Business and Sales · Tabnews · 🇧🇷 Brazil
Discovering the problem wasn't the model, it was the question asked to customers
An entrepreneur improved a demand forecasting model, but only made progress in sales after changing the question asked to customers.
- Profession
- Entrepreneur, Data Scientist
- Tools
- Machine learning, Python
- Source
- tabnews.com.br ↗
- Country
- 🇧🇷 Brazil
- Report date
- September 9, 2026
- Verified on
- October 24, 2026
What they did
He built a demand forecasting model and went out prospecting for customers.
How it went
The error (WAPE) dropped from 44% to 31%, but 160 direct messages resulted in zero customers. The turning point came when he asked about the customer's pain, not about the model.
Good to know
Validating the problem before the technology saves months.
The prompt
I'm going to interview owners of [type of business]. Write 8 open-ended questions about how they decide on [inventory/purchasing] today, without mentioning my product, and 3 signs that the pain is real.
Replace what is in [brackets]. Prompt written by us from the account, not a literal copy of the source. Do not paste other people’s personal data (privacy laws such as LGPD and GDPR apply).
Summary in our own words. Results as stated in the original account; we have not tested or audited them. Read the source ↗ Found a mistake?
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