From Founder to VA

Hey y’all — here’s a new way to find product ideas (and/or new features):

Become a VA for early customers.

Founders are more comfortable delegating more things than ever before, but they also have a higher expectation for what new products should be able to do due to AI.

The result is that you can find the most valuable opportunities faster if you work more closely with them early on.

Here’s why if you want to build a compelling product right now, you might want to start with a simple service and take “do things that don’t scale” to the extreme:

From Founder to VA

What Exactly Does Being a VA Mean?

I’m not saying you should go apply to join Athena as an assistant yourself.

Instead, after you do some customer discovery with them, offer to take on an area of work they’re either having trouble delegating or haven’t yet hired someone for and deliver the results as a service provider.

Don’t bother trying to sell them anything else upfront.

Over time, automate the process for yourself. Remove the human in the loop.

And then sell the solution back to them as a product at a lower rate than you would have charged for the service.

This is a win-win.

It differs from traditional customer discovery in that it’s not just about observing and learning about their problems — you’re actually working for them and it’s more operationally intensive.

You’ll quickly find yourself in a situation where, in order to add more customers, you have no choice other than to build a product that automates the work you’re doing.

In particular, this is a great way to find a version of “Cursor for x” with x being the specific area the customer needs help with.

What To Look For

To start, reach out to 3-5 folks in your ICP.

When first approaching them, ask about the work they wish they could delegate or have done by AI in their ideal world that they’re currently not able to.

Charge them something like $500-1,500/mo to completely take it off their plate. This is affordable enough for it to be a good value relative to hiring someone, while high enough to feel like you’ll be delivering actual value. If they won’t pay in this range, it likely isn’t a painful enough problem area for them.

And this is key — it can’t be a partial solution to a problem. You should take it all on.

The big opportunities right now are large, broad ones. Cursor’s co-founder talked about how he almost abandoned their vision of automating software engineering because it felt too broad and, instead, focusing on some part of engineering like bug detection.

AI bug detection will certainly be a business, but each industry has their own Cursor-esque opportunity right now (though that won’t be true for long).

Once you’re doing the work, track your time like a VA would — use a tool like Toggl or a simple spreadsheet.

Only start coding once you understand where the bottlenecks are. What’s the 80/20 of where you’re spending your time? Start there.

As you start to build, continue expanding your circle of folks in your ICP who you’re working with as you can.

Don’t burn yourself out, but use growth as a forcing function to automate the right things and avoid hiring.

If you’re tackling something truly important, finding customers won’t be the issue — your time will.

Eventually the system you’re building will be able to deliver the same results to those early customers without you needing to perform any service functions yourself at all.

At that point, it’s time to start marketing and selling followed closely by, if you want to go that route, fundraising.

How We Can Help

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