Nobody is going to use your product at first
Two startups, one acquisition, and the case for starting before you feel ready.
Every founder is sitting on something that is almost ready. The idea that needs one more signal before you commit, the build that needs one more feature, the launch that is waiting for the interface to stop embarrassing you. Underneath all of it is one question: when do you put it in front of people?
Devin Owen has answered that question the same way his whole career: sooner than feels safe.
He majored in psychology and neuroscience, spent two years in a research lab, then quit with nothing lined up to teach himself to code. It took a year of grinding to land his first engineering role at SurveyMonkey, a side project there grew into his first startup, and after a funding round, a COVID rebuild, and an acquisition, he is now building Greenflash, which shows AI and product teams how users actually interact with their AI agents and helps fix what is breaking.
Ask him what moves a company forward and every answer points the same direction: start before you feel ready, get it in front of real people, and be ruthless about what they tell you.
Here are the five ways he answers that, from our conversation
1. Stop waiting for the lightbulb.
Ask Devin about the moment his first startup idea arrived and he refuses to give you the movie scene. “It’s not like there was one crisp moment where I was like, this is the idea that’s going to work. It really was just wanting to build and to try things.” He watches the opposite pattern hold founders back: people “who spend most of their time waiting for that light bulb moment,” telling themselves they cannot start without the right idea. His math on that perfect sign ever arriving: “it happens once in like a thousand startups.” What separates the people who get there is plain. “The only thing that connects the people who actually do it are just that they did something and it evolved.” His own something was a side project helping friends with resumes. It became his first company, a funding round, and an acquisition.
To Coach yourself: What idea are you holding until it feels certain? What would doing something look like at the smallest scale, a conversation, a landing page, a weekend build? What will you have tried by the end of this month?
2. Talk first, then build fast.
His first startup opened with the classic builder’s mistake. “I was like, okay, now I have time to just close myself in a room and think about nothing but building and coding. So I did that for a few months,” and “at least 50 percent of what I built in those three months ended up just getting completely scrapped or changed anyway.” The second company flipped the order: “I refuse to write a single line of code until I have at least a decent understanding that there’s room in the market” and “a real desire.” His map of customer conversations is worth pinning up. The best one happens with “zero assumptions made, zero product built,” because nobody in the room has an agenda yet, and the second best is “when you give something to somebody that they can actually use.” Even then, contact stings: “you find the assumptions you made were totally wrong.” That is the point of talking first. It lets you be wrong cheaply.
To Coach yourself: When did you last hear a customer describe the problem in their own words, with no pitch to them? Who are the three people you could have that zero-agenda conversation with? Book them before you build the next thing.
3. Ship it ugly. Nobody is watching yet.
The fear of launching something unpolished runs into Devin’s honest math: “Nobody’s really going to use your product at first.” The nightmare of strangers mocking your rough edges assumes an audience that does not exist yet. “The disappointment often is not that somebody uses your product and goes, that login flow was garbage. The disappointment is nobody uses your product at all.” The handful who do show up early “are on your side. They want to help,” and polish is wasted on them: “If it was 10 percent prettier, they would not be any more impressed with you as a person.” Those early users carry a compounding gift, because they “often convert to your first customers because they’re now bought in and you’ve built something around their needs.”
To Coach yourself: What are you still polishing that nobody has seen? Name two people who would spend half an hour with it this week. What is actually at risk if they see it rough, and what do you lose every week they don’t?
From Devin: “If you can just get yourself to release it sooner, that means those people who you work with sooner are going to become your customers even sooner.” Every week of polish is a week of that compounding you gave away.
4. Be ruthless: one lane, one ICP.
His first company ran several business lines at once, justified as a marketplace, but here’s what he learned: “as a startup, that was just too much.” The advice he borrowed from writing is kill your darlings, and the hard part is that darlings pay, a customer here, a little revenue there. His test cuts through the maybe: “It’s never going to be a thing if it didn’t work and you’re not fully committed to it anyway. It’s not going to suddenly start working if it’s just sitting there.” Round two, he operates differently: “now I do think I’m significantly more ruthless,” and the discipline is to “really pick one lane, one ICP and go really hard at that thing.” He also flags the new trap. AI has made building so cheap that “if you’re not ruthless, you just add so much more bloat because you can build anything. You build everything,” while the same tools are “really good at validating every idea you’ve ever had.” The model will agree with you. The market is under no such obligation.
To Coach yourself: List everything your company is running right now. Which one has genuine traction, and which are you keeping because you already paid for them? If you fully trusted the traction, what would you stop this month, and what would stopping it free up?
5. Your opinion is your distribution.
Devin is blunt about where startups live or die now: distribution “is often the moat that is going to keep you afloat.” His way through the noise costs nothing and takes nerve: “just having a clear opinion,” one that is “super clear and super concise,” is “the thing that can possibly break through the noise.” At Greenflash, that meant picking a fight with the category leaders kept confusing them with, guided by a line that stuck with him: “category disruptors pick fights with category leaders.” Telling prospects the standard tools would waste their budget has cost him deals, and he keeps the trade, because “even if you’re wrong, people will listen to you... they’ll at least take a meeting to hear your side because they think you have something to say. Whereas if you have nothing to say, there’s no reason for them even to get on a call in the first place.”
To Coach yourself: What do you believe about your space that your competitors would not put in writing? Shape it into one sentence a buyer could repeat. Where will you say it this week, and will you commit to repeating it for a few weeks before judging it?
From Devin: “I’m going to follow somebody who has an opinion.” Your buyers are overwhelmed, so a clear point of view is a service to them before it is marketing for you.
Resources Devin mentioned
The Mom Test, the first book he hands every founder, first-time or third-time. The premise in his words: learn to run user interviews “such that even your own mother would tell you that your idea was bad if it was actually bad.” He credits it with compressing years of market learning into about ten good interviews.
Devin’s LinkedIn, and Greenflash, the company whose lessons run through this whole issue.
Leaving you with this question: what is the thing you are waiting to feel ready on, and what would putting it in front of one real person this week teach you? Share it with me.
If anything in this article resonated with you, share it with one more person that could also use these insights.
Work with me
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC), I have worked with founders and executives, and am the writer behind The Inner Game, the weekly newsletter of Little Pursuits.
My goal is to support founders, executives, and individuals doing one of the hardest things we can do: build and scale something from the ground up.
1:1 executive coaching: Book a 30-minute discovery call.
Founder Circle: Group coaching for early stage founders where you will receive peer support and accountability. Apply for the Circle.
Not ready for this yet? Subscribe to our newsletter to continue to learn from founders, leaders, investors, and experts!
Watch the full episode here:
Read next