Is your channel more important than the specific problem you are solving?

Focusing more time on building your channel and meeting new customers might even be more important than spending a lot of time on figuring out your customers problems, at first.

You can argue that you have no valid reason for existing if you haven't got a good idea of what problems your customers are having. There is a lot of truth in this but I also feel that if you are an entrepreneur you are always able to solve someone's problem any time.

Also, most customers are probably not buying your product for the thing you are trying to sell it to them for. Hence the customer discovery part and not the customer what do you want me to fix for you part. You can only validate your problem and your solution by testing not by just asking.

Building a channel is harder than solving a problem

Building a channel for your product is much harder and takes a lot more effort. It is easier to iterate with a value proposition or a problem hypothesis than it is to iterate with a channel.

You can flip the switch by changing your interview quests or a problem hypothesis but you can't flip over 3000 community members to another subject or marketing channel.

Following this train of thought you might like Ash Maurya's advise of starting with the riskiest part of your business model. In the sense of the arguments given before, your channel might actually be the riskiest part. You can find product/solution fit for your customers in various ways with a small group of people.

But, you can't just build a channel within 3-5 weeks and a bunch of conversations.

Also, The Startup Toolkit has a great post on how he built his channel.

Conclusion

Solving someones problem is always the reason why a product should exist. Either you have consciously solved your customer's problem or they are seeing something in you that you don't know about.

But don't forget the effort it takes to build a channel to your product.

Solving a validated problem is the ultimate goal but it does not make much sense to only do it for 20 people if you can't live off of that.

What are you experiences in balancing building your channel and learning about your customers problems? Where would you focus your efforts on when you are just starting out?