Tuesday afternoon, I stared at the launch dashboard
On Tuesday afternoon, I was staring at the dashboard in a shared office in Nanshan, Shenzhen. The new product page had been live for three days. Reservations were plenty, but almost nobody placed an order. I used to rush to tweak the page again or add a discount. After two busy days, inquiries still barely moved. That was when I realized: the launch itself was not the growth. The problem might be why a customer was willing to pay now.
Skip the new product for now; find the demand that already exists
This is not about stopping altogether. It is about moving our energy from “what I want to build” to “what customers are already paying for.” Last week, my friend Lin Yue, who runs corporate training in Hangzhou, sat down with three salespeople. They found that the real bottleneck was not a lack of course content. Nobody internally knew who should receive what participants had learned. So Lin Yue changed the delivery sheet into a checklist with named owners and deadlines. She did not rebuild the course. In the first week, two clients renewed. She has no technical background, but she used an existing spreadsheet to solve one very specific step.
Replicate it today: nearly zero budget, one interview to start
Money: 0 yuan. An existing document and chat tools are enough. Time: 60–90 minutes for one customer interview and the notes. Technical barrier: typing, sending links, and organizing answers—no coding required. First step: open the document where you usually record customer questions, circle the three things customers most recently asked about unprompted, then book a 20-minute conversation with one customer. Do not introduce your product yet. Ask: “Who handles this now, and how much time does it waste each week?” If the customer cannot explain the problem clearly or does not seem to care, hold off on building.
Pick the path that fits your current stage
If I had just started, I would interview three potential customers and look only for the problems they mentioned repeatedly, without rushing to build a complete product. If I already had one or two clients, I would add the interview to delivery, try a small version, and watch whether they were willing to pay. If I were scaling, I would turn the recurring problems into a standard checklist, then decide whether to change the service, hand it to a teammate, or build a tool. It is okay not to try right now. Having customers and people who respond to your questions is already worth pursuing more than a shiny new idea.