Keep a beginner mindset
In a recent interview with the excellent
, Marc Benioff emphasizes the need to keep a beginner's mindset.You can listen to the podcast directly, Benioff talks about it around minute 22.
I tried for years to teach this to many engineers and PMs, but Benioff puts it in a simple way: you need to keep a beginner mindset so that you constantly test your ideas and questions your approach. This is critical to do this as you build.
Keeping a beginner mindset pushes you to test your product to check if it resonates with your target audience.
Success never comes overnight and is the results of dozens or hundreds of failed experiments. Experienced founders like Nikita (two good exits and many successes in the consumer product space) understood this very early and recommend investing in a good testing framework. In his interview, Nikita detailed how he failed multiple times and tested his applications to understand users’ behavior.
Failures often come from overconfident founders and so-called experts who think they know what to build. Instead of testing and listening to their audience, they take months to build a product they believe will work but ultimately, has no traction. Such companies end up burning millions of cash and dying slowly as they consume their runway.
Success comes with hard work and luck. Relentless testing increases your luck factor and tells you in what direction you should work.
Keep a beginner mindset. Start everyday by telling yourself that what you thought was true yesterday might be false today. Question your reality, keep testing and listen to customers.