Bonus Episode: Building Products Around Real Customer Needs with Filipe Castro Matos
Filipe Castro Matos is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Altar.io, where he helps founders go from idea to MVP with clarity and speed. With over a decade of experience across B2C and B2B startups—including an early exit, viral growth experiments, and advising dozens of founders—Filipe specializes in helping teams find their first customers and build Go-to-Market strategies that actually work.
His work today centers on solving one of the biggest problems in early-stage startups: the gap between building and growing. He's quietly building something new to bridge that gap.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- [00:00] Intro
- [01:19] Learning ecommerce by evolving with companies
- [02:50] Avoiding guesswork through real user engagement
- [04:57] Avoiding costly guesses in early channels
- [07:24] Finding people who match your avatar
- [08:23] Returning to basics for direction clarity
- [08:51] Distinguishing buyers from friendly critics
- [11:29] Starting small when validating ideas
- [14:36] Simplifying business ideas through existing tools
- [15:29] Stay updated with new episodes
- [15:40] Capturing insights for go-to-market
- [17:36] Separating problem discovery from solutions
- [19:55] Going where the market is active
- [21:10] Introducing payments only after solutions
- [22:24] Digesting conversations into ICP
- [23:17] Pulling branding assets from real conversations
- [24:56] Testing organically before paid ads
- [27:04] Building a brand as key differentiator
Resources:
- Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
- Digital products for entrepreneurs and business leaders: altar.io/us/
- Follow Filipe Castro Matos linkedin.com/in/filipecastromatos
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Transcript
Felipe Castro Matos
Before going all in to all the channels and trying to see what works and not works, let's go back and let's identify people that fit your... What you think is going to be your buyer. And let's talk with those people.
You can just go to the coffee shop and ask, Hey, can I buy your coffee if you can answer some questions for me about an idea I have? And 9 times out of 10 people will be like, sure, I love free coffee.
Chase Clymer
Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I am welcoming to show an amazingly smart gentleman. I've got Felipe Castro Matos coming to us. He is currently the entrepreneur in residence over at alter.io.
But on the side, he also advises a lot of early stage startups in crafting and executing their go-to-market strategies. Felipe, welcome to the show.
Felipe Castro Matos
Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be here and glad for this conversation.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. We're gonna have an awesome conversation today around validating your ideas and then how to go to market with your new idea.
Quickly, can you run me through how you know so much about this? What kind of jobs and experiences? Why should people listen to you? What kind of expertise are you actually bringing to the table?
Felipe Castro Matos
Okay. Okay. So I've been working basically with startups all my life. So, almost since the beginning of my career. I would say around 12 to 14 years now. And yeah, I learned everything on the job on many different startups. So I work with those enough startups in many different industries
And I always work on marketing. In different roles in marketing. But always on marketing. And of course, I learned many, many things from being just one person in marketing in that startup until managing marketing teams of four or five people. And so in many different stages of those startups as well.
And so, somewhere in the middle, I also worked with e-commerce specifically. I would say two, three companies. I think two. Very interesting comparison that I could do because one was already scaling and I helped them scale even more. The other one was really started and it wasn't a great success and at least while I was there. So we can talk about it later.
But yeah, my experience with Ecommerce was in those two companies where I spent around 5 years in total.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And I think that with go-to-market and with just the strategies behind getting awareness about a brand or a product, and then converting that awareness into sales, the strategies, the overarching strategies are similar. It's agnostic to the industry.
It's just the execution, the nuance of it gets a little more industry-specific. Would that be valid?
Felipe Castro Matos
I'll say so. I'll say that I'm proof of that because I worked with many different industries and it was never a problem for me because I can see that I applied many of the foundations, the principles for those strategies. And so I'll say that anyone could work on that marketing strategy in any industry. The foundations are the same.
Of course, we're going to for sure discuss that. One of the first things that I do when I'm starting a new company. I wouldn't do [it] in the beginning because I didn't know, but then I learned the importance of speaking with customers, with users, and knowing everything about that specific industry, that specific use case. That's very, very important for marketing.
