You can spot them a mile off.

The entitled individual that has a piece of mind that they need to inform you of right now. Its the thing you need to fix if you’re going to land THEM as you customer. Except, they would never buy your product anyway, but you still should listen to them. In a time when every opinion counts, its tough for people to understand that every opinion isn’t always weighted the same.

The game of entrepreneurship is about finding product-market fit as fast as possible. There are a million ways of defining market, but one of the key attributes is that its members are likely to buy what you’re selling. Weighing all opinions the same dilutes the data and can give you a false sense of reality.

In an early stage company with few to no customers, one of the ways we decide what to ficus on is through a simple surveying exercise. That provides data from which we can gauge how to expend our efforts.

When collecting your data, add a “Customer Fit” variable to your spreadsheet to assess how likely a person is to actually become your customer. While this adds editorial to your data, it provides you the opportunity to add information lost in simple survey questions.

As you can see, the addition of this scaling variable can DRASTICALLY change the appearance of data. Things that appeared important before fall off, and second thought traits suddenly become high priority.

Remember, YOU’RE in control of your business. If someone else had the answers they would have started it. While its important to listen, knowing when to smile and nod is just as important.