The rule of twenty conversations

Most founders skip the boring part and go straight to building. The boring part is where the answers are.

Before you build, have twenty real conversations with people in the problem — not friends, not family, not people being polite. Twenty is enough to hear the same pain repeated, and enough to notice when it isn’t.

Ask about the last time they hit the problem, what they did about it, and what it cost them. Don’t pitch. If you find yourself explaining your idea, you’ve stopped learning.

Patterns show up fast. After twenty conversations you either can’t stop hearing the same sentence — or you’ve just discovered, for almost nothing, that the problem you imagined isn’t the one people have.