Whether you watched our workshop live or missed it - here's a recap on what you missed with your key takeaways.
The total addressable market has been mapped. The beachhead identified. The deck is built, the pitch rehearsed, and the conviction is there. That capturing even a fraction of this market means having something real.
Chaz Mee has seen this story play out more times than he can count. As VP of Product at Keep Labs and a product veteran with years of experience building across industries, he's also lived it himself. And his message to early-stage founders is equal parts liberating and confronting:
Being wrong isn't a risk to manage. It's the method.
At a recent CDH Lunch & Learn, Chaz walked shared the framework he calls The Art of Being Wrong.
Every founder has a version of the same story. The idea was sound. The market was real. The team was all in. And yet somewhere between the first prototype and the fifth pivot, something went sideways. For Chaz Mee, VP of Product at Keep Labs, that moment isn't a warning sign, it's the whole point. The art of building great products, he argues, isn't about avoiding being wrong, it's about learning to use it.
Here are some of the insights we took away from the session — and a few that might just change how you think about your next product decision.
Stop Selling to a Market. Start Finding Your 50.
The TAM slide is a fixture of almost every pitch deck. We operate in a $X billion market, and if we capture just Y%, we have a business.
Chaz calls this the "magical unicorn slide." Not because the market isn't real — but because it's the wrong unit of thinking entirely.
The goal isn't market capture. It's finding the first 50 users — people with such an acute unmet need that they don't just try the product, they evangelize it. When a team optimises for 50 specific people, decisions get sharp. When they optimise for a percentage of a market, decisions stay broad.
The Ladder: 50 → 500 → 5,000
Scale doesn't happen in a leap. It happens in a ladder.
When a team nails the experience for its first 50 users, they learn what it takes to find the next 100. From 100, the path to 500 becomes visible. Then 5,000.
This is also a fundraising story. A founder with 50 deeply engaged users and a laddered growth path is far more compelling to a VC than one waving a TAM slide. The math works out but only after founders have done the work to earn the right to talk about it.
Two Kinds of Wrong and One Is Far More Dangerous
Most founders accept being wrong about features. Ship, learn, adjust. That kind of wrongness is productive.
But there's a second kind that's far more costly: being wrong about the value proposition.
Chaz lived this at Keep Labs — iterating extensively on a medication adherence product, only to realise they were solving a problem people didn't actually want solved. The real need was somewhere to talk about the lived experience of having a rare disease. A completely different direction.
If a team is refining endlessly without meaningful movement, it's rarely a design problem. It's a signal to question the foundation.
The Superpower Standard
Ben Horowitz once said the best software gives its users superpowers. Chaz has built his product philosophy around this idea.
Most products solve pain points. The ones that stick do something more — they open up entirely new capabilities. They make people feel like they can do things they simply couldn't before.
At every major product decision, the question worth asking is: what is the superpower we are handing to people? That one question reorients a team away from feature debates and back to what actually matters — the value being created.
Earning the Right to Build
Before thinking about what to build, teams need to earn the right to build it. That means prototyping, testing, and learning enough about the problem space to enter the build phase with conviction — not just enthusiasm.
The Takeaway
The feature cycle is a trap. Traction doesn't come from completeness. It comes from fit — and fit only comes from deeply understanding the job the product is hired to do.
The best product builders share one quality: intellectual honesty. The willingness to sit with being wrong, question the value proposition when iteration stalls, and ask the harder question underneath the feature list.
Being wrong, done well, isn't a failure state. It's a method. And for founders trying to build something people would genuinely miss — it might be the most important skill in the toolkit.
Based on a session from the CDH Lunch & Learn series — supporting founders with the skills and knowledge to scale. Watch the full session on the CDH YouTube channel.
