Why “just build it and they will come” is the business equivalent of microwaving a frozen pizza and calling yourself a Michelin chef.
1. The $1.7 Billion Reality Check
There’s something poetic about Shanaz Hemmati calmly explaining, “Go talk to customers before you commit to a business model,” while a million would-be founders are busy maxing out credit cards on servers, swag, and that neon logo sign they think screams unicorn vibes.
Hemmati isn’t just an armchair philosopher. She and Ross Buhrdorf co-founded ZenBusiness, an AI-powered platform that helps first-time entrepreneurs navigate the legal labyrinth of incorporation and compliance. Launched in 2017, the company hit a $1.7 billion valuation by 2021 and now serves 850,000+ small businesses. Translation: when she tells you to slow your roll and talk to actual humans, she’s not being quaint—she’s handing you the cheat code.
2. The Cult of the Idea vs. The Boring Power of Research
Let’s face it: in the influencer economy, “research” is what your cousin calls googling for five minutes while sipping a $7 oat latte. The real flex, apparently, is to announce that you’re “in stealth mode” while building an app that will “revolutionize” something no one asked to be revolutionized.
Hemmati calls B.S. on that fantasy. Before she and Buhrdorf wrote a single line of ZenBusiness code, they spent ten months talking to 50–100 would-be customers. They ran design sprints, mocked up fake pricing pages, even refunded early sign-ups just to test what people would actually pay for.
Compare that to the average founder who treats “customer discovery” like it’s optional DLC in a video game. Spoiler: you can skip it only if you also enjoy skipping product–market fit and investor interest.
3. Pain Points Are Not a Personality
Every entrepreneur loves to declare they’ve “identified a pain point.” Cool story, bro. But pain points are like gym memberships—everyone has one, and most people ignore them until something snaps.
Hemmati’s team didn’t stop at “legal compliance is a headache.” They asked how small-business owners experience that headache: Where do they trip up? What paperwork paralyzes them? What’s worth paying for? Without that clarity, ZenBusiness would have been yet another generic SaaS subscription collecting digital dust.
4. Pivot or Perish
Steve Blank—Stanford professor, startup whisperer, and professional dream-crusher—backs her up: “It’s not ‘Here’s what I’m building. Can I sell it?’ It’s ‘Who are my customers and what do they want?’”
That’s not just semantics. It’s the difference between building a sustainable business and starring in the next season of “Shark Tank Failures We Pretend Never Happened.” Blank even warns that if you can’t pivot quickly, “chances are you will fail.”
Hemmati echoes that with the zen calm of someone who’s actually pivoted: true entrepreneurs stay open, not married to the first draft of their idea. In other words, love your market, not your mock-ups.
5. The Hall-of-Shame Counterexamples
For every ZenBusiness, there’s a cautionary tale:
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Juicero, the $400 juice-squeezer that could be replaced by, wait for it, your own hands.
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Quibi, proof that $1.75 billion and celebrity cameos can’t make people care about 10-minute shows.
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Any startup that ends its pitch with “it’s like Uber for X,” where X is something no one needs on demand (e.g., Uber for Origami Lessons).
The common thread? A deep faith that technology alone will hypnotize customers into paying for nonsense.
6. The Glamour Gap: Talking vs. Building
Let’s admit it: “talk to 100 strangers and refine your value proposition” doesn’t look sexy on LinkedIn. “Founder & CEO, raised $5M pre-seed to change the world” does.
But those coffee chats, awkward surveys, and A/B-tested landing pages are where product-market fit actually happens. It’s the grunt work that saves you from burning through your savings while you wonder why nobody wants your blockchain-powered cat-sitting service.
7. AI Buzzwords Don’t Replace Listening
ZenBusiness uses AI to help with legal filings, but Hemmati never pretended AI was the story. The story was: “First-time founders are drowning in bureaucracy; let’s give them a lifeboat.”
Contrast that with countless AI-for-AI’s-sake projects—those “LLM-driven synergy platforms” that impress VCs for about five minutes until the first churn report lands.
8. Customer Conversations = Free R&D
Think of early customer interviews as free focus groups—except they’re better, because these people might become paying customers. Hemmati and Buhrdorf literally refunded early sign-ups after testing mock sites. They weren’t losing money; they were buying insight at a discount.
Meanwhile, many founders treat customers like final-boss monsters to be confronted only after launch, by which point the burn rate is a bonfire and the runway is a cocktail napkin.
9. The Ego Tax
Skipping this step is basically an ego tax. You pay in sleepless nights, wasted capital, and awkward all-hands meetings where someone finally asks, “But…does anyone want this?”
Hemmati dodged that tax by remembering that your brilliant concept isn’t exempt from reality checks.
10. From HomeAway to ZenBusiness: Experience Isn’t a Shortcut
Worth noting: Hemmati and Buhrdorf weren’t rookies. They’d been executives at HomeAway, sold to Expedia for $3.9 billion. If anyone could have coasted on “trust us, we know,” it was them.
Instead, they acted like beginners—because every market is a fresh jungle, not a sequel where past wins guarantee future survival.
11. Snarky Takeaways for Aspiring Founders
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Your idea isn’t sacred. It’s a hypothesis begging to be disproved.
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Research isn’t procrastination. It’s product foreplay; skip it and you risk a very short honeymoon.
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Customer obsession beats founder ego. Every. Single. Time.
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Pivots aren’t shameful. They’re proof you’re awake.
12. The Quiet Power of Boring Discipline
ZenBusiness may have an eye-catching valuation, but its real secret weapon is painfully boring: discipline. Ten months of structured interviews. Design sprints with refunds. Relentless feedback loops.
It’s the kind of story that will never headline a tech-bro TED Talk because it lacks rocket emojis. And that’s exactly why it works.
13. Final Word: Listen Like Your Business Depends on It—Because It Does
The startup graveyard is littered with the bones of ideas that sounded brilliant in a vacuum. Shanaz Hemmati’s playbook isn’t complicated: talk to people, learn what they actually need, and stay flexible enough to change course.
It’s not flashy. It’s not viral. But it’s how you build something real—like a $1.7 billion company instead of a cautionary Medium post.
Bottom line: If you can’t muster the humility to spend months interviewing customers, maybe entrepreneurship isn’t your sport. Because the market doesn’t care about your vision board; it cares whether you listened.
Now close Figma, cancel that premature seed-round announcement, and go have 100 conversations. Your future balance sheet will thank you.