The Build Trap Survival Guide - Part 1

This is the biggest question I’ve seen come up time and time again in my work with founders, and of my own experience. Some chats, research, and mentorship opportunities later, I ended up pouring myself a coffee in 2020 and took down Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri in just a few days. It’s a fantastic book that introduces essential frameworks for moving past the endless feature development cycles and getting back on track with Product-led growth. An observation I had while reading it is that some parts lack the gritty advice shot from the hip that founders are looking for when they're looking to change gears in their startup.

I decided to translate my own experiences into a survival guide, to expand on some of its concepts by bringing my takes for founders who need to turn things around yesterday. if you thought you knew what you were aiming for, built something cool, and started sharing it but somehow, no one’s biting yet, this one goes out to you.

Obviously, I don’t need to tell you why being in the build trap is bad. You’re here to make a difference, and yes, to make money too.

How Do I Know I’m In There And Not Just Going About Product-Led Growth In My Own Lane? 

The Build Trap has a certain smell to it 🤢 it’s something like this:

• Overemphasis on Features Over Value; You got a lot of big features

• Lack of Clear Product Vision or Strategy; You know your broad strokes, but can you clearly identify all of the following:

  • Where in the user process is your solution coming in?

  • What are the top 3 job titles for each of your user roles?

  • Which user is the one that will see x-sized returned from using your product?

  • Problem you’re solving is a big enough issue for each that someone wants to spend money on it.

• Do you feel like Product leadership, Sales, and Development are all pushing for different goals in how they’re working?

The key difference between being trapped in building versus creating value in a Product-led format is simple: Do you have proven client value, not random feedback. (I’ll get into feedback in a different post, trust 🙏🏽)

If you smell it and do nothing, you’re at the risk of:

• Wasted Time and Resources

• Missed Market Opportunities

• Erosion of Customer Trust and Loyalty

• Diminishing Team Morale and Engagement

Now You Smell It. Let’s Get Started. 🥼🩺

Your biggest winner is the most boring answer first. You’re going to need to pivot your mindset to creative pragmatism. Your own mindset as a founder needs to rotate to a place where you can come up with creative ways to get answers on objectively identifiable indicators of progress, and success, THEN actually make decisions on them. You are at the helm, and no amount of delegation can solve the problem that you fundamentally are accountable for.

In this pair of articles, we’re going upstream from product, then into your core business fundamentals in hopes that we can get you a fix along the path of least-to-most operational overhaul. Sales & marketing issues are functions crucial to a survivable business, BUT are less directly involved in having control over the value proposition.

Starting With Your Product:

1. If you have a non-trivial mass of users: Check if a reframe is needed. Did you set yourself a goal in sales in order to argue that your situation is bad?

2. If you’re in a case where growth has stagnated, and you’re still at x users, well… 

   A. Review your marketing and outbound sales activities, they might be in need of more fuel, better targeting, or more resources.

   B. Is your articulation of your value the issue?

   C. Check if you’ve hit your market saturation and it’s time to push further into a new market space? (This might mean MORE investments purely in developing that new market) 😓

3. If you’re at your sales start, and you’ve got full blown software before you’ve got users…that’s the bulk of the issue. You’re going to have to peel back layers all the way to “What can be considered MINIMALLY VIABLE?” on the product side, and deeper still on the business side.

Touching grass is critical.

Academics would say that UX and the Customer Journey determine minimally viable - from what I’ve lived, that’s objectively wrong.Because you’re likely enhancing a process that already exists - hence your true MVP is a service that performs the task you’re enhancing almost entirely with humans. 

You’re in the software game, and right now your duck tape ball of features is your first guess at how your software can simplify or remove the human in the loop of your client’s process.

Considering how much you’ve built, and how little you’ve sold, making product features “for the market” is too early. This is something you, as a founder, need to guide+coach your team on avoiding ASAP. You think you know your pool of users, but you don’t as much as you think.

What does that 2nd draft at answering the client needs look like? Something that covers the A-To-B of the TRUE client need. There’s backward work required to do before you iterate a second time on your value proposition. You’ll need to dig in your past work to find the indicators of that need. Missed market opportunities often lie in the sales pitches that did not go well.

• What can you learn from those notes?

• What were clients looking for, asking for?

• What parts of the conversation were high-friction?

• What did they understand you “did”? 

• Did you bore them with a tech demo instead of focusing on the outcomes?

A high-level, counterintuitive, overly pragmatic solution:

Making Features just for individual users and closing immediate sales is a bit too customized, but frankly it’s a freshly good place to start. This will guide you into a better direction in your earliest days. Yes, clients will individually pull in different directions, but those - in exchange for paid collaboration will set you up for a much better start. If you’re desperate, starting to fix the situation by saying “yes, we’ll build you this feature that’s missing upon signature of a x$ commitment for (xyz period) at abc volume.” is a safer approach to things - ASSUMING YOU CAN GET IN FRONT OF CLIENTS. So long as these agreements are oriented in the global market niche you’re looking to work in.

Now what?

Immediately use a signed contract to guide your sales efforts internally to check if there’s a bigger pulse on the streets for this kind of value. Call competitors, call industry references you have, talk to your advisors - it takes a village... for startups too. If you end up with a second, and a 3rd win around those specific features, this is an indicator that you are onto something. This flags that you did have a problem with understanding the criticality of what part of the process clients were willing to pay for. You can build your way out of that build trap.

You’ll still have to stop, deprecate, or even cut features that you built that don’t serve this newfound common shape of what your now actual paid users are pulling for. After 2-3 wins in that direction, you will need to reevaluate your internal perspective on your positioning. Yes it means a partial return to the drawing board because the universe is showing you the money. Is that not better than where you were in the first place? Your 2nd draft will likely mediate between the value being sought out by your newly minted users, and the value you’re hoping to bring them. Now you aren’t in the best position, but damn is it better than before.

Taking steps back towards the Product-led path

You’re definitely next going to have to build your product management chops some more so that you can start honing in on a clearer picture of what you want to bring to market and move by maturing past sales-led product growth, and inching your way into Product-Led changes. To transition from this 1-to-1 approach into something scalable, start by identifying patterns across customer requests. That means taking a pause before moving the request into your sprints. When those fragmented feature requests come in, start to look for recurring needs or pain points that apply to a larger segment of your market, rather than building features that only benefit one specific client. Once you've noticed these trends, prioritize developing features that address common challenges while maintaining flexibility for customization. 

It'll also be critical to set boundaries—ensuring that custom work aligns with your new core vision and long-term goals, so you don't stray too far from your target market. Use these early customizations as learning opportunities, but once you’ve secured a few key wins, shift your focus toward building a product that can scale without needing constant one-off adjustments.

Want to talk about this longer? Need more customized help on the matter? Email me [email protected] don’t be shy, let’s talk.

I know there are a LOT of other AI-Product topics to cover like feedback loops and ethics, so let me know if that’s something you want to see discussed!

Here’s an anonymous channel for you to send me your thoughts if the comments section isn’t for you! 😉