What should you build next - Honest answers to Reddit business questions

Video Transcript

So, in today's video, I am going to answer a question from side projects on Reddit. So, it's uh the subreddit is Side Projects. I'm going to I'm going to be answering a question from a Reddit subreddit called Side Projects. And subreddit reads as follows.

How do you decide what to build when everything feels important? One of the hardest parts of building a startup for me isn't actually building things. It's deciding what to build next. And the Reddit poster goes on to talk about marketing and features and bugs and all sorts of random things.

And there are a lot of answers in in the subreddit and and most of them are fine, but they're also somewhat wrong. like just pick whatever makes the loudest noise in my head that day or imagine having a thousand workers available to you every day almost for free. What would you let them work on? Those are all interesting hypotheticals.

But here is the true straightforward simple answer. If you have customers, they are telling you what to build next. It's not about what you want. It's about what they want and what their clicks, what their action, what their engagement is telling you to build next.

So, it's on you to be self-aware enough to pay attention to your product roadmap to acknowledge that you might not actually be the focus of what comes next. Now, I also do want to make mention here of Steve Jobs and his approach to this. He did not believe the customer was always right. He believed that the customer didn't know what they liked and would only know it when he presented it to them.

That is absolutely one way to go if you're Steve Jobs. But not everybody is Steve Jobs. And if you're not, then the safest, smartest way to build is to balance what your customers are screaming for, what their engagement is telling you to do, what their clicks are telling you to do, and then what your priorities are as the product leader or the CEO or the founder of this business. If there is an overlap, follow that.

If there is no overlap, you should default to your customers if it makes sense. Use your own discretion. You're not a slave to your customers. I don't believe that the customer is always right.

But I do believe that once you have traction and it's rolling, you have to observe the data and follow the data. And your decisions need to be a balance of what your intuition and gut is telling you will give you the growth that you need as well as what the users are telling you in their actions. So to that subreddit, do not be crippled by the choice paralysis in front of you and don't just pick the easiest thing and go there because the easiest first doesn't necessarily give you the most rewards. You have to weigh up the cost benefits.

But take some action, but focus on your users, listen to what they're saying, and then use your discretion to build something. Don't