There were lots of signals for me:

There were lots of signals for me:

1. I wasn’t energized after most customer conversations. They often didn’t get what I was saying and there was an obvious mismatch of worldviews. One example: I was a technologist, my customers were professional photographers. While my file sharing tech could help them, I didn’t care that much about photography.
2. I invented more ways for not talking to customers directly through email, forums, etc.
3. I thought I knew what customers wanted and preferred sticking my head in the ground building out a new feature and only showing it once it was ready.

I had the good fortune of experiencing the opposite of #1 when I started blogging. That’s when I really realized that falling in love with problem is more important than your solution.

Another way of looking at this is using Kathy Sierra’s perspective on creating badass customers. Our jobs is not creating a better X, but a better users of [X].

I wasn’t passionate about creating better photographers but creating better file sharing solutions.

Now, I am passionate about creating better entrepreneurs and am okay with figuring out the solutions along the way.