Shavin Peiries is a writer, designer, and engineer. He writes a newsletter that focuses on guiding founders to validate their ideas fast using audience research.
"If you had to grow a SaaS with $0 marketing budget, what's your first move?" I see this question pop up constantly in founder communities. "We've built this amazing product, but we don't have cash for ads. How do we get
"Someone's already doing it" - the lie that kills great businesses before they start. Picture this. You walk into a party where everyone seems deep in conversation. Inside jokes are flying, groups have already formed, and your first instinct is to turn around and leave. That&
"We need more marketing!" That's what the SaaS founders insisted when we looked at their numbers. What they didn't realize? With their 0.2% conversion rate and $27 ARPU, they'd need nearly one million visitors (926,000 to be exact) just to
If you build it, they will do absolutely nothing. - Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) Six months of your life. Countless late nights. Thousands of lines of code. And then... silence. No users. No sales. Just the crushing realization that you might have built something nobody wants. If you're a
"I've sent 47 cold outreach messages this week trying to land customer interviews. Two people replied. Neither had time to talk." Sound familiar? That's why we're building a better research system: * In part 1, we mapped Reddit's hidden network to
"Looks interesting, but I wouldn't pay for it." If you're building products, you've probably heard some version of this soul-crushing feedback. You spend weeks or months crafting what you think is the solution, only to discover you're solving a problem
"Is this actually a pain point for you?" That's the kind of question that puts your research dead on arrival. Here's why: When you ask someone if they have a problem, you get their sanitized, rational self. But when you catch them actively struggling
“We just scheduled a demo with a potential user. They want to see the new sales dashboard for feedback. Can you have something ready by 2PM?” That Slack message from my founders hit me like a bucket of cold water. I looked at my screen: one barely-functional dashboard card, a
Ever notice something strange about project management software? Jira dominates engineering but can't crack marketing teams. Notion captures creative agencies but struggles with traditional PMOs. Monday thrives with agencies but falters with dev teams. Basecamp endures with small teams while enterprise goes elsewhere. In this post, you'
Imagine you're trying to fix an unusual noise in your car. Would you rather: A) Post in 50 different Facebook groups and forums, getting opinions from casual drivers, people who owned a different model 10 years ago, and 'car enthusiasts' who've never touched your
You've seen the promises: AI will “revolutionize” your customer research, generating deep insights in seconds. But when you dive into the results, disappointment hits. The insights feel thin, lifeless—like something's missing. It's not just you. Recently, Matt Lerner from SYSTM talked about this
Ok, here's something ridiculous about customer research. (The good kind of ridiculous.) You know all those insights you're breaking your brain trying to find? They're literally just... sitting there. Already collected. Already organized. Just waiting for you to grab them. I'm serious.