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In MENA’s relationship-based business culture, everyone has opinions about your startup. Family members think you should pivot to e-commerce. Friends think you should add AI features. Advisors think you should expand to more markets. The challenge is figuring out which feedback actually matters. Here’s a simple rule: the only feedback that matters is from people who will pay for your product. Not people who might pay, not people who should pay, not people who say they would pay—people who are actually willing to give you money in exchange for solving their problem.
The Hierarchy of Feedback
  1. Paying customers (highest priority)
  2. People who tried to pay but couldn’t (technical issues, payment methods, etc.)
  3. Active users who haven’t paid yet
  4. People who tried your product once
  5. People who expressed interest but never tried it
  6. Everyone else (lowest priority)
This doesn’t mean you should ignore all other feedback, but you should weight it appropriately. A paying customer’s complaint about a missing feature matters more than a dozen survey responses from non-customers saying they want that feature. A user who churned after one month can teach you more about product-market fit than an advisor who’s never used your product.

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The Uncle Test

In many MENA families, there’s always an uncle who made money in real estate or trading and now considers himself a business expert. He’ll have strong opinions about your startup, usually involving suggestions to make it more like whatever business he understands. This dynamic exists beyond family—mentors, advisors, and even investors often push startups toward business models they’re familiar with rather than business models that make sense for the specific problem being solved. The “uncle test” is whether you can defend your strategy against well-meaning but misguided advice from people who don’t understand your market. The best defense is data from real customers. When someone suggests you pivot to enterprise sales, you can show them usage data from small business customers. When someone suggests you expand to ten countries, you can show them unit economics from your current market. Data from real usage trumps opinions from observers.
The Three-Question Defense When someone gives you strategic advice, ask them:
  1. “Have you talked to our customers about this?”
  2. “What data are you basing this recommendation on?”
  3. “What would need to be true for this advice to be wrong?”
Most bad advice crumbles under these simple questions.