“I ran to the nursery and I bought like 30 plants because I was like I need to have the problem in order to be deeply motivated to solve it — because if you actually have over 10 plants, keeping track of them kind of sucks.”

Buy 30 plants to make sure you actually have the problem you're solving

Alex deliberately bought 30 plants at the start of COVID to ensure he and the team felt the pain they were solving. Being your own user kept motivation real and grounded the prototype in actual need — founders without an authentic version of the user's pain ship for demos, not retention.