When it comes to building successful solutions, many founders fall into the trap of rushing to market without thoroughly understanding their customers.
Shelby Stephens, founder and CEO of GrowthMatch, has hands-on experience with the importance of validating a need narrative before jumping into solution-building.
Through his personal experience in launching and growing multiple companies—including marketplaces—Shelby lays out practical advice for companies navigating customer discovery.
A need narrative is the foundational description of your target customer—who they are, their problems, desired outcomes, and how they currently attempt to solve those problems. According to Shelby, getting this step right is essential:
It eliminates guesswork. Founders often jump straight to developing solutions without validating if the identified problem truly resonates with their audience.
It prevents costly mistakes. Building a product without ensuring customer alignment can result in wasted resources.
It informs solution development. With a validated need narrative, founders can build features that match what customers need, not just what they think customers want.
Shelby emphasizes that validating a need narrative and testing solutions must be done in sequence—not simultaneously. Attempting both at once can lead to misinterpreting feedback, which results in poor product-market fit. Here are some common risks:
Misleading Feedback: Solution feedback may come from people whose needs weren’t properly validated, leading to false confidence.
Bias in Solution Design: Preconceived ideas about the product can shape the solution based on unvalidated assumptions.
Complexity of Dual Validation: Especially for two-sided marketplaces and for SaaS solutions with multiple stakeholders (e.g. the buyer is different from the primary user), it’s challenging to manage feedback streams from multiple target customers without clear segmentation.
To avoid these risks, Shelby recommends focusing on validating the need narrative first, for one customer or stakeholder at a time. Only when this foundation is solid should founders proceed to develop and test their solution.
Shelby suggests a structured, iterative process for need narrative validation:
Create a Need Narrative: Describe your customer in qualitative terms (e.g., demographics, lifestyle) and list quantitative, externally identifiable traits (e.g., income, job title).
Conduct Conversations, Not Surveys: Engage in live conversations to capture detailed insights. Surveys work better after you’ve already validated the core narrative.
Test and Refine: Use customer feedback from these conversations to iterate on the narrative until it aligns perfectly with their reality. Look for signals like, “This feels like you read my mind.”
For businesses managing two-sided marketplaces, Shelby advises validating narratives for each side—supply and demand—separately. Attempting both at once can introduce noise and confusion.
This also holds true for SaaS solutions or service offerings where the purchase decision maker is different from the primary user. Trying to validate a need narrative for multiple customers or stakeholders at the same time is incredibly difficult.
Pro tip: Once you validate one audience’s narrative, circle back and validate the other. This sequential approach ensures that you remain focused on fully validating each need narrative and reduces the risk that you’ll cut corners along the way.
To confirm you’ve achieved full need narrative validation, keep an eye out for these key indicators:
Strong Alignment: 100% of your interviewees tell you that the need narrative is highly accurate and they don’t point out any critical issues or suggest any material revisions.
Problem is Their #1 Problem: 100% of interviewees identify that the key problem stated in the need narrative is indeed their #1 problem. If this is anything less than 100%, it means the targeting needs to be tightened to only include those for whom it is their #1 problem.
Existing Buying Behavior: Customers are already paying for solutions to the problem. This doesn’t mean they must be paying for the same type or category of solution as what the company hopes to offer, but it does mean that they must be paying for some sort of attempt to solve the problem.
Discontent with Current Solutions: Customers express dissatisfaction with current solutions, clearly indicating that their existing solutions are not doing a good job at solving the problem.
Once these indicators are in place, founders can confidently move to the next phase: validating the solution statement.
By following the process of need narrative validation, companies can minimize the risks associated with premature product development.
Shelby’s advice is clear: validate your audience’s needs first, iterate until it aligns perfectly, and only then build a solution that addresses those needs. This method not only reduces wasted effort but also builds confidence that your product will meet real market demand.
In summary, the key to sustainable growth lies in doing things in the right order—starting with understanding your customers at the deepest level.
With a validated need narrative in hand, your company is well-positioned to create solutions that resonate, attract paying customers, and drive long-term success.