“Is There a Pony in There?” Five Steps to Diligence Your B2B Startup Idea

Step 5: Use the Data. Update willing customers regularly on your evolving thinking. Integrate feedback. A/B test your messaging. Share your roadmap. Rinse and repeat. In the end, you want to determine your initial go-to-market criteria.

Step1: Get Access to Potential Customers. Getting access to potential customers is easy with the right go-to-market effort if you want early access to your product or service. Start by creating a spreadsheet to keep track of your conversations with a target number of potential customers.

Step4: Plan Your Company Strategy. You must understand the broader context in which your product will live as a startup founder. Customers usually envision hiring a services firm to come and fix their problems completely as their "ideal solution." As a startup, you should develop a compelling, generalizable solution.

What do they not understand, and what are they skeptical of?How does the customer wish it worked differently than you described?Your desired outcome is to have a limited, clear, and repeatable set of use cases where 1) your product is differentiated, 2) there is customer pull, 3) customers understand how the product as described by you will solve t... See more

Enterprise tech founders, how can you determine whether customers will be interested in your product before building it? There are ways to effectively research this kind of market with B2B customers' CIOs, CISOs, people ops, and sales or marketing leaders.

Step3: Define Your Product Concept, Scope, and Use Cases. Continue to ask open-ended questions:

Step2: Describe the Pain. Create a 1 page datasheet and a 10–15 slide deck that explains the product concept, scope, and use cases. Don't ask to lead yes/no questions, such as "Do you want to use AI in your business?".