[latchkey]

> after talking to 100s of marketers, we realised that modern B2C marketers needed to leverage billions of customer data points from the data warehouse to run personalised marketing campaigns

I like this. You learned one of the most important lessons quickly. Get customers first and then build what they need.

Update: I just watched your demo, this is really fantastic work. A couple suggestions: 1) your demo is a tad bit fast and showing a lot of content, so it makes me have to stop the video and rewind. you obviously know the product too well. 2) for dropdowns with only one item (there are a few of them in your demo), don't make people click on it, just select the item, by default.

[aruntdharan]

Thanks! Yes, for sure - pivoting at the right time is important.

[latchkey]

No, it isn't really a pivot. Pivot is a dumb startup term for when you haven't figured out your customers yet.

What I'm referring to is the realization that you should build only what customers are asking for, not what you think they need.

When you do that, you don't need to convince anyone to use your product, since you've built what they are asking for already.

It is a much better way to do things that will always lead to success if you can execute on it.

[ernestoo]

Customers want smaller CDs, not iPods. So I think this statement is true if you are improving on an existing idea (such as castled). But if you’ve got a transformative idea, talking to customers probably doesn’t help as much

[latchkey]

There is only one Steve Jobs. The rest of us are better off talking to customers first. That thinking (transformative idea... which generally amounts to nothing more than 'X of Y'), is why most startups fail.

[ernestoo]

True, from a numbers perspective most startups are a Y (in an X of/for Y) but every once in a while someone becomes an X (Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox) and that’s what’s exciting about reading a “Show HN” for me.