Built on Feedback, Not Features with Keith Peiris

On this episode of the Predictable Revenue Podcast, hosted by Collin Stewart with guest Keith Peiris, co-founder/CEO of Lightfield, we discuss moves you can apply now.

You’ll learn how to: identify what’s truly breaking in your users’ workflow, sell it yourself from $0–$1M, validate product-market fit with retention/referrals/expansion, grow through relationships (not rigid funnels), and build a CRM that serves reps first so reporting becomes exhausting.

Use it like a checklist. Ship one change this week that removes real pain, and let the compounding begin.

Start with what breaks.

Your first idea won’t fail politely. It will stall your users in obvious places: missed follow-ups, scattered notes, and handoffs that drop deals on the floor. That’s where you start. Don’t add more features. Sit with the work. Watch three real customers use your product for an hour each. Capture exact moments of friction, where they hesitate, switch tabs, or make a face. Those are the breaks.

Then narrow the promise until it hurts. One clear sentence your product keeps every time, something like “You will never miss a follow-up again.” If a feature doesn’t serve that promise, it waits. This is the difference between shipping novelty and removing pain. When you cut scope this aggressively, you earn shorter cycles: smaller builds, faster validation, cleaner signals.

Trade for truth. 

Offer hands-on setup, personal onboarding, or your own time in exchange for unfiltered feedback. Don’t ask what they want, ask them to show you where they lost 10 minutes today. Fix that. Ship the smallest change that erases the biggest pain, then measure what matters: repeat usage, task completion without workarounds, and whether new users show up because current users brought them.

You’ll know you’re on track when your roadmap gets quieter, not louder. The product gets simpler, the value prop gets sharper, and conversations shift from “Can it do X?” to “It already solved Y.” If you don’t see that shift, good, you just found the next break to chase. Keep listening, keep cutting, keep shipping. The path to product-market fit isn’t paved with ideas; it’s cleared by removing what gets in the customer’s way.

Founders are the first sales team

From $0 to $1M, your job isn’t “vision”, it’s conversations. The fastest way to learn what sells is to sell it yourself. Book the calls, run the demos, do the onboarding, and answer support at 10 p.m. You’re not just closing revenue, you’re collecting the language, objections, and workflows that will shape your product and your future playbook.

Trade value for access. 

Offer hands-on setup, custom workflows, or your own time in exchange for unfiltered feedback and a real commitment. When you personally deliver outcomes, migrating data, wiring a key integration, writing the first playbooks, you learn which promises land and which ones create support debt. That knowledge is impossible to outsource early.

Treat every call like R&D. 

Capture the exact words prospects use to describe their pains. Turn objections into spec changes. If three customers ask for the same thing, either build it or rewrite your pitch so you’re not selling what you don’t have. And make every conversation end with a clear next step: calendar invite sent, pilot start date, success criteria defined. No “circle backs.”

Instrument the process just enough to see reality: what created the meeting, which promise won the trial, where deals stall, who referred whom. Keep the tools simple, so you keep them updated. The signal you’re looking for isn’t a perfect dashboard; it’s momentum, shorter cycles, warmer intros, and customers who bring you more customers. When that happens, you’ll know you’ve got something worth handing to a team. Until then, it’s you.

PMF isn’t a finish line

Usage can fool you. People will click around, try features, even praise your product, and still churn next quarter. Product-market fit shows up in quieter, harder signals: they keep using it, they expand, and they bring friends.

Anchor on retention first. Pick a meaningful “core action” (e.g., deals updated weekly, follow-ups sent on time) and track cohorts over 30/60/90 days. If the curve flattens above zero, users are still doing the thing without hand-holding. You’re solving a durable problem. If it decays, you’ve got novelty, not fit. Don’t celebrate MAUs, celebrate the workflows that stick when you stop nudging.

Referrals are the second truth. 

When customers invite colleagues, introduce you in their Slack, or add you to their onboarding checklist, that’s PMF you didn’t have to advertise. Make it easy to happen (clear invite flows, shareable templates, light partner docs) and instrument it so you can see which behaviors precede a referral. In healthy systems, value creates conversation, conversation creates introductions, and introductions compound.

Expansion is your tiebreaker. 

Do accounts add seats, connect more integrations, or entrust more of their process to you after 60 days? Expansion without discounts means you’re moving from “nice to have” to “we run on this.” If expansion isn’t happening, ask why: Is the promise too narrow? Are adjacent workflows still painful? Fix the next bottleneck in the chain.