And that's one of the biggest pitfalls that many founders have around is that they don't speak enough with their customers, with their prospects. And they jump right into executing different channels, trying everything without having a complete clear what is their positioning, what is their messaging. That's very, very important.
So of course, that applies to any industry. So you don't necessarily need previous experience in that industry. But if you don't have one, you need to talk with everybody in that industry to understand very well how to communicate with them.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Yeah. Because it's so funny how the language that you're used to speaking in your niche or vertical or industry is Spanish to folks that aren't in your industry. So it's very funny.
So what you said there though, I guess let's just start at that. So you mentioned when you first take on a client or a new position. And just for the remainder of this conversation, we're going to speak very much in ecommerce terms just to make it easy for everyone. And that's also what the audience listens to.
But you could extrapolate from this if you were thinking about other stuff. But before you're even going to craft and execute a go-to-market strategy, which is just a fancy term for a marketing and sales plan for this new thing. You alluded to there, like we have to validate a lot of this stuff first.
Because there's always usually a lot of assumptions around the product, or the solution, or the offer, or who the actual audience is. How do you help an Ecommerce startup validate their idea?
Yeah, there are different ways. The one that I prefer is, of course, going directly to the audience, understanding the customer very well. Sometimes you also have the user that is not necessarily the buyer. So you need to understand very well the different personas that are in that journey.
Usually, e-commerce is easier because it's direct to consumers. So the buyer is the user that is using your product or website. So usually, it's easier. Still, there are some cases that could make sense to talk with other people.
One thing that many, many years ago, before I learned everything that I know today. It's very common. So I did that in the past and it's very common. Many founders do it. Going directly to the channels and trying to test and validate that idea while they are going to the market, which I think is dangerous.
I still think that is possible, but only for experienced people. Maybe they could do that for not so experienced founders. That's very, very dangerous because you can spend lots of effort, lots of money going to different channels. That includes paying for ads, but also developing content for social media, for blogging, trying many different things.
And then you are receiving signs from everywhere. And that is dangerous because maybe you are not receiving enough signs, or if you are receiving lots of signs, they are completely different.
Because channels are also different, audiences may be different. So that's very hard to manage. And so I prefer to, it's what I tell founders all the time. It's like before going all in to all the channels and trying to see what works and not works. Let's go back and identify people that fit your, what you think is going to be your buyer. And let's talk with those people.
And it's not that hard to find those people. And you don't need hundreds of conversations. If you talk with 10, 20 people, it's more than enough to help you build this strategy. And I'm completely sure, and I tell this to all the founders, is, after 10, 20 conversations, I'm sure that your strategy will be completely different than what you were thinking before having those conversations.
So part of this conversation sometimes is also product feedback that could also inform the go-to-market strategy. It can mix the above of them, especially in the beginning before starting the startup and launching the product. Many times it's a mix of both and it's okay.
So that's my process: go back to the basics, talk with people and then build a strategy around those insights.
Chase Clymer
Now, I just have to ask this because a lot of our listeners out there are like, okay, I've got 20 cousins. I'm going to give my cousins the product and get their feedback. I'm assuming that you want founders to go talk to strangers and not people that are anyway biased towards the outcome.
Felipe Castro Matos
Yeah, I would say so. Cousins and family friends are great buyers. If you can sell to them in the beginning, great. But for this kind of feedback to validate the idea, that's not ideal because of course they are buyers.
Chase Clymer
They're going to be nice to you regardless.
Felipe Castro Matos
They are buyers. They want to help you. It's not the best feedback. Sometimes it happens that somewhere in the family, there is this perfect person that is going to be the perfect buyer for you. But that's rare. So I would say try to find strangers or at least a third connection. Someone that knows your friend or your family, that's already bad.
