Research pays massive dividends or reveals you're wasting time

Getting to know your customer always pays off. So it's user interviews and getting to know your market, your customers, and your prospects always pays off... The amount of clarity at momentum that it can create inside of a seed Series A up to Series B company when you first do some proper research push... is remarkable.

Put a number on a whiteboard. You're going to have 10 customer conversations a month, just 10 non-sales conversations. You're just going to talk to 10 people. Or you're going to send one survey. And people are terrible at sending surveys. Surveys are actually great. You just have to be good at sending them.

Research takes a long time and that research can often lead to more questions and can slow everything down. You can end up in analysis paralysis, but it doesn't have to be that way. It can be very straightforward, honestly, in a survey scenario.

User research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty and high leverage for getting to certain.

ICPs refers to Ideal Customer Profiles, a marketing framework for defining target customer segments.

Only one in five companies have buyer personas or ICPs, only one in five. So we talk about this all the time, we retweet the articles, we give the advice, so many of us give the advice. But then we look at our own companies, only one in five have some sort of segmentation ICPs. And then only one out of 10 companies actually do customer research or development on a quarterly basis.