{"id":13094,"date":"2026-06-01T23:17:55","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T03:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/on-the-importance-of-desperate-customers\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T23:17:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T03:17:55","slug":"on-the-importance-of-desperate-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/on-the-importance-of-desperate-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"On The Importance of Desperate Customers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve been revisiting my Kindle highlights of Pattern Breakers<\/em><\/a>, co-authored by legendary angel investor and friend Mike Maples Jr<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mike was the kind soul who taught me the fundamentals of angel investing<\/a> back in 2007\/2008. He deserves a lot of credit for the wild startup adventures<\/a> that followed. He\u2019s one of my favorite people in Silicon Valley, a co-founding partner at Floodgate<\/a>, and has been on the Forbes<\/em> Midas List eight times in the last decade.<\/p>\n

Of course, Mike\u2019s principles apply to founding or investing in early-stage tech companies, but many of them also apply to evaluating public stocks or creating anything for the wider world.<\/p>\n

One simple distinction from Pattern Breakers<\/em><\/a> worth revisiting often is this: interested<\/em> vs. desperate<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mike writes:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

[Some of these startups] embraced all the tenets of disciplined entrepreneurship. But, still, something\u2019s missing. They aren\u2019t getting the traction they expected. Why? Because customers are interested in what they have built, but they are not desperate for it. Suddenly you realize that your idea isn\u2019t big enough. You followed the best practices for good execution, yet you\u2019ve encountered the pitfall mentioned earlier in this chapter: settling for a limited upside, the dreaded local maximum.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Ultimately, in a start-up, there is a huge cultural difference between finding any number of desperate customers versus zero desperate customers. Many start-ups have a huge theoretical market opportunity but never find a single customer desperate for what they propose to build.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Seeking desperation\u2014a signal for a potentially valuable problem to solve\u2014starts early. One early testing ground is the \u201cimplementation prototype\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Implementation prototype: A focused deliverable that helps you engage potential early believers to identify: What is the most important benefit? Who are the most desperate customers?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To get to the right product and the right business, you have to ask the right questions. Two examples:<\/p>\n

\n

In the case of Chegg, the most important question was \u201cWhat is the limit of someone\u2019s willingness to pay to rent a textbook?\u201d In the case of Okta, it was \u201cWhat is the most urgent management problem early-adopter cloud customers are trying to solve right now?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Don\u2019t ask whether people like<\/em> what you\u2019re planning to make.<\/p>\n

People can love or hate what you\u2019re creating, but you don\u2019t want to land in the mild middle.<\/p>\n

This applies to writing books, building companies, making crochet socks on Etsy, and a million other projects and paths.<\/p>\n

The real name of the game is this: How quickly and clearly can you find your 1,000 True Fans<\/a>? Sometimes, starting small is what allows you to go big.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been revisiting my Kindle highlights of Pattern Breakers, co-authored by legendary angel investor and friend Mike Maples Jr. Mike was the kind soul who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}