But you want someone that is not emotionally attached to you and to your success. But yeah, even finding strangers usually is not that hard. Of course, it really depends. I'm not talking about a specific case here. But yeah, you can find [people] on social media, on Reddit, on forums, on groups online, events, physical events as well. You can find many people. Once again, it's not hundreds of people. It's like just 10 people. Shouldn't be hard.
If you can find those 10 people by yourself with no paylabs, that's maybe a sign that they need to review everything before jumping in and building a product for one year. And then what's going to happen? Probably you're going to need the same thing that is finding people. And so I prefer to do that before putting lots of effort, lots of time on developing a product without any kind of validation.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And another thing that I've read, and I really wish I remembered where this was, but it was like, you can just go to the coffee shop and ask, hey, can I buy your coffee if you can answer some questions for me about an idea I have? And 9 times out 10 people will be like, sure, I love free coffee.
Felipe Castro Matos
Yeah, exactly. Another thing that happens is that, of course, we are talking commerce with this digital business. Sometimes people are even behind the screen and don't go to the street to talk to people. And you can find lots of people in the coffee store and that's perfectly okay to validate the idea.
You are not testing how to scale from 1,000 customers to 1 million customers. You just want to validate your idea. And then a little bit after that you just want to get your first 10, your first 100 customers. And for that, you don't need to have a perfect digital strategy. That's not what we need right now.
Chase Clymer
Oh, so you're saying that I don't need to spend all of my money on the most beautiful website in the world with the most top designer in the world with all these award-winning people. I can just stand something up, DIY it myself and get my first 100, maybe my first 1000 customers.
Felipe Castro Matos
Exactly. And now talking about Ecommerce. The website, of course, is going to be an important piece of the journey. A good website will always compare better than a bad website. That's not what you are testing right now. The website is just a means to a man. What you need is like you have an idea for a product that you want to sell through a website.
Chase Clymer
Yep.
Felipe Castro Matos
So you want to validate the product itself. The product usually solves some kind of pain problem that people have. And you just need to talk with the people that you imagine are the best audience for that product and validate that. Many times, you see that what you are thinking is not exactly what people think. And sometimes it's the same, but they value other things more than what you are thinking.
And especially with e-commerce, oh when you are selling physical products, it's important to have this validation before you go developing the product because you can spend months developing the product. It depends, of course, if it's technology or if it's apparel or whatever, but it needs some time. It's not like just developing a website that today you could develop in one day. That's done. A physical product is different.
Before jumping into a factory developing that product, I would really validate the problem and the solution with real people that could be your real customers.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And I just, anecdotally, want to say we talked to a lot of entrepreneurs that have websites that are doing alright. And they might have done the first iteration or their experts didn't build these websites by any means.
The language in which they're talking about the problems that are solved by their product is helping them get to that first million without really making a huge investment in their Shopify store. And if you're building an Ecommerce business and you can't use Shopify for some reason, I would argue that maybe your business model is overly complicated.
Felipe Castro Matos
Yeah, I would agree with that. And Shopify and other similar tools are perfect to start for any ecommerce founder.
Chase Clymer
If you truly believe you need a custom solution to build an ecommerce business, you should maybe rethink what you're doing.
Felipe Castro Matos
I agree. In one of the ecommerce companies that I work with, we use Shopify to launch and sell for the first customers. But we kept Shopify until later. I remember that we are already... We had a 20 million annual revenue. And that was the moment where oh we started thinking about changing and maybe a customer solution. But it was like 20 million dollars of revenue. It was already big and Shopify was okay until then.
So if a company like this can work with Shopify, anyone that is searching can work with Shopify or any other similar solution.
Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview.
Chase Clymer
Alright, so let's just, I'm just going to recap some stuff real quick to get back on track for the go-to-market because I knew I was gonna have fun with you and we're gonna do this. Alright, so validate before you over invest in manufacturing. Just don't over invest in your website at the beginning. And then you've had these conversations with folks.
