Your first customer is not your market

Your first customer is the best thing that can happen to a product.

And the most dangerous.

Because they're real. They have a real problem, real opinions and, crucially, a real voice. Nobody else is talking to you yet. So everything they say sounds like the market speaking.

It isn't. It's one person speaking. Loudly, because the room is empty.

How agencies get this wrong

I come from services. In services, the client is always right, or at least always paying. If they want the button on the left, the button goes on the left. That's the job.

That reflex is great for projects. It's poison for products.

When you're building a product with a first client inside, every request feels like a project request. And the agency in you wants to say yes. Of course. Tomorrow. Anything else?

Do that for a few months and you won't have a product. You'll have a very long custom project with a subscription attached.

Build everything your first customer asks for and you'll end up with a product for exactly one customer. Which is a project with extra steps.

Listening without copying

The answer isn't to ignore them. That would be worse. A first customer is the only honest feedback you'll get for a while. Everyone else is being polite.

The trick, I think, is to listen to the problem and be suspicious of the solution.

When a first client asks for a feature, they're usually describing their workaround. "Can it export to this spreadsheet?" often means "I don't trust that the numbers are right, so I check them by hand". The feature they asked for is the spreadsheet. The problem is trust. Fix the trust and the spreadsheet stops mattering.

And the question I try to ask before building anything: would the next one need this too?

If the answer is yes, it belongs in the product. If the answer is "only this one", it might still be worth doing, but as a setting, a favour or a separate job. Not as the shape of the whole thing.

Why this is hard for us in particular

We don't have investors pushing us to grow fast. That's a privilege. It also means there's no outside pressure stopping us from becoming the in-house developers of our first client.

Nobody's going to look at our roadmap and say "this is too specific". We have to say it to ourselves.

So I'm trying to remember something simple. The first customer is a guest who arrived early to the party. You should take good care of them. You should listen to them. But you shouldn't let them choose the music for everyone else who hasn't arrived yet.

Your first customer is the proof that the problem exists.

The market is everyone who has the same problem and hasn't called you yet.

Build for them too. They're the ones who'll pay for the next ten years.

P.S. If you are our first customer for something and you're reading this: we love you. You're still not getting the button on the left.