What should a founder do when customer discovery results oppose their beliefs?

You just marked your 12th interview analysis as “disproof”, and you’re wondering what’s going on. You have a great idea, and you thought the problem it was solving was huge. In fact, your family loved your idea and all of your friends thought it was the coolest thing ever. Regardless, every conversation you have is showing that people just don’t care that much. 

This can be extremely troubling and frustrating for entrepreneurs. Often, the idea we have becomes part of our identity, and finding out that other people don’t seem to care about it as much as we do can be a tough pill to swallow.

If you find yourself in this situation, it’s important to remember that the idea does not define your identity as an entrepreneur. The fact that you’re willing to go out and test your assumptions, and acknowledge that they may have been incorrect, is proof enough that you’re a good entrepreneur. It’s important to avoid looking at disproof of your beliefs as a “ha, you’re wrong”, but rather look at it as a “You just saved yourself years of time and money on an idea that wouldn’t have worked”. 

Once you recognize this, the next step is to look at what you learned and make a choice about what you want to do moving forward.

Often, entrepreneurs will detect Ughs during interviews that they didn’t realize existed before, but may be solvable. Perhaps your next step is pursuing a problem that you have proven exists. Continue to do validation, learn more about the problems you’ve detected, and see if there’s a fit. 

For others, you may find it more useful to apply your skills and learning to other areas until a new problem more in line with your passions, that has demand, comes up. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, “hey, this didn’t work”, and finding other ways to stay engaged in what you’re passionate about. For instance, if you thought there was a major problem with the way food is delivered, but had trouble proving this, perhaps a next step would be working in food delivery for a while to better understand the pain points real delivery drivers have.

There’s tons of ways to hammer a nail, don’t feel like you can’t continue pursuing something you’re passionate about because your first assumptions weren’t correct.