It's holiday time. During this period of the year you spend time with people that are dear and near to your heart. After having lunch or dinner with your family you all seat around the table or on a couch and your uncle asks you how it's your startup going and what you are working on.
Here comes your startup pitch. You start explaining what you and your buddies are working on, how this idea is so revolutionary that will change the world we know today. You are so excited about your idea that you are jumping on your seat. When you finally tell your whole story 20 minutes have passed. Then you ask your dears, what do they think about your idea.
They all seam to agree that your idea is great and they compliment you. They all use words like good, great, awesome and you feel very positive about yourself.
The same thing happens on startup events, especially here in silicon valley. When you ask other startup founders what they think about your idea they will mostly say positive things. Later the same founders will pitch their idea to you and ask for your opinion. Some ideas are good, but most of them are stupid to tell the least. Because they complemented your baby, you don't want to be mean and that's why you leave out all the negative stuff about their project and try to focus on the positive things.
What can you do with all this positive feedback? You can continue dreaming to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but in the end, this will not make you more successful and will not help you improve your product.
In the early stages of a startup, bad feedback is the best feedback you can get. You should already know how good your startup is and you shouldn't need others to give you their thumbs up every day.
The things you don't know is where your product sucks, where the UI is confusing, where you don't express enough what you expect from the user. Only this type of feedback will help you improve your product, develop further your idea how to help your customers and maybe even to identify your early adopters.
If you don't want to hear negative things about your idea you will not be able to improve and find a product market fit. If you worry that you will not be able to change your product because you made the wrong assumption in its core, then is better to kill the idea early and pivot or change direction entirely rather than to procrastinate and postpone the inevitable.
You definitely don't want to develop a product for 6 months or a year, and only then find out that your idea is bad. The more time you invest into building your product, the more emotionally attached you will be to it.
That's why bad feedback is the best feedback and the only feedback you should be looking for.
So, the next time when pitching your idea, ask people where they see potential problems. Help them start giving you bad feedback, make them feel comfortable, tell them that you are too attached to your idea and that you need a critical eye to help you find and overcome problems you are not able to see by yourself.
This will help you more then you can immagine. Give it a try!
You can start by giving us feedback on our latest project called Dubjoy.
Rok Gregorič (@rokgregoric)