The apocryphal Henry Ford quote is often used to dismiss customer research. Yet highly innovative companies like Apple invest millions studying customers to find deep-seated problems, not to ask for solutions. The real lesson is to research customer pains to inform visionary products.
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Your happiest, biggest customers are satisfied because your product already works for them. The most valuable insights for innovation and growth come from understanding your non-customers—the people not buying from you. Their unmet needs represent your largest untapped opportunities.
Asking users for solutions yields incremental ideas like "faster horses." Instead, ask them to tell detailed stories about their workflow. This narrative approach uncovers the true context, pain points, and decision journeys that direct questions miss, leading to breakthrough insights about the actual problem to be solved.
Founders misuse the Henry Ford quote to justify ignoring user research. It wrongly equates a customer's underlying problem (demand), which is supply-agnostic, with their desire for a specific solution (supply). True innovation serves existing demand with a better supply, like a car fulfilling the need to travel.
The old product leadership model was a "rat race" of adding features and specs. The new model prioritizes deep user understanding and data to solve the core problem, even if it results in fewer features on the box.
While customer feedback is vital for identifying problems (e.g., 40% of 911 calls are non-urgent), customers rarely envision the best solution (e.g., an AI voice agent). A founder's role is to absorb the problem, then push for the technologically superior solution, even if it initially faces resistance.
Users often develop multi-product workarounds for issues they don't even recognize as solvable problems. Identifying these subconscious behaviors reveals significant innovation opportunities that users themselves cannot articulate.
The traditional SaaS method of asking customers what they want doesn't work for AI because customers can't imagine what's possible with the technology's "jagged" capabilities. Instead, teams must start with a deep, technology-first understanding of the models and then map that back to customer problems.
Directly asking customers for solutions yields generic answers your competitors also hear. The goal is to uncover their underlying problems, which is your job to solve, not theirs to articulate. This approach leads to unique insights and avoids creating 'me-too' products.
Don't jump straight to building an MVP. The founders of unicorn Ada spent a full year working as customer support agents for other companies. This deep, immersive research allowed them to gain unique insights that competitors, who only had a surface-level idea, could never discover.
Even at SpaceX, many engineers first heard from customers during a company all-hands. This feedback revealed the setup process was a huge pain point, leading to a dedicated team creating first-party mounting options. This shows that fundamental user research is critical even for highly technical, 'hard tech' products.
