Welcome to the first issue of Relentless from Heatseeker, a weekly newsletter for fearless founders who learn by doing.

The relationship between humility and learning while building a product

Humility? Really? In a newsletter about being relentless?

Hear us out. Humility is misunderstood. It's actually a founder's greatest asset.

Humility is about trying, admitting when you’re wrong, and being curious about the right next steps.

As AI develops further, tools that aid in experimentation, learning, and decision making will be the most valuable to people who use it to gather different perspectives.

And with social networks already well developed, it’ll be easier to incorporate the market and real customers into the decision making process, so you can build what people want – and receive their feedback in real time.

Read our article on how you can conduct market tests to validate your product to find out what customers will actually buy – not what you think they want to buy.

View the flesh-and-blood people who show up online every single day as your “big data” to query. You can do this through market experiments or market tests.

ALSO: How I Learned (The Hard Way) When To Be Humble As a Startup Founder

Ever heard of the “arrogance-humility” cycle? This old – but timeless – article recounts how BuildDirect CEO Jeff Booth learned how to strike a balance between confidence and humility while building his company, and how he identified when to stay the course and when to pivot.

The same confidence that helped launch my company nearly killed it. It took a near disaster for me to re-learn how to be humble again. Here’s what I found out along the way.

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Gathering million-dollar insights without a million-dollar budget using AI Users

Imagine if you could say, “Hey Siri, send me a person who fits these exact characteristics, so I can find out what they want out of a product like mine”?

Seems like an outrageous ask, but we’re not far away from such a capability thanks to synthetic data and AI Users. AI Users are made up of the characteristics of a customer in your target audience.

This character’s “personality” comes from scraping the web and reading customer reviews, blogs, and other feedback to create a representation of your target buyer.

In a library of AI Users you could choose an “AI Professional Woman in her 30s with an Annual Household Income of $120,000” or an “AI College Student in the United States on a track scholarship” and then ask these individuals questions to find out how to better solve their problems.

This saves you the trouble of recruiting real individuals with these attributes, especially in the early days of your startup when time and money are tight. AI Users is one of the features on Heatseeker’s roadmap.

Read our article What is synthetic data and how can it boost user testing? to learn more about this emerging tech.

Computers generate synthetic data to mimic what data would typically say. Synthetic data sets can be thought of as AI-generated personas that are trained to use different data to make up its “individuality” such as socioeconomic and psychographic data.

PLUS: Check out this case study of how we helped a wellness patches company find "sticky" messaging with AI Users.

Try: Explore the Heatseeker Virtual Demo or Book a Live One

Founders and their teams are already testing and learning in the Heatseeker platform. Check out our virtual demo below to learn how you can use the platform to run social media experiments and find your market.

Watch the virtual demo

If you’d like a live demo, you can book some time with a member of the Heatseeker team.

Book your 1:1 demo

Happy Heatseeking!

Neya

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