Talk to your users.

It's a mantra repeated endlessly in startup circles, often traced—sometimes loosely—to Paul Graham's YC essay Startups in 13 Sentences. In it, founders latch onto a single golden rule: understand your users.

But here's the catch: in practice, this advice ends up backfiring for a lot of early-stage teams.

Talking to users often becomes only talking to users. You run surveys. You collect interviews. You rack up confidence scores of 100+. And yet your product still feels off. Why?

Because your customers don't live in binary. Their day-to-day behaviour is messy, emotional, inconsistent—often so dynamic that analytics tools misinterpret it entirely. A user might be deeply frustrated with your product, and even they don't consciously realize it.

These micro-behaviours are real, human signals—signals no dashboard fully captures.

Users aren't simple creatures. Their experience is full of tiny frictions, unspoken annoyances, and quiet rage-clicks that session replays flatten into meaningless data. And they won't report this stuff in an interview. Not because they're hiding it, but because each individual frustration feels too small to mention—yet collectively, they define the product experience.

This is why merely "talking to your users" isn't enough.

You have to be your user.

You have to live inside your own product—use it obsessively, feel every awkward edge, run into the same walls, experience the same flow. Surveys, interviews, and analytics are just tools, not truth. They inform you, but they don't replace the visceral understanding that comes from living in the environment you're building.

If you want to really understand your users, you must embody them. Only then do the details speak.