Pre-revenue, ten interviews a week, and strangely fine with it

Everyone else in my cohort intake seemed to have something live already — an MVP, a waitlist, early revenue. I had a Notion doc and a hypothesis about marketplace liquidity that, frankly, could have been completely wrong. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to stop treating that as a problem to fix quickly.

The decision to stay pre-revenue on purpose

The pressure to "show something" pushes founders toward building before they've actually confirmed anyone wants the thing. I made the opposite call: ten customer interviews a week, no build, for the first two months of the cohort. It felt slow watching other founders ship features while I was still asking questions. It also meant that when I finally did build something, it was built against real, specific evidence instead of a guess dressed up as conviction.

• •Two months, zero code, purely discovery — uncomfortable, deliberate
• •Every assumption from the original Notion doc got tested before a single feature was built
• •The eventual MVP looked almost nothing like the original plan, and that's exactly what the interviews were for

“Not having a product yet isn't the same as not having progress. I just measured progress in confirmed assumptions instead of shipped features, for a while.”

I'm still pre-revenue as I write this, and still fine with it, because I know precisely which assumptions are confirmed and which aren't — which is a very different, much more useful position than having revenue built on top of assumptions nobody ever actually checked.