Quanta's engineers performed manual bookkeeping, a practice they called "engineers as bookkeepers." This forced immersion into the domain's deep complexities and edge cases, leading to a far more robust and effective automation product than if they had worked from a spec sheet.

Girish Redekar's strategy for his second venture was to find a problem that was valuable but that "nobody wants to touch with a 10-foot pole." This led him to the compliance space, a high-pain, low-glamour area ripe for innovation without the hype and competition of other markets.

While interviews yielded feature ideas, observing inspectors in the field ("ride-alongs") revealed the true bottleneck: hours spent writing reports at home. This insight allowed Spectora to ignore superficial requests and focus on the core workflow efficiency problem, which became their key marketing pillar.

Fundrise decides which software companies to back by first becoming a power user of their products (e.g., Ramp, Intercom). This firsthand experience provides deeper conviction and a more accurate assessment of product quality than any external analysis could achieve.

Before their product was ready, Quanta partnered with an outsourced accounting firm to service its first design partners. This allowed them to immediately start selling, charging customers, and learning the operational complexities of the service, de-risking the business while building their own technology.

Before writing code, manually perform the customer's workflow as a service. This unsexy approach ensures you deeply understand the process, enabling you to build a superior automated solution later. It's about fulfilling the task first, then building the software.

Before investing in a full SaaS platform, manually create the end result (e.g., reports in Excel/PowerPoint) and attempt to sell it directly. This low-cost, concierge-style experiment quickly validates if customers have a real willingness to pay.

Before launching, the Drata team committed to being their own first customer. They used their product to achieve SOC 2 compliance, ensuring it worked and embodying their core value of proving, not just telling.

Instead of starting with a scalable platform, Decagon built bespoke, perfect solutions for its first few enterprise customers. This validated their ability to solve the core problem deeply. Only after proving this value did they abstract the common patterns into a platform.