As a founder, you need to have a strong intuition to help guide your company and product. With limited time and resources, slow decisions are bad decisions, and gathering complete information before making decisions isn’t pragmatic or feasible. Intuition is the skill that helps founders focus on the most fruitful areas despite having limited information. Intuition helps you get moving, cutting through the unnecessary like a razor to help you make decisions. Ultimately this is what will enable you and your team to find product market fit and continue to build the right things for the right people for years to come.
The magical part about intuition is it feels like an innate part of you and will continue to shape the decisions you make going forward. Intuition is a skill, and like any skill, it can improve with training. As we experience and learn, our sense for how things work becomes more accurate. As we gain exposure to and reflect on a topic, our intuitive skills improve in that domain. As we get more comfortable with this knowledge and it settles into our system, our grasp of it becomes instinctual—a form of pattern recognition.
*Imagine you’re leading a group of explorers through unfamiliar territory. To survive, your first task is to find water, pronto. You don’t have time or resources to take a topological survey of the area — your party would die of thirst in that time — you need a more efficient discovery process.
You start by using your senses. If you stand perfectly still and listen intently, you may be able to hear running water, even if it’s a far away. Next, use your eyes. Animal tracks, insect swarms, or the flight path of birds at twilight may each lead you to water. If that fails, scout the environment. Water runs downhill, follow valleys, ditches, gullies, etc. Find your way to low ground, you’ll often run into water.
By having a clear intent, paying attention, and following your intuition, you’ll make faster decisions and increase the chances that your party survives.*
Your intuition should be constantly evolving. Training your intuition involves gathering information about your users and product, which are also continuously evolving. Research is a tool to train your intuition. It gives you a process for how to gather this information, make sense of it, and ultimately use that knowledge to make the right decisions efficiently.
Some might think that intuition and research are oppositional - you either trust your gut or you get data to inform a decision. But it is actually through learning and gathering more evidence that you train your intuition. Research, whether informal or formal, is one of the most critical superpowers to develop as a founder — it is the key to building intuition that guides you to product market fit and build a lasting product.
We regularly praise individuals for their “intuition,” thinking that they have a unique insight into the world that they were born with or that couldn’t have been developed elsewhere. Nothing could be further from the truth — humans are pattern recognition machines and what we call intuition is a pattern library that has been developed over someone’s life from the experiences that they’ve had. Intuition is nurture, not nature.
Intuition is not something that necessarily gives us answers, but it does often reduce the time that we spend in deliberating. It helps us more quickly orient and decide things that we’ve already seen, or reduces the time in decision-making given our relatable past experiences. This is also why an over-reliance on intuition or being too quick to act can be a problem — if we’re not seeing the world as it is, but seeing our stale perception of it — we will miss critical information that should shape our decisions.
If intuition is something that we build over time, then the question for founders becomes “how can I intentionally strengthen my intuition in ways that are beneficial?” The answer is to expose yourself to people and experiences that will add to and strengthen your pattern library, and for most founders this is best done through intentional engagement with the people you’re trying to solve problems for and their contexts and environments. We typically refer to this as user research — the gathering and synthesizing of evidence in service of making decisions — though we recognize that word often limits people’s thinking to a 5 person usability study rather than the spectrum of approaches that can be taken.
Early stage startups rarely hire full time researchers, but a company’s research practice starts the moment a founder has an idea. They ask themselves who else might have this problem? How many of these people exist? How have they tried to solve it? What worked or didn’t work about those solutions? Whether they’re aware of it or not, they’ve already been doing research. But that research probably felt unstructured, yielding useful evidence in inconsistent ways.
User research is a topic that comes up a lot when you’re talking about startups, but we find that a good portion of the discussion is overly prescriptive about specific methods rather than the underlying reason why doing research is valuable and the high level frameworks to keep in mind.
While many people say that research is about learning, we believe that good research is about empowering good decision-making. Learning on its own can be valuable, but more often than not “learning” as a goal is a distraction and too low of a bar. The world of things that you could learn and find interesting — even ones related to your company — is far larger than the world of things you can learn which will help you take action as an organization.
This decision-first approach helps you make better decisions in your organization and it also adds to your pattern library and intuition by focusing your attention on the things that will matter most to your business. It’s easy to want to pay attention to feedback from everyone who has used your product, but over-indexing on feedback from people who aren’t your target customer or adjacent user is a waste of your time, and this helps prevent that.
Many of you are already doing things like this, but to help you improve the quality of the decisions you’re making and train your intuition, we’re going to go deep on how to develop your research skills and best leverage every customer interaction to gather the evidence you need to make your business decisions.