We just want to solve this for you

Yesterday Josh Haimson stopped by Character Labs for a great Q&A about working with early design partners and converting them into real customers.

The team at Inductive Bio are incredible at this, which is especially important in the biotech/pharma world, where trust is hard to build and lead times are long.

Josh dropped a ton of gems during the call yesterday, but one phrase stood out:

“We just want to solve this for you.”

This was Josh and Ben’s mantra in the early days. They weren’t precious about product. They weren’t afraid of consulting. They did lots of things that didn’t scale.

It’s so hard for product builders to adopt this obsession with solving customers’ problems.

Usually they got into building products because they... love building products. And to be clear—long-term, you need to be great at building products if you want to succeed.

But in the short-term, it can be a handicap. If you are always thinking “how do I build the product to solve this customer’s problem?” you’ll sometimes miss out on opportunities to just... solve the customer’s problem.

So, here’s my advice (with thanks to Josh!)...

If you’re pre PMF, adopt this as your mantra: “We just want to solve this for you.”

Become obsessed with solving problems for your customers, and I promise that good things will happen.