Rob Snyder: design partners play Steve Jobs with your product and never buy
victor_explore · x · 2026-10-26
Investor Rob Snyder points out a common early go-to-market trap: design partners tend to "play Steve Jobs" — happily giving vision-level feedback on your product while almost never actually buying it.
The customers who really need something done, he argues, don't want to be design partners at all. They don't care about co-creating; they just want the problem solved and will pay for the result.
A useful calibration for founders selling B2B or agent products: seek buyers with real pain instead of collecting eager critics under the "design partner" label.
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