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Confession: I ignored my own advice for the first four companies.…

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Confession: I ignored my own advice for the first four companies. Everyone talks about listening to customers. I talked about it too. I did the calls, ran the demos, sat through the discovery sessions. I was doing the work. But there's a difference between hearing and absorbing. I was hearing. I wasn't absorbing. What I mean is this. You come out of a customer conversation and you've got three pages of notes and six tabs open and someone's already pinging you about something else. The insight that mattered, the thing that was slightly uncomfortable to hear because it pointed somewhere you didn't expect, that one gets buried. Not deliberately. Just by momentum. I did that. More than once. Across multiple companies. By the time I was building company five, I started noticing the pattern. Every pivot that worked came from something a customer had said clearly, weeks or months before we actually acted on it. We'd heard it. We just hadn't moved quickly to take action on it. We'd rationalized, delayed, kept building what we already had a roadmap for. The pivot from B2C to B2B with AgentCraft is the freshest example I have. Customers and prospects told us directly. Not in coded language, not subtly. They told us. And once I stopped defending the original thesis and actually paid attention to the learnings, the direction became obvious fast. I think about the COO I spoke to recently. She runs a healthcare company, about $100 million in revenue. Smart, thoughtful, always in motion. She goes to conferences and events constantly, and she told me she regularly sits in sessions with something genuinely useful to say, a real perspective, the kind of thing her audience on LinkedIn would actually want to read. And by the time she gets back to the hotel she's exhausted and it's gone. Just gone. That hit me because I recognize it. Not the LinkedIn part specifically, but the experience of having something worth capturing and not capturing it. And then the idea is lost and you move on and the moment passes. Your brain is an incredible tool but it is not a reliable storage system at the end of a long conference day. The COO story is partly why we built what we built. But the reason I'm telling it here is because the version of me from company two or three would have heard her situation and filed it as a nice-to-have feature request and kept going. Company six me hears it and treats it as signal that needs to go somewhere immediately. Six companies in, that is the actual lesson. Not the tactical stuff about pivoting or finding product-market fit, though those matter. The real lesson is simpler and harder. Pay attention to what you're being told. Not just note-taking-pay-attention. Actually let it land. Let it change something. Incredible what happens when you do.

Mark HadfieldJun 3, 2026Published to X - Mark HadfieldView original ↗

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