HOW TO UNDERSTAND CUSTOMERS

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

If you don't have firsthand customer intuition, you will only build the right thing if you get lucky on the millions of decisions it takes to build a great product. Last year, forward-deployed engineers were all the rage. In 2026, the goal should be to forward deploy everyone. The GTM founder talks to customers, tries to explain what they learned to the technical founder, and something gets lost in translation. That cycle repeats with more formal writeups, more prototypes, more frustration. Translation errors compound until you're building something nobody wants.