• earning sales validation should before you commit to a roadmap
• how to find your first customers using the case study method
• what a viral waitlist can teach you about product-market fit
• how to distinguish customer feedback from customer demand
• why technical founders need to learn sales earlier than they think
• which early traction signals are worth trusting (and which aren't)

If you want to build a product that sells, you can’t disappear into a garage for several months and emerge with a winner. You’ll have to talk to a lot of people, and that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, some founders confuse customer conversations for customer commitment. They're not the same.

That's one reason I enjoyed my conversation with Shanea Leven, co-founder and CEO of Empromptu.ai. Before starting her second company, Shanea spent more than a decade building products at Google, Cloudflare, and elsewhere. Her perspective on customer discovery is unusually blunt:

Customers will happily tell you they love an idea. If you propose a new feature, they could say it sounds useful. They'll tell you they'd absolutely use a product like yours. Sometimes, they're even telling the truth.

Giving someone good feedback doesn’t cost me anything. Signing a contract does. Pulling out my credit card does. When I’m exchanging my money for value, that’s when you’ll learn what my priorities are.

One thing that came up repeatedly during our conversation is that technical founders often underestimate how difficult it is to uncover those priorities. Many assume the hard part is building the product. Shanea argues the harder part is learning how to sell it.

That line resonated with me because it captures a trap I've seen founders fall into for years. Software is tangible. Product development feels productive. You can point to a new feature, a redesigned interface, or a completed sprint and show evidence of progress.

Distribution is a lot different because talking to customers is uncomfortable and sales conversations are messy. Positioning rarely arrives fully formed. Many founders would rather spend another week refining the product than spend an afternoon discovering whether anybody cares.

Shanea put it even more directly:

That's not a statement you hear often from technical founders, but it's true. Engineering has clear feedback loops. The code works or it doesn't. Sales and marketing operate in a world of incentives, emotions, budgets, procurement processes, and organizational politics. The variables are harder to see and the answers are rarely binary.

The most interesting example from Shanea's company came when a LinkedIn post generated roughly a thousand waitlist signups almost overnight.

Startup mythology tells us this is the moment when founders realize they were right all along. The market has spoken. Product-market fit has arrived.

Instead of treating the waitlist as validation, Shanea treated it as a research opportunity.

What she wanted to understand wasn't whether people liked the idea. She wanted to understand where the product ranked among everything else competing for their attention.

One insight she borrowed from early-stage product development is that every customer has a short wish list. 

I suspect many founders would benefit from sitting with that idea for a while.

A waitlist can be misleading. So are product stats, positive customer conversations or going viral on LinkedIn.

The question isn't whether someone likes what you're building. The question is whether solving that problem is important enough for them to spend money, time, credibility, or attention on it right now.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Shanea what experiment she would recommend to a founder who’s trying to validate their idea over the next 30 days.

If that sounds simple, it is. It's also hard because it requires founders to expose themselves to reality earlier than most would like.

(3:16) What Is Empromptu.ai, and Who Is it For?

(6:25) Sales Is Just as Complicated as Engineering

(8:14) The Case Study Method for Finding Early Customers

(11:56) Why Al Is Rewriting the Product Playbook The Only Real Product Validation Is Money

(13:37)   The Only Real Product Validation Is Money 

(17:10) The S***ty Purple Website That Predicted Impromptu's Viral Launch

(21:38) What 100 Waitlist Calls Taught Shanea About Customer Demand

(26:28) "We evolved the platform."

(34:57) "Ninety-nine percent of VCs are great at one thing."

(36:20) The GTM Problem That Still Keeps Shanea Up at Night 

(39:02) A Process for Selecting Your First Sales/Marketing Hires

(40:59) Why She'd Hire a "Scrappy" Marketer Over a Former Meta Employee "Every Time"

(44:05) The Early Traction Signal She No Longer Trusts

(45:28) A 30-day Experiment Founders Can Run To Validate Their Idea

Become a paid supporter. It directly buys me time to make more deeply-reported, founder-first conversations like this one.