Ignorance is a budget.
You can spend it slowly. A year of meetings, slightly underprepared in all of them. Or you can concentrate it. Pick one person who knows. Ask the dumb questions in front of them. Burn the entire budget in 45 minutes.
That person sees you not know things. The next person, three days later, doesn't. They hear vocabulary, priorities, the way someone who's done this for ten years phrases things. You sound native because you just talked to a native.
You also moved the cost into one room. The other forty-nine stay clean. And the person who saw it isn't thinking badly. They answered questions for 45 minutes and felt useful. People remember the answers they gave more than the questions you asked.
The fifty people you'll talk to about a given market don't have a group chat about you. The dumb thing you asked in call one doesn't follow you to call seventeen. No permanent record. The market is broad enough that nobody is keeping score.
Most people don't take this trade because they think looking dumb compounds. It doesn't. Five minutes of dumb at the start of one call buys twenty calls of sounding informed. The math is in your favor because the next person isn't the same person.
the roadmap is in the calls
You can read for six months and still not know what to build next.
Ten calls with the people you're building for and you know exactly what to build next week.
Documents calibrate. Calls direct. Every call is signal: customer language, objections, frames, what surprised them. Everything else is noise.
The roadmap is downloaded, not designed. You walk in with a draft of what people might want. You walk out with a list of what they actually asked for, in their words, in their order.
Reading is for sharpening. Calls are for choosing.
what gets in the way
What stops most people isn't access. It's the few seconds before they ask the dumb question.
They picture the cost as large and permanent.
It isn't. It's small, one-time, and dissolves the moment the other person starts talking. They're not thinking about you. They're answering the question.
People are also more generous about novice questions than you'd think. Especially if you say you're new. "I'm new at this, what am I missing?" sounds weak. It isn't. It says you'd rather look small for two minutes than fake it for two months.
Spend your stupidity in one place. Then move on.
- Simon