

2. Effort: data access/integration/migration plan;

3. Access: intro to decision maker/testimonial/case study.

4. Money: LOI/deposit/pre-order;

If they won’t give you any of these, they definitely won’t give you money after you build.

Until next week,

—jdm

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