“make something people want” — the very foundational motto of Y-Combinator (and every successful company).

But how do you really do that? Well, I’ve been on that journey trying to figure it all out.
And I’ve learnt a ton of hard lessons this week around:
→ Target market validation
→ Problem-solution fit
→ The right questions to be asking (both yourself and customers)
→ …

Welcome back, this is Week 20 of The Unicorn Founder, and oh my goodness, 20 weeks straight of just trying to figure out how to build a billion dollar company.

Can you believe it?!

I barely can, my word. It’s been quite something and it just feels like it’s getting better as every week passes by.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 🖊️ The Recap: Why we’re slowing down (in one sense), what it means for business, and what it entails for the future of Casper AI.

• 😤 The Current Obstacle: Not knowing.

• 🕺 The Next Week Ahead: Stage 1 testing with customer A, a lot of coding, and preparation for stage 2 build.

🖊️ The Recap

The Hard Questions

I have been asking and, trying my best to answer, a lot of the hard questions this week.
Why are they hard?
We’re afraid of the answer because it causes us to ask follow-up questions that take us deeper down the rabbithole of our minds/lives/situations/circumstances/etc.

And that’s scary because: It represents the unknown.

And I think the greatest thing we fear from it: Realizing that we are perhaps in a sub-optimal position in our lives and that’s it’s all because of our own doing.

But, if you can look past that very emotional first-response to your situation you can begin to have agency over your situation and make the necessary changes required.

Some of the questions I have been asking:

• Is this really what I want to be building?

• Is there any way we can even build anything of note that is able to genuinely solve a need?

• Am I solving a genuine problem or is this something I have made-up in my mind?

• Is there even a space for more tech to come into real estate or is the market just too fixed in its thinking & behaviour?

• Where is the value that we are providing?

• Am I, and my team, the right people to be building these things?

In summary, the questions have been about:
→ Internal: Myself, my team, our current product.
→ External: The market, our specific target market, the problems in the industry.

I can only control the internal, and best case scenario, I can try to understand as much as possible about the external environment.

Which has led me to become overly-aggressive with seeking a better understanding of that external environment.
To have the mentality of: There is never too much information you can gain, so speak to more, and more, and more realtors every day.

And that’s what I’ve now been doing.

Close Communications

Realtors are terrible at communications. Absolutely terrible. They score a negative on that point.
Directors of real estate agencies on the other hand are about 20% better than realtors.

But, directors of real estate agencies who are very serious about bringing tech into their agencies score a 100% with good communications.
→ Finally a good indicator for our target market!

So, every day I am making posts on reddit community channels consisting of active realtors — which gives me small opportunities to piece together different pieces of the puzzle and to ask some follow-up questions (which usually don’t get answered at this point lol).

But, one thing that has recently come to fruition is to have the opportunity to work closely alongside an estate agency operating in both SA and the UK.

Why This Matters: This is where we do what Peter Thiel and Paul Graham advise; we do something that doesn’t scale.

The Explanation: We cannot scale a fully-customised, very hands-on, service to every real estate agency in the world where we go step-by-step through their operations and start automating things — which is what we’re doing with estate agency A mentioned above.

The Tradeoff: The customer gets a hyper-personalised service and we get a hyper-close-up view of their operations, problems, and get actual validation on whether our solutions solve their problems.

Why This Matters: Once we get the whole setup right, we can then know for a 100% certainty, what sort of process we need to create for other estate agencies that can resemble software being sold as a service.

And then we have our SaaS, validated with problem-solution fit, with actual real-world results.

In case you missed it, right now, we are nowhere close to that:

• Myself and my team have zero experience in the real estate industry.

• We’ve just been shooting shots in the dark at attempts to map a problem-solution fit

• We’ve had very little opportunity to actually get inside an estate agency, see their operations, problems, and attempt to solve them in any way.

And to remind you of our big vision: It’s to completely automate realtors’ sales pipeline process — which we can only do once we’re solving real problems in their sales pipeline.

So, it’s been fun.

A ton of ups and downs, but feeling really good about this approach and direction we’re taking, and real estate agency A will forever be cherished by us and aptly rewarded if when things work out in the end.

😤 The Current Obstacle

We don’t know what we don’t know.

I think one of the worst things a startup can do is make assumptions — because your mind is then completely shut off to thinking about that issue — it feels like it’s resolved.

Over the last few weeks, assumptions have been one of the most annoying thorns in my side as I’ve wanted to just get past a specific issue, mark it as resolved in my mind’s eye, and move on.

Which I have done several times.

But in reflection, I’ve realised how harmful those assumptions are in basically just delaying a problem to a later stage.

I’ve realised that by seeing the problems pop back up now.

Ahhh, painful.

Nonetheless, this obstacle of not knowing is more so of an opportunity than some sort of obstacle we can’t get over.

It’s an opportunity to really knuckle down on getting right with the external environment I mentioned earlier, and slowly building the correct solutions to very real problems.

🕺 The Next Week Ahead

1. 🧪 Hypothesis Evidence: Working closely with estate agency A to get through product stage 1 and 2 — two different solutions for two problems they’re experiencing — building, testing, and then if all’s good, scaling in their organization.

2. 📕 Education: Harvard CS50 is now complete, I am currently going through freecodecamp.org at a very nice pace — so that I can get to building alongside my team as fast as possible.

3. 🟠 YC: The deadline for the YC fall batch is the 19th of September, so next week you’ll see either an accepted/rejected email screenshot.

😌 Want to give honest feedback?

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

Or just thank you for the really helpful feedback :))))

Did I miss anything? Hit that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

Did someone forward this to you? You can follow the billion dollar company journey here.

Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn, IG, X (aka. Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube.

Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan