u/Puzzleheaded-Web-872

A few friends and I are technical founders (mid-20s, SWE background) and over the past months we built a pretty advanced internal search/retrieval system.

The engineering side went great. We learned a lot, solved hard technical problems, and built something we genuinely think is useful.

But now we hit a wall:

We honestly don’t know how to find the real pain points companies deal with day-to-day.

We assumed:
“if the tech is good enough, companies will find use cases.”

Reality seems very different.

We tried:

• cold emails
• LinkedIn outreach
• demos
• talking to random founders/operators (some were really interested and we are in touch, but no real action or action involved yet, looks like they are waiting a bit more)

I think we made the classic technical-founder mistake:
building infrastructure before deeply understanding the business problem.

So now I’m curious how others approached this phase.

How did you:

• find your first actual business problem worth solving?
• get access to real users/workflows?
• learn what companies actually struggle with internally?