Build with customers, not for them

The right way to think about an ROI model is to actually co-create it with your customers from day one, which means agree and validate on the assumptions and the inputs.

The way we think about product development at Stripe, it really is to find the correct set of early users to kind of co-create the product with. So we had shared Slack channels, we'd actually show them product on a very regular basis, get their feedback on it. And only when that original kind of Alpha group was super, super happy with the product did we then think it might be ready to go to a broader audience.

If you have a mechanism to listen to users, get something in their hands quite quickly and then get their feedback on it to run it back through a feedback loop, you're very unlikely to go wrong. It's actually very hard to go wrong if you have that feedback loop working really well.

I've had 50 conversations over the past month, but I learned so much more from even the first conversation when I had a hypothesis and I had a prototype, or a couple prototypes, to show them. It's like night and day.