Pre-PMF founders get stuck in a frustrating loop: their outreach hypothesis is wrong because they haven't sold anything, but they can't get conversations to fix the hypothesis because it's wrong. This circular trap prevents progress until the founder breaks the cycle by changing their approach to simply getting meetings, not validating an idea.
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Early-stage founders, especially those who are analytically minded, must resist the comfort of spreadsheets and data. The most crucial activity is direct engagement and selling, even if it feels uncomfortable. No amount of analysis can replace the impact of the founder personally championing the product.
Many founders perceive selling before building a product as an extreme approach. They prefer the comfort of building first, even though it wastes months on irrelevant products. This aversion stems from a fear of interrupting people without a finished product, a mindset that equates building with preparation and early selling with being premature.
Having paying customers doesn't automatically mean you have strong product-market fit. The founder warns against this self-deception, describing their early traction as a "partial vacuum"—good enough to survive, but not to thrive. Being "ruthlessly honest" about this gap is critical for making necessary, company-defining pivots.
Early outreach often fails by pitching an unproven value proposition. Instead, founders should use "Founder Magic"—leveraging their unique background, story, or mission to make themselves so interesting that prospects agree to a meeting out of sheer curiosity. The outreach should be product-agnostic and focus on being compelling as a person.
Founders often quit for the wrong reason: struggling to schedule meetings, which is merely a lack of data. The true signal to pivot or quit is when you've successfully engaged potential customers who have clear demand (pull) and they still explicitly reject your solution after multiple iterations.
Founders often believe their product is flawed when facing rejection. However, if they're only speaking to 1-2 potential customers a week, the core issue isn't product-market fit. The real problem is an insufficient number of conversations to validate or disprove any hypothesis. You haven't earned the right to have a PMF crisis yet.
To truly validate their idea, Moonshot AI's founders deliberately sought negative feedback. This approach of "trying to get the no's" ensures honest market signals, helping them avoid the trap of false positive validation from contacts who are just being polite.