If you're doing it digitally, just record it so you can dump that transcript into AI. It makes your life a lot easier in person. Record it with your phone so you can remember everything that's said. Take all these notes. So you've got all this information that you've learned about your product and the potential how it solves these problems. Now, how do I take all this information from these 10, 20 conversations I've had and turn it into an effective go-to-market strategy?
Felipe Castro Matos
Yeah. So in terms of tools, you already mentioned, it's amazing how AI is helping now with customer research. I remember doing customer research with people. In that case, it was in the same room, but it could be online through a Zoom call, any kind of online call. But I remember how painful it was to have a good conversation going on, but also taking notes at the same time, and then digesting everything, it was hard. Like all the process, it was very painful.
And now it's completely different. And I already did recently with AI. AI is recording everything. I can focus on the conversation and AI will take all the notes and digest everything. And then I can also, of course, interact with all the later. So that would be my main recommendation for any kind of interaction that you have to receive this kind of validation feedback is to record the calls, have a good AI assistant to take the notes, and then it's going to be so much easier.
The process is quite simple. It's to identify the people and then set up maybe one day where you run different conversations with different people or on different days. It really depends on the people's availability. That's agenda management.
But then there is, of course, I always ask some specific questions. I'm not going to say here the exact script that I use. But usually what I recommend is if you are in the really early days of the startup, you want to validate also the problem, not only the solution.
So usually I say to people that the best thing is to start from the problem and then eventually you can introduce the solution. Or sometimes you can have a completely different conversation about the solution. So today you have the conversation only about the problem and in one month you talk with the same person to show what you are thinking to solve that problem, your solution.
Sometimes it's not possible and you can add, you can talk about the solution in the same call. But try to not talk immediately about the solution. I know that's hard. The founders are thinking, oh, I have the perfect solution. I need to talk about this. But usually I see that it is really beneficial to talk about the problem first and validate the problem.
Because I've seen cases where the founder is thinking about the problem in one way. That is not how people feel. The people that are in the market that are the potential customers. So I'll do that. It's, talk about the problem. Only ask things about the problem.
Like what you are feeling when you are doing X that you intend to solve. Where do you go to solve this? Try to understand what people are doing today that you feel is not the best solution, but try to go to all the details. And only then you introduce your solution and try to see how they feel about your solution.
Somewhere in the middle or at the end, then it really depends on the order that you want to bring to the call. But I also like to ask about things like where you go to search for these kinds of solutions. Or where do you spend your life online? Things like that. To start understanding how I'm going to find more people like that person. If that person is the audience that I want to attract, I want to find more people like that.
And so the best person to answer me this and to inform me about this is in fact that person that is right in that conversation. Usually I try to ask those questions and also inform my marketing strategy and not try to invent the will. Because marketing, basically one of [the] roles of marketing is to go where people are. And if you have that person there, that person probably knows a bit better than you were. You can find more people like that.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It's funny. You're asking them where they hang out online and they're like, oh, I go on Reddit to find these solutions. And you hear that multiple times. Like, “well, Reddit might be a great paid channel for us once we get this solution off the ground.”
Felipe Castro Matos
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
And it's just from having those conversations and talking to the right people. Do you often... Are you ever asking a question like, how much would you pay for a solution like this without even introducing a solution?
Felipe Castro Matos
Sometimes, yes. Once again, not right in the beginning of the call, but in the end, when I'm already talking about the solution, that's something that we can ask. I don't see big harm [in] asking that. Maybe there are other ways to validate the pricing, but pricing is a hard thing to guess immediately. What I see is that many times you are testing pricing for months until you guess what is the perfect pricing.
But yeah, it's possible to ask in those first conversations. I'll just leave that for the end of the conversation and not ask you right in the beginning.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. So you have all these conversations with potential customers and or real customers at the beginning of starting to build out this go-to-market strategy. And then from that, you learn in their voice, their pain points, what this solution should be solving. And I'm assuming you just start to flip that information from their voice into something a little more generic to build out your ICP, your ideal customer profile.
