Stop Building in a Vacuum

Decades ago I spent months building an online live music marketplace nobody asked for. Three-sided. Musicians, venues, and promoters. Later I learned that a triple marketplace is one of the hardest SaaS products to undertake, so what an incredible learning it was to start there.

The idea made sense to me because I was running a music booking agency at the time. I figured anything a traditional booking agency did, we could just put online. Post venue details, handle bookings, take a straight commission. Simple.

So I went about building. Found co-founders, raised some money, hired an agency. Spent many, many months building toward my assumptions. Waterfall-style, though I didn't have a name for it back then. You make a lot of assumptions, spend a lot of time and money building toward them, and then you find out if you were right.

I was not right.

The Pivot That Came Too Late

When I finally started talking to people deeper in the industry, I discovered something I never would have guessed sitting at my desk. The Performing Rights Organizations, the PROs, had a massive pain point I'd completely missed. They sold blanket licenses for music played at venues, but tracking what songs were actually performed? Nearly impossible.

My platform had that data. Every booking, every setlist, every performance. And when I showed it to them, the reaction was unmistakable. They were willing to pay significantly more for that data than I could ever make on booking commissions.

That was the magic moment. The eyebrow raise I talk about in my previous post about the eyebrow metric. But I found it too late.

Now, the original commission-based model was already struggling on its own. This was 2004. Credit cards were barely being used online, PayPal wasn't the phenomenon it is today, and the transaction sizes venues were dealing with were a big ask for that era. So the commission revenue was never going to work. The data brokerage with the PROs could have been the real business, but by the time I discovered it, I'd burned through the budget and the platform was too rigid to pivot quickly. I had to shut it down.

It was devastating. But it taught me the most valuable lesson of my career: front-load the conversations. Listen first. Build second.

The "I Already Know I Should" Gap

Here's the thing. You've probably read The Mom Test. You "know" you should talk to customers. The problem isn't information. It's that doing it alone feels exposed and awkward, so founders procrastinate or do two or three half-hearted interviews and call it validation.

Since launching Pathfinder Foundry over a year ago, I've been working with founders one-on-one, helping them build and test their early assumptions. The pattern I keep seeing is that founders know what to do, they just don't do it consistently because there's no structure or accountability around it. How to build is becoming easier every day. Knowing what to build is the hard part.

The Real Unlock

That's why I'm launching a cohort program starting April 15th. Six weeks where a group of founders come together to actually do the reps.

Each week we'll meet as a group. I'll teach methodologies around customer interviewing, building small falsifiable hypotheses, and reading the signals that matter. Then we'll practice. You'll interview each other. You'll show your product and get real reactions from people who understand what you're building. During the week, you go out into the world to gather insights, and I'll help you catalog and frame them so we can move through multiple product iterations in a matter of weeks.

Why This, Why Now

The tools available right now, vibe coding, AI-assisted prototyping, all of it, make it possible to iterate faster than we ever could before. But speed without direction just means you're burning tokens on the wrong thing faster. This cohort is about getting the direction right.

I'll go deeper on the eyebrow metric. We'll turn customer signals into design briefs. You'll practice the 80/20 rule: 80% listening, 20% presenting, showing prototypes with minimal context and watching what happens.

But this isn't just about curriculum. Zero-to-one is isolating. You're making decisions in a vacuum, second-guessing everything, and your friends and family don't understand why you're stressed about something that doesn't exist yet. This cohort is 8-12 people in the same trench. That peer element is often what founders remember most.

The Goal: Find Your Design Partners

Most founders think the goal of customer discovery is "learning." The real goal is signing someone who will use and give feedback on your product before it's done. That's a design partner. Most founders don't even know that's the target, let alone how to ask for it.

By the end of six weeks, we're aiming for each founder to have design partner agreements in place with real people who are committed to co-creating with you. I'll walk you through exactly how to ask for that and how to structure it.

Don't Build Alone

In the end, this is a very affordable way to figure out the right direction before you waste too much time, energy, or AI tokens building something the market has no interest in.

I went through the painful version of this lesson. You don't have to.

I'll also be hosting lightning talks in the lead-up. Here's a recent one if you want a taste of what we cover.

Have questions? Reach out directly. I'd love to co-build with you through this process.

Know a founder who's building something right now? Forward this their way. The cohort works best with people who are actively in the thick of it.

Marc ✌️