Sometimes the best product mentor is someone who knows nothing about products.

Hear me out.

I’ve been immersed in the startup world ever since I founded Collaborizm, a technology venture, my senior year of college. Collaborizm enabled engineering students from across the world to build up their resume credentials by participating in the development of open source hardware passion projects. Collaborizm took me through the whirlwind of validating a consumer problem, building a team, and monetizing a social network.?Collaborizm?grew to over 60,000 monthly active users and achieved near profitability via our?Collaborizm Freelance?effort, but certain business flaws heeded attempts to greatly scale the platform. We were forced to phase down the venture in 2019.

In the recent past, I’ve work full time as a product manager for a large CPG company. I also grind hard on nights/weekends on an education-technology side project, called?The Nestomir?(fantasy novel + companion app which introduce readers to computer science?and?the power of “learning-by-doing”).

Recently, after stumbling across a TechCrunch article “Which open source startups rocketed in 2022?”, I became inspired to create another iteration of?The Nestomir (I have a strong gut belief the story has great commercial potential, but I need to position the effort differently against the competition to generate the attention I need to make the business grow). I spent some time sketching out ideas. However, after tinkering with my designs, I began to doubt the cohesiveness of the new iteration, so my gut told me to seek out feedback from a mentor.

My close friend from high school came to mind. He’s not technical. He’s not a startup founder, nor ever worked for a startup. He knows very little about product development, UX, or software,?but he has a very good business sense (he has been successful in the world of commercial real estate).

After describing my new product strategy to him over a bowl of Pesto gnocchi, he quickly got to the root of where I was making mistakes (he was able to very quickly pick apart some of the deep flaws in my model):

• I was engaging in too much wishful thinking (I had added too much functionality to the website plans, when most of this functionality can already be accessed via other free tools like Discord, Twitter)
• My consumer-facing presentation was too dense and had too many steps…and my friend made it clear that a small iteration to the language and concept was not good enough–I had to bite off a much smaller slice of the initial problem I sought out to solve, and tackle new problems once/if the business grew

This feedback was pretty brutal. He told me the base idea simply was not valid. Initially I wanted to fight back, but after taking down some more pasta, I realized he just saved me?a lot?of time (and pain).

The feedback my friend gave me?was?quite sophisticated from a product standpoint, even though he has no real product experience. The reason for this:?business acumen overrides product acumen. As a result, his mind stays focused on the laws of economics and business, which are the things that govern product development and?really?matter in startup (and new product) success. Things like:

• Performing an?honest?competitive analysis
• Having a strong feel for consumer trends
• Being able to assess the validity of a problem statement

Notice, there wasn’t anything about button placement, UI, color scheme, or branding in his feedback after he looked at my demo. UX mentors (and sometimes “standard product mentors”) will get too close into the weeds and miss giving feedback on the overarching business logic.

UX has no meaning until your business fundamentals make sense.?If you can’t look at your competition objectively, measure your total available market size, or grill your problem statement validity, you have nothing.

The Best (Product) Mentors

• Have proven business acumen
• Give you tough feedback (and don’t care if they hurt your feelings) because they know they are going to save you pain in the long run
• Focus on what you’re doing wrong, not what you’re doing right (there’s not supposed to be?anything?nice about product mentorship?until?you are generating significant, life-altering revenue) except maybe the Gnocchi you eat during the mentorship conversation
• Are good investors (from my experience, the best business people are also great investors,?because?the best investors all share one quality: they get a great gut sense of the viability of a business idea quickly, without having to dive too much into granular details, and their portfolio’s prove it

The best product advice I’ve gotten in the past 10 years was from somebody who knows nothing really about building products. You should keep this in mind the next time you are building a product from scratch.

You can check out my new iteration of?The Nestomir?here. Through my friend’s feedback, I decided to use GitHub as the core collaboration platform behind the story’s open source effort. I also introduced Discord as a complement to the The Nestomir web platform. I also shaved off a lot of conceptual fat (in my initial plans, I had a portfolio of different products on the website, instead of focusing on one project). The platform still has a lot further to go, but now I am on a clearer path.

*This example is targeted at early stage startup companies (product mentorship changes as companies/products grow)