Building Products Around Real Customer Needs | Filipe Castro Matos | Altar.io | Bonus Episode

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 https://www.youtube.com/c/HonestEcommerce?sub_confirmation=1 Digital products for entrepreneurs and business leaders: https://altar.io/us/ Follow Filipe Castro Matos https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipecastromatos If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews! Review Link: https://getpodcast.reviews/id/1447700156 Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast, community & educational resource providing online store owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business. Visit https://honestecommerce.com/ for more information. Or get all our content sent directly to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter: https://honestecommerce.com/pages/newsletter