Founders' Mondays: Strengthening the Signals from Customers

"Building has become super easy now," Matthew starts. "We can basically go to Codex and pull one, and we've brought out a POC in a few days."

"What that means is that we are building software faster than we are figuring out how the business works right now."

Today, the focus is the customer: customers, with daily pressures, existing solutions, and forces that shape how they behave.

"We need to unbox our customers."

The Person, The Problem, and The Context

Matthew started off with a simple 3-part exercise, which you can do at your own time.

1) What are the facts about the person you are solving for?

How many of them are there?

What are they responsible for?

What pressures shaped them?

What do they care about, and who, if anyone, do they answer to?

2) What exactly is the problem space?

"What is frustrating?

What happens if nothing changes?"

Here, Michael talks through what he thought was the pain of co-working customers: Getting like-minded people into one space, creating weekly programmes that engage them, and assembling shared rituals while everyone is still figuring out their own startup.

3) What is the customer's context?

What do customers do instead?

What tools and habits already exist?

Matthew frames these notes as raw signal. Who the customer is, what problem they have, and what contextual influences act on them.

After everyone got to a baseline understanding of who their customers were, Matthew layered on three additional lenses: Urgency, problem obsession, and competition.

Lens 1: Interest Does Not Equal Urgency

Matthew tells a story about a medtech founder pitching AI-first medical diagnostics.

The pitch generated plenty of interest. Doctors love it. But that interest did not convert into pilots or letters of intent. The real pain in that clinic was not the diagnosis itself. It was the patient journey. Arriving, scheduling, waiting, seeing the doctor, getting a prescription, and handling referrals. In the end, the founder did not need to change the product. All he had to do was to anchor it in the workflow where clinicians felt daily pain.

Interest does not equal urgency.

When it comes to addressing the urgency problem, founders need to ask what happens if nothing changes.

How often does the customer hit the pain point?

What does it cost them in time, money, reputation, or sleep?

Can they just ignore or defer it?

A audience from the floor notes that for conversational AI applications, every new user and every chat costs money. Monetisation is existential, but ads create privacy and reputational trade-offs. Another added that his public-space AI interaction product can be urgent daily or never at all. It depends on whether the facility manager is problem-aware and cares about reputation.

Matthew also compares this dynamic to payroll, a problem he was working on previously. Nobody cares about the payroll software until something goes wrong.

We spend months polishing features for a customer who is perfectly happy deferring their decision until next year. If the house is not on fire, they are not buying a hose.

Lens 2: Fall in Love With the Problem, not with the Solution

The medtech founder's pivot was an positioning pivot, not a product pivot. Customers were telling him about tool friction, process friction, and multiple apps on the screen. Another app, even a brilliant one, was just adding noise.

What we need to do early on, is to fall in love with the problem more than the solution.

Here's a useful exercise you can do on your own:

Write the problem down as an elevator pitch, and then rewrite it without mentioning their solution or its benefits at all.

Lens 3: The Stubborn Competitor

Matthew then shifts the conversation to the competitive landscape dynamics.

Matthew shares a story from building a payroll platform. Payroll has massive competitors like BDO, Grant Thornton, Deloitte, Workday, and SAP. But his most stubborn competitor was not another platform.

It was Microsoft Excel.

Existing behaviours and familiar interfaces can kill adoption more effectively than a well-funded direct competitor.

Shaun adds that drop-in replacements are easier to sell when they preserve existing workflows. But if your product breaks how people understand their work, adoption becomes a psychological hurdle.

Farhad suggests that if you want to introduce change, sell to people already in motion. A major airline going through digital transformation is easier than an inert organisation. Contractual agreements matter, but if your product complements an incumbent vendor, bring that vendor to the table so they vouch for you.

Matthew closes the morning by reframing how we look at rivals. Competitors are also good sources of market intelligence. They show what customers already value, what they tolerate, what they avoid, and which existing behaviours will kill intent to adopt.

An interesting aside on B2B Sales

In this conversation, an interesting side conversation developed as a lot of the founders in the room were working in the B2B space.

Someone in the room asked what happens if his customer is not exactly his user. The buyer is the marine company, but the user is the engineer working on the rig.

This is the classic B2B divide. The buyer and the user have different urgency, different problems, and different context. The buyer may care about cost savings, efficiency, and reducing errors. The user cares about whether the new system interferes with their daily operations.

Another founder asks whether selling to the CTO means the buyer and user are basically the same person.

Matthew says they live in the same system, but founders still need to add enough value for the buyer and enough utility for the user. The person spending the money always has veto power.

Farhad steps in with an analogy. Think about selling a product to a child when the parent makes the financial decision. The child wants excitement. The parent wants safety and a reasonable budget. If the school influences the parent, you position your product through that influence mechanism. In B2B, founders have to find the influence mechanisms acting on the decision making executive. Strategy firms, consultants, existing vendors, or integration partners might already shape the buyer's thinking.

He also introduces the SCR framework (Situation, complication, resolution), which he used extensively during his stint in consulting.

1. Start with objective facts the decision maker will not argue with.

2. Then show the complication that arises if nothing changes.

3. Only after that do you offer the solution.

Another founder shares an example from India.

BYJU'S sold education software to parents through FOMO and became huge during the covid pandemic. The company was supposedly selling coding skills. But what the parents were buying (actual value) was actually quiet child time for exhausted parents. The stated value and actual value can differ wildly. In this case, understanding your customer became a competitive edge.

The work after the session is not making the deck prettier. It is going back to the signal. You have to ask yourself whether you are solving a problem that hurts enough to demand a change, or if you are just building another tool for a customer who would rather stick with Excel. The answers are already out there in the market, waiting to be unboxed.

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Founders Mondays feel different from a typical talk. They are closer to a working room where builders test their own customer assumptions out loud with peers facing the exact same friction. The room on Monday included founders building an AI-native project manager for non-technical folks, conversational AI for public spaces, wireless power transfer for underwater maritime robots, signals intelligence for neurodivergent humans, and AI in banking operations.

Missed out last week? Don't worry, these conversations happen every Monday at SQ Collective.

Usually over laptops. Sometimes over pizza.

Join the next one.