Update: Fewer Mistakes, Deeper Customer Discovery, and Leveraging NYU's Startup Bootcamp

If you read my last blog post, you’d know we spent a lot of time and energy building features for ProperlyAI and received (what we thought was significant) interest around our features. A bunch of our potential users told us they’d use them, and we took that as validation. But here’s the reality: they didn’t.

Why didn’t these potential users use our product? That’s on us. As beginners, we didn’t ask the right questions. Instead, we asked leading ones, like “Would you use this?” or “Do you think this would help?”—questions that only got us polite nods. After reading The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, I realized that our approach needed a complete revamp. The book hit home: most people, like your mom, will encourage you out of kindness, saying things like, “That sounds great! If you build it, I’d definitely use it.” It’s well-meaning but often not helpful. When you explain your product idea to potential users, you’re likely to get what Rob calls “fluff”—basically biased, feel-good feedback. We grew a lot from reading this and spent a lot more focus on customer discovery, rebuilding the questions, and interviewing potential customers from scratch.

Recognizing we needed to reshape our approach, we applied to NYU’s Startup Bootcamp—and got in! The program connected us with mentors experienced in both real estate and building successful startups themselves, giving us the guidance we desperately needed on effective customer discovery. They reinforced exactly what I’m talking about here: the importance of stepping back, listening, and truly understanding our market before diving back into building.

Within 4 days, we conducted 14 interviews across California and New York, meeting in person and hopping on calls. I even got kicked out of a couple of real estate agencies in New York (a story for another time). But the insights we gained into their workflow were worth it, revealing problems we’d never considered and giving us a completely fresh perspective. And this time, the knowledge we gained was real and unfiltered, no fluff.

Now, we’re focusing on having real, unbiased conversations with potential users to get a genuine understanding of their needs. We’re not mentioning our solution but instead diving deep into their workflow to see where they encounter friction. We learned a key lesson: it’s not our customer’s job to suggest or validate our product directly. It’s our job as founders to understand their problems and design a solution around them. Only then can we deliver real value.

This process has shown us the value of putting in the time to understand users—time that’s worth more than any feature we could have built in those weeks. In just four days, talking to these potential users gave us more insight than months of development could have.

It’s been about 10 months since we started on this journey, and we’re still learning. No ego, no pride, just pivots and lots of valuable insight. This is just the beginning, and I’m more hyped than ever to see where this takes us.