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Hoag: Treat early go-to-market as parallel customer, messaging, and product experiments

Andrew Hoag · Empowering Work with AI: Inside Dash Labs' Vision of Workstation · Nov 11, 2025 · at 21:34

Dash Labs founder Andrew Hoag explains his framework for customer discovery and early go-to-market testing for early-stage startups.

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“I think the other piece of advice related to this go to market that I tend to give entrepreneurs when I'm advising and mentoring them is you got to think of it almost as a series of experiments. To the point where sometimes I'll even start to make a spreadsheet. We have a spreadsheet inside dash labs of like, here's who we think the target customer is. Here's what we think their problem or messages. Here's what we think the product features are that they need. And you run through that spreadsheet. Like there's a combination. I think of it almost like in tuples where each row is an experiment and you run through those experiments. You can do a couple in parallel, probably not all of them. But you don't want to do them all sequentially either, because you're kind of trying to cast, you know, lines in the water and see where the fish bite.”

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