It's true what they say, spend more time doing Business Development

When working on a new startup idea, it's easy as a developer to get comfy working through the backlog and getting on with product delivery.

Someone in the team says or even in your own brain your hear:

Oh man this talking to customers/investors all day feels like we're not getting anywhere, screw this let's take 3 weeks out and get on with really delivering our product by coding

I've said it myself in the past. But I've been learning recently that in early stages of product market fit that I should resist this urge.

Why? Because most of that development time you end up building features that you actually didn't need or even worse realize too late that customers don't want what you're building.

What do I do now? I take an idea in it's most basic form, enough to sell it to a real customer. The most minimum I need to sell it, even if it's just a verbal spiel then that's enough.

Take that bare minimum and speak to as many customers as I can find. If the verbal presentation is not enough then knock up some quick wireframes (don't code!) and walk through that with them.

I always remind myself to not speak with my peers or friends, trying hard to find _real_customers. Friends will always be nice and say "hmm yeah I'd like that, use it".

This thinking has been great at stopping a direction quickly before wasting a couple of weeks/months developing out an idea or feature.

Taking this iterative approach makes sure we're only delivering the bare minimum until we get to taking a payment and not spending too much time deliberating on internal opinions on what's right or not.

The project then gets into an early strategy to talk early and to continue talking to the customers keeping us on track.