Treat PMF like a living contract. 

Re-validate it every release: same cohorts, same core action, same referral and expansion signals. When those numbers hold or rise, ship more. When they slip, stop adding features and go back to the breakpoints. PMF isn’t the tape at the end of the race; it’s the ground you have to keep maintaining so the race can continue.

Relationships over funnels

Funnels help you count; relationships help you compound. In the early days, treat every customer like a long-term partner, not a lead to push through stages. That shift changes how you spend time: fewer scripted demos, more joint working sessions; fewer “Are you ready to buy?” emails, more “Can we sit with your team and fix this workflow on Tuesday?” The goal isn’t to accelerate someone through your pipeline. It’s to make them successful enough that they never want to go back to life without you.

Start by writing a success plan with each early user. Define one business outcome they care about, one workflow you’ll fix, and one date to review results. Ship what’s required to hit that outcome, even if it means hand-rolling an integration or personally migrating their data. When customers feel you’re invested in their wins, they invest back: deeper usage, candid feedback, and introductions you can’t buy. That is organic growth: not a tactic, a byproduct of real outcomes.

Build a small community around the work. 

Keep a lightweight Slack or monthly office hours where early users compare notes, share templates, and show off how they use your product. Your job is to facilitate, not pitch. Listen for patterns, turn them into product changes or guides, and spotlight customer wins publicly. Every story you publish is a relationship asset, proof that the product delivers, and a magnet for the next right customer.

Replace rigid stage gates with a simple operating cadence: hands-on onboarding, a 2-week check-in tied to the promised outcome, a 45-day review on adoption, and a recurring call only if both sides see compounding value. Capture everything you learn in plain language, top use cases, exact phrases customers use, the moments they get stuck, and feed it back into the product, the website, and your demos. Over time, you’ll notice that deals move faster, not because you pushed harder, but because prospects recognize themselves in the stories your customers tell.

When relationships lead, the metrics follow: higher retention, warmer referrals, and expansions that don’t require discounts. Keep your funnel, sure, but let your users be the engine.

Build for reps, not reports.

If your CRM slows reps down, your data will always be wrong, because reps won’t use it. That’s the root failure of management-first tools: they optimize for dashboards rather than daily work. Flip the priority. Design the CRM like a personal productivity app that just happens to produce perfect reporting as a byproduct. When reps can capture context in one place, update deals without ceremony, and trust the system to remember what’s next, adoption becomes intrinsic, and accurate data follows.

Start with the minute-to-minute reality of selling. 

A rep is juggling call notes, inbox, calendar, and follow-ups while trying to stay present with the customer. Your CRM should collapse those contexts: log calls and emails automatically, summarize threads into next steps, suggest the next best follow-up with a draft the rep can send in two clicks. Keyboard-first navigation, instant search, and zero-latency edits matter more than any other field on the opportunity. Every extra click is a tax you pay later in the form of missing data and lost revenue.

Measure productivity, not form fills. 

Track time-to-first-note for new leads, percentage of activities auto-captured, coverage of “next step + date” across open deals, and follow-up SLA adherence. If these improve, pipeline quality improves, without begging. Reporting should read like a byproduct of good habits: complete timelines, current stages, and clean next actions. If you’re forcing reps to feed the dashboard, you’ve already lost.

Implement change the way you sell: by removing pain. 

Don’t migrate every field. Migrate the minimum to run today’s deals. Ship a “shadow mode” that mirrors their current workflow but removes steps. Replace status meetings with the CRM’s shared view of what’s blocked and why. Celebrate reps who close loops faster, not those who log the most activities. When the tool helps them hit quota with less effort, you won’t need a compliance policy; you’ll have a preference.

Build for reps, and you’ll earn the right to manage. Build for management, and you’ll be managing around the tool forever.

Conclusion

If you take one thing from this episode with Collin Stewart and Keith Peiris, make it this: traction comes from removing pain, not adding features. Sit with real users, narrow the promise, sell it yourself, and measure PMF in retention, referrals, and expansion. Build relationships that create outcomes, not pipelines that create reports. And when you choose tools, bias toward the rep’s workflow so that good data becomes the exhaust of productive work.

Pick one move this week, fix a real break, run three founder-led calls, or ship a change that shortens a critical workflow. Then watch for the only signals that matter: they keep using it, they bring friends, and they grow with you. That’s progress you can bank.

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