A sophisticated product is not necessarily a useful one. Ahmad Aqel, Innovation Funding Manager at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), learned that lesson the expensive way.
Years ago, while building software to automate processes for printing companies, he and his team spent QAR 50,000–60,000 and countless hours developing what he believed was an impressive, scalable solution. Then they put it in front of the people who were actually supposed to use it.
They did not want it.
“It was amazing. It looked sophisticated, but it was useless,” Ahmad recalled. The team eventually built a simple WordPress website for around $100, listed a few items, and generated its first revenue.
That experience became one of the lessons he brought to founders in the QSTP Fall 2026 Incubation Sprint during a Customer Discovery workshop focused on a fundamental question for any early-stage startup: Are you building what your customers actually need?
Your early customer is part of the team
For an early-stage startup, a customer does more than buy a product. Early customers can help founders understand what problem they are really solving, who experiences it and what needs to change as the product develops. In Ahmad’s words, “They are, in essence, part of your team.”
That makes choosing the right early customer critical.
If a founder describes their customer as “everyone,” or even a broad group such as all HR managers, the starting point may still be too wide. Ahmad encouraged founders to get increasingly specific. During the workshop, he illustrated this by narrowing a potential customer from operations managers in the energy sector to those working in offshore drilling for natural gas companies in a particular market.
The goal is not to stay within that niche forever. It is to start with a group founders can understand deeply, learn from them and build a strong foundation before expanding.
As founders around the room described their own target customers, Ahmad kept pushing them further: Who actually experiences the problem? Who uses the product? Who pays for it? And are those necessarily the same person?
The more specific your early target customer is, the more focused your early outreach and discovery are.
Ahmad Aqel
What you “know” may still be a hypothesis
Once founders know whom they are building for, Ahmad challenged them to reconsider what they believe they know about those customers.
A founder might believe customers need a particular feature, behave in a certain way or will pay for a solution through a particular model. Until those beliefs are tested, they remain hypotheses. The workshop emphasized that assumptions are naturally influenced by founders’ own experiences and therefore require repeated validation with actual users.
“As humans, we always think we’re correct,” Ahmad told the founders. “As a startup founder, you cannot afford that.”
His own experience building Deema, an AI-powered recruitment solution, provided a practical example. The team initially made assumptions about both the number and format of résumés recruiters typically receive. Working with users revealed a much wider reality: application volumes could reach far beyond what the early product could process, while résumés arrived as PDFs, scans, Word files, images and other formats.
Another assumption was that customers would overlook an unpolished interface as long as the technology worked. Customer reactions challenged that too.
The lesson was not that founders should stop making assumptions. Assumptions give them somewhere to start. The mistake is treating them as facts.
That also changes how founders approach customer conversations. Rather than pitching an idea and asking whether someone likes it, Ahmad encouraged them to understand what customers already do: how they work, where problems occur and how they currently respond to them.
The workshop outlined several ways to do that, from customer interviews and observing behavior to eventually putting prototypes and product iterations directly into users’ hands. For technology founders in particular, that distinction matters. The technology may be complex, but customers ultimately experience the value it creates for them.
Now go talk to one
The session ended with an exercise designed to move those ideas out of the room and into practice.
Founders first identified three hypotheses about their customers and considered how each could be tested. Then Ahmad gave them one final assignment: reach out to a potential customer and book a meeting before leaving.
They could start with someone in their professional network, ask for a warm introduction, send a personalized message or make a cold approach. The important part was to begin the conversation. The workshop itself explored different routes for customer outreach, from professional networks and warm introductions to personalized outreach and broader channels.
Your customer will never care what kind of technology you used. They care about what it does for them.
Ahmad Aqel
“I’m holding you hostage to find that first customer,” Ahmad joked.
Behind the joke was perhaps the simplest lesson of the workshop: founders cannot discover their customers entirely from behind a desk. Eventually, they have to put their assumptions in front of the people they are building for, listen to what comes back and be willing to change what they build next.
Ready to test your assumptions and build with your customers?Apply to the QSTP Incubation Program and discover the support available to founders building from Qatar to the world.
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