You're Building the Wrong Thing. Here's How to Know Before You Write Any Code.

There's a particular kind of pain that every developer who's ever built a side project or a startup product knows intimately. You spend a weekend or six months building something. You think carefully about the architecture. You make sensible technology choices. You write reasonably clean code. Then you ship it. And nothing happens. Not negative feedback. Not users complaining about bugs or asking for features. Just silence. A few signups who never come back. A Product Hunt post that gets seven upvotes, six of which are from your friends. This is the most common failure mode in software, and it almost never has anything to do with code quality. It's a research problem. Specifically, it's the absence of research before a single line was written. This article is about how to do that research practically, without a UX team, without a budget, and without it taking six weeks before you can start building. The Assumption Problem When developers build products without talking to users first, t