I'd like to challenge the customer discovery aspect.
A few weeks of customer discovery will give you a better picture of a more robust mental model of what needs to be built. Your approach assumes changing software is free and quick. A solo business founder relying on contractors who are building the software may wind up spending obscene amounts of money on implementing subsequent case studies. Changing your data model, even on a new code base, can be really time consuming.
But with notes and learnings from talking to many people, your initial data model and UI/UX can be designed to handle those follow up customers. And generally take the same amount of time as if you were just doing it for your initial customer. Changing blueprints is much easier than changing a house with plumbing and electrical... Just knowing you're likely to need another room means you can leave pipes or wiring ready for that renovation, even though it isn't built initially. Same is true for your data model, you can design it to be much more flexible.
Otherwise, I am very much aligned with you've been putting out there. Thank you!
This! It's terrifying to think about the amount of work it would take to build something new to the point where you could sell it, just to get into the first sales meeting to discover that they want something different. I realize that the answer to this is to do as much as possible with manual solutions, but I've never really been able to figure that out. I'm willing to be proven wrong, though. Maybe my product designs don't contain enough business logic to valuable. Maybe valuable software replaces human services.
I'd like to challenge the customer discovery aspect.
A few weeks of customer discovery will give you a better picture of a more robust mental model of what needs to be built. Your approach assumes changing software is free and quick. A solo business founder relying on contractors who are building the software may wind up spending obscene amounts of money on implementing subsequent case studies. Changing your data model, even on a new code base, can be really time consuming.
But with notes and learnings from talking to many people, your initial data model and UI/UX can be designed to handle those follow up customers. And generally take the same amount of time as if you were just doing it for your initial customer. Changing blueprints is much easier than changing a house with plumbing and electrical... Just knowing you're likely to need another room means you can leave pipes or wiring ready for that renovation, even though it isn't built initially. Same is true for your data model, you can design it to be much more flexible.
Otherwise, I am very much aligned with you've been putting out there. Thank you!
This! It's terrifying to think about the amount of work it would take to build something new to the point where you could sell it, just to get into the first sales meeting to discover that they want something different. I realize that the answer to this is to do as much as possible with manual solutions, but I've never really been able to figure that out. I'm willing to be proven wrong, though. Maybe my product designs don't contain enough business logic to valuable. Maybe valuable software replaces human services.