As your startup grows and starts to gain traction suddenly everyone has opinions about your product. You will drown in them. But where do they come from, and which can you safely ignore?<\/p>\n
Growth comes from acquiring customers \u2013 customers who will definitely have opinions about what you should build next. You then add teammates so that you can continue to build your product, and you wouldn’t have chosen to work with them if you didn’t want their opinion too. Maybe you take on advisors or investors, and again, you are choosing them because you want their opinions. Maybe the media start covering your product area and talking about the must-have features, or the future of the space. That creates more noise for you. And even if journalists don’t have an opinion themselves, they’ll send lots of people your way who do. Just ask anyone who’s been on the receiving end of the TechCrunch effect.<\/p>\n
At a very simplistic level, we’re all agreed the customer is king. They are the ones who are going to be using and paying for your product, so their opinions carry unique value. Thankfully getting customer feedback<\/a> is easy today; product feedback\u00a0tools<\/a> like Intercom mean you can get it in a few clicks. Often the challenge is knowing how relevant it is to you.<\/p>\n Here’s the types of feedback you should never listen to.<\/p>\n What people say they want is dependent on their context<\/p>\n It’s human nature to want to improve ourselves and so we like to make aspirational claims that\u00a0we convince ourselves we are going to follow through on. We are prone to this kind of thinking at the start of the year when we are encouraged to make New Year’s resolutions. That’s why the busiest days of the years in gyms are the first and second Monday of January (it’s human nature to try and start afresh at the beginning of each week, not just each year). It’s also why gyms are able to sell seven times as many memberships as they have capacity for. Gym operators cash in on people’s aspirations, hence the hefty annual discounts they offer. As Derek Sivers pointed out, often aspirational statements have an inverse correlation with behavior<\/a>.<\/p>\n This also happens in business. Customers will tell you they want less meetings, but if you build a product around removing the need for meetings you might find that it struggles for adoption. Some people subconsciously value the way meetings give them an excuse to move to a different space or allow them enjoy some social interaction with their team, though they’ll never say it out loud. And for a lot of people it’s not actually about less meetings, it’s about bad<\/em> meetings. Maybe they just need better ones.<\/p>\n A lot of the time what people say they want is dependent on their context and the solutions they can envisage. Advertising guru Rory Sutherland put this best in a famous TED talk<\/a>.<\/p>\n1. Aspirational statements<\/h2>\n