Lenny Rachitsky points out that finding design partners is standard startup advice. Snyder, who coaches founders on finding product-market fit, says he has yet to see it help. His framework is about finding customers who already have an urgent project on their to-do list.
…down and build it. Now, now with AI, you can kind of get that out of your system in hopefully a couple of weeks instead of months or not. But you do not, you want to face the cold wind of reality as soon as possible. And so don't delay the customer conversations where you can actually find pull.
You're also not a fan of design design partners, which is okay. Say more, because this is typically very standard advice to find design partners.
Yeah. I don't know. Maybe in some contexts, it's helpful. I have yet to see it be helpful. What I've seen in basically every single time I've seen somebody with a design partner is that you recruit a design partner who quote unquote buys into your vision for the product and they give a bunch of feedback and never buy from you. They never buy. And you realize that all of their feedback was just like them playing Steve Jobs. And there's like, I'm going to help this startup versus I have something I'm actually trying to get done. And if you think about it, like the people who actually have something really important they're trying to get done, they don't want to be a design partner. They just want that thing done.
I love that. Okay. So your advice is don't set up a bunch of design partners. We'll go through kind of the process you actually recommend. Okay. So I guess just to think about this, coming up with an idea step, the core moment is some insight based on being hands-on living with the people that you…
Yeah. And you get like the method kind of doesn't matter. It might come to you in an ayahuasca retreat. Like you get, you could get that secret from anywhere, but the things that are most likely to actually work are like getting your hands dirty and learning it from reality versus from theory.
So just to follow that thread, say there's like a pie chart of the, say, 50 companies you've worked with, where their idea came from. What would be like the biggest chunks of the pie chart?