CT
Caroline Tran
Hello Clever · EP 29
Caroline now insists on validating demand before any build — to the point her co-founder's reflex is "justify the demand." It came from shipping products fast that ultimately "no one's buying."
See Caroline Tran's full take
Caroline says the co-founder dynamic enforces this: "if I go to my co founder right now and tell him to do something, he will come back to me be like — justify the demand." She values that pushback: "it's like having someone that can challenge you and actually pushes you back on certain things." The reason is concrete — building without demand means "wasting his engineer's time." Even Clever AI grew this way: they built one product, then "got feedbacks around merchants that wanting us to do more," and "continue to fine tune it" rather than "build everything in one go."
HB
Hung Bui
AIducation · EP 10
Hung's method: build something, get it to customers as fast as possible, and let them tell you if it's good, not good, or missing something — but remember that positive words mean nothing without payment.
See Hung Bui's full take
Hung says "you should build something and then get it as fast as possible to your customers, and then let them give you their feedback" — whether it's good, not good, or they need something more. The critical caveat is that even if they say it's good, "if they don't buy from you, then it's still not good." When his team rebuilt, they operationalized this: as soon as one feature was ready they shipped it to a testing server, had their partners try it immediately, and got feedback before moving on.