And then from there, start to build campaigns around [it]. This is where they'll be and this is maybe the pain point or this is what we should focus on for this particular advertising campaign? Is that the next step?
Felipe Castro Matos
More or less, I would say. So yes, after the conversations, basically, you're going to digest all the information. So that's why AI can help you a lot.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
Felipe Castro Matos
Because it's so much easier to digest everything. And yeah, before going to the channels, you want to build your positioning and your messaging. I love the conversations with the potential customers because many times they say a sentence that could be your copy for the website, for example. And it's, I copy what they told me in the call. I don't need to invent the copy. [I] don't need to change.
Chase Clymer
No editing. You're like, that is it. Copy and paste.
Felipe Castro Matos
Yeah, exactly. That's it. And so basically, [you] need to digest that. And you're gonna start identifying some patterns, seven out of the 10 people always mention this specific thing, always tell this in this particular way. And you see, okay, I need to talk like these guys. So I'm gonna use this in my copy, not only in the website, but also in paid ads or in social media or in a blog, in any kind of channel.
I'm going to use that positioning and that messaging that I found through customer conversations. So that would be the second step is to digest everything and build that. Don't just leave the notes somewhere. Build a document with a written positioning, some messages that you can use based on those conversations, and then you can go to the channels.
Usually, I don't recommend going directly to paid ads because I feel that you need to test organically before going to a paid channel. But like other people probably disagree with me, so I'm OK with that. I know that e-commerce in the past, like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, was a really common strategy going directly to paid ads.
And I understand that because it was way cheaper. [It’s] way cheaper doing that at that time than it is today. Today, there are lots of challenges, not only with the price, but also with privacy issues, with paid ads. You know way more things about the people 10 years ago than today. And also people are tired of ads. And of course, more companies are using ads as an acquisition strategy to the event nearly 15 years ago.
So I'll be careful, but of course you can try paid ads. But only after getting the message in the positioning that I talked about before. Because that's going to be, I'm sure that it will bring you better results because you already have some message that was approved by potential customers from your conversations.
So the process would be that. Talking to customers, build your positioning or messaging notes that you're going to use then go directly to those channels and test that message out there. It is outreach. I know that with e-commerce, it's not that common to do cold outreach, but it works. yeah, like on social media, on paid ads.
You test that message and prove if it's working or not. Sometimes it doesn't work even after those conversations. But you are closer to that than without doing any kind of conversations before.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. Now, Felipe, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience today?
Felipe Castro Matos
I'm not thinking about a specific question. But I can talk about the good things that I see with e-commerce that I don't see so much with other types of products that I also work with. So I work a lot with software as a service products and I see a big difference between those two. So e-commerce is great because it's direct to consumer and usually the founders try to build a brand as well around that product.
I feel that today, more than ever, building a brand is a great asset and is really, really important for your success. So for e-commerce founders, please continue doing that because I feel that it's a big differentiator against other alternatives. That's my experience also with one of the e-commerce companies that I work with, the one that I mentioned before.
It was already somehow successful. We started getting some copycats coming from China and countries like that. But we had something that they didn't have.That was the brand. So that didn't affect our success a lot because we had the brand also feeding our strategy and not only the product that was good and the other guys had the exact same product. That was quite simple, but they didn't have the brand.
So my recommendation would be to continue investing in the brand. And if you are not doing that yet, please do because that's important and I feel it's more important than ever. Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Felipe, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Felipe Castro Matos
Thank you.
Chase Clymer
If people want to get a hold of you online, where should they go? What should they do?
Felipe Castro Matos
So I'll say that the best place today is LinkedIn. You can connect me on LinkedIn. You can search me with Felipe Castro Matos. And yeah, connect with me, send me a message.
If you are a founder, many times I talk with founders. So you can send me a message and you can set up a call. And I can try to help you in any way. And yeah, I say that's my only place right now to find me.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. We'll make sure to link to your LinkedIn. In the show notes, Felipe, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Felipe Castro Matos
Thank you. Thank you, Chase.
Transcript
