Talking to customers can feel like getting punched in the face.

Yesterday I watched a great TED talk – "the single biggest reason why startups succeed" by Bill Gross. One of the best lines was his quote from boxer Mike Tyson that forms the title of this post. It made me think about our current process at GoSquared to focus us on building the right things.

You spend days, weeks, maybe even months with an idea, building it into reality, only to put it in front of your customers and realise it's off the mark with what they really need.

The sooner you can turn your idea into something tangible that you can show your customers the better. That doesn't mean building the thing, it doesn't mean building an "MVP", it can be as small as having a conversation face-to-face with just one customer.

Here's how I'm trying to avoid getting punched in the face:

First, by talking to the customers we want. Meticulously noting down their business, where they're at (are they growing? Are they struggling against their competitors? Are they on their way out of business?), what their job is within the company (not just their title but what they actually do all day), and the tools and processes they currently use to get their job done.

Then we take that away and look at how we can help – both with our current features, and with what we might build in the future. This conversation helps focus our current pitch, and inform our future roadmap.

For features we haven't yet built, I try to avoid describing in words what we are working on. I much prefer to show something visual. Not a fully working app or flow, but mockups. With a copy of Sketch and a prototyping tool like Marvel App or Invision, there's no need to waste time on HTML or CSS before getting feedback. You can get your ideas in front of a customer in hours.

The best bit is the feedback – does the customer even bother to respond? Perhaps this isn't a big enough problem for them to care about it. Perhaps they're just busy. Do they hate what you've sent them? Great! You've just saved weeks of building the wrong thing. It's even better if they like it. But will they pay for it? Do you need to build it to find out? It's amazing how motivated the team can feel when working on a feature knowing there's already a queue of customers waiting for it.

Avoid getting punched in the face – don't write a line of code. Don't wait. Talk to customers, mock up your idea. Set a deadline for yourself. Send what you've mocked up to your customers. Get their feedback. Act on their feedback. Rinse and repeat.

As a founder you wear a lot of hats. Sometimes the jobs you have to do are not always evident to the whole team.

Jobs like deciding on a name for a new project, deciding on the next project to focus on, deciding on who to hire next. Often with these jobs, the team don't see anything until they're complete, and the result is often as small as a single sentence, perhaps even just a single word.

Unlike those who are full-time developers, or full-time designers, or sales people, as a founder some of your toughest work – some of the jobs that require the most time and energy from you – can be almost entirely invisible to the rest of the team.

Just as an iceberg is almost entirely invisible to a boat on the surface, your team likely only see the tip of most of the "admin" work you do – the decisions that come from hours, days or weeks of thinking, planning and sketching.

What makes invisible work difficult to communicate is it's often not terribly clear how close to completion it is. Unlike designing a web page, or working on a sale, showing your progress on tasks like deciding on a new direction for the company, or figuring out your next major feature can often be impossible until they're 100% complete.

My one suggestion would be this – write it down. Even if you have nothing to show for your progress, write down your thoughts and feelings at the end of the day based on your findings towards the task at hand. Even better, run those thoughts by a colleague or co-founder.

Some of the hardest work you do as a founder is invisible until it's complete. Finding a way to quantify it and get feedback on it can help make that work more visible. It seems the more visible you make the task the closer it gets to completion.

"Saturday Night Live doesn't go out because it's ready. It goes out because it's 11:30."

I recently listened to a fantastic episode of one of my current favourite podcasts – The Growth Show by Mike Volpe, CMO of Hubspot. The episode that got my creative juices flowing was where Mike chatted with Seth Godin – the God of marketing, and an inspiration of mine for years. In the episode, Mike asked Seth how we manages to produce so much content on a daily basis. Seth suggested that you should set yourself a schedule (e.g. write every day for a month) and see how it goes.

I felt inspired. "Write more. Write more!" I said to myself.

But very quickly I ran into a perhaps silly roadblock – what if I start writing now and realise 3 months down the line that I'm writing in the wrong place? Shouldn't I make sure I'm writing in the right place before I embark on this journey?

Should I really invest all this time writing on a platform that I don't own?

I suppose I had better decide on the right blogging platform.

Medium

I already have a Medium blog (can you call it a blog?) – it currently has two posts. Two posts, but two of my best pieces of writing nonetheless – an illustrated essay on why we redesigned GoSquared, and an extensive piece contemplating why Apple would make a watch.

Medium is probably the most thoughtfully designed destination to write content on the web. It has perhaps the closest thing to a perfect text editor I've ever used – I prefer writing on Medium to using any native text editor I have on my Mac. The care they put in to both the writing and reading experience is astonishing – have you noticed the underlines?

Medium is reassuring to the reader – I know whenever someone tweets a link to a piece with a Medium URL it's going to be easy to read, it's highly likely to be well written and considered, and I know I won't be met with a horrible popup modal asking for my email address the moment the page has loaded.

My biggest issue with Medium, though, is it's not mine. I love reading articles on Medium, but whenever I come to telling friends or colleagues about a piece I read last week I almost always end up explaining it as "a great piece I read on Medium" rather than "a great piece by The Writer Of Said Piece". That's a concern for me – I don't particularly want my own voice and my name to sink into obscurity while I put my time and effort into writing articles that build the name and brand of what is essentially a large magazine that doesn't pay me to do so.

Tumblr

I've had a Tumblr blog for as long as I