Stop Building Features. Your First 10 Users Need a Phone Call.
Why your first 10 users need a phone call, not another feature — lessons from early AgentLayer sales.
When I launched the AgentLayer waitlist, I had a list of 17 features I wanted to build. Within a week of launching, I had 47 signups. My instinct was to build all 17 features as fast as possible so people would have more reasons to use the product. That instinct was wrong.
The Feature Trap
Here's what happens when you build features instead of talking to users: you build things nobody asked for. Each feature takes time. Each feature adds complexity. Each feature has edge cases, bugs, and maintenance costs. And after shipping 17 features, you discover that your first 10 users only ever use three of them.
Those 14 extra features didn't just waste time — they made the product harder to use. More features means more UI, more choices, more confusion. The three features people actually needed got buried.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything
One of the waitlist signups was a marketing agency owner in Dubai. Instead of emailing him a feature roadmap, I called him. We talked for 40 minutes. He told me exactly what he needed: a way to generate weekly social media content in Arabic and English, scheduled across LinkedIn and Instagram, without manual copy-pasting.
That was one feature. Not seventeen. One. And it wasn't even on my list of 17 — it was a combination of three features I'd planned separately, packaged in a way I'd never considered.
"Your first 10 users don't need more features. They need you to listen, build the one thing they actually want, and make sure it works flawlessly."
What I Learned From Calling 10 Users
I called every single one of the first 10 signups. Here's what I found:
- →6 of 10 described the same core need, just in different words
- →3 of 10 had problems I could solve with what I'd already built — they just didn't know how
- →1 of 10 had a use case I'd never thought of, which became the most requested feature later
- →None of them cared about the 17 features on my roadmap
The New Rule
For the first 100 users, every feature request goes through a phone call. Not a survey. Not an email. A phone call. Because on a call, people tell you what they mean, not what they think you want to hear. They describe their actual workflow, not their idealized one. And they tell you about problems they've given up on, which are the problems worth solving.
You can stop calling after 100 users. By then, patterns are clear, and the product should speak for itself. But for the first 10 — pick up the phone.