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Key Takeaways

Ranking the order history first beats brainstorming, because real purchases reveal demand that meetings can’t.

Cap your own judgment calls in advance, or the result drifts back toward your taste.

Most product ideas start in a meeting. Someone has a hunch, the team falls in love with it and the customer gets a vote only after the money is spent.

That sequence is expensive. When CB Insights studied 431 venture-backed startups that have shut down since 2023, poor product-market fit was cited in 43% of failures it could trace. Plenty of companies already hold a better source of truth than any brainstorm: their own order history.

At Scento , the Paris-based company I founded in 2024, we hand-pour perfume decants, small vials filled from original bottles, and sell more than 3 million of them a year, one every 10 seconds. Every one of those decants is a vote somebody paid to cast.…