The CSO Interviews - the biggest unsolved problems in security today
When John and I decided to start a company, one of the first things we agreed on was to interview potential customers. Before we made any decisions about what we were going to build, we wanted to understand what they needed.
As John says, “It has been my approach to product development since about 2005, when McAfee put me in my first Pragmatic Marketing course. I think in many ways, it's the secret to my success. Even a lot of people who take those classes, or get the overall guidance don't really internalise it, and end up being too internally led.”
It wasn't that we didn't have ideas of our own but if previous startups have taught us anything, it's that it's far better to build something that people already need than to build your brilliant idea and then spend the next few years convincing people that they need it. Our investors understand this, we closed our seed round long before we knew what we were going to build.
Many people quote Henry Ford or Steve Jobs' version of the famous quote “If I had asked them what they wanted they would have said a better horse” as the antithesis of this approach, but if you understand it correctly, both Ford and Jobs understood the customers and the market and then built the solution that they believed solved that need. It was their insight into the need that made them so successful.
