>When you’re building the product the trick is to build your product almost alongside your first customers
I agree with you up to a point. Real customer use cases are important and good references are gold--both for getting other customers and for getting onto some analyst radars. However, it's important not to pivot towards building what a customer wants so much that you basically end up being a consulting company doing a bunch of one offs. (Assuming that's not what you want of course.)
Of course - you'd want to do validation with 4 or 5 companies, and identify common pain points, as well as separating 'nice to haves' from 'table stakes'.
Usually by the time you've done 3 or 4 calls with customers in a good target segment, you start to hear some common themes again and again. As you say though, you have to avoid the temptation to wrap yourself around the weird edge cases of one customer (especially if that customer is a 'big fish').
I agree with you up to a point. Real customer use cases are important and good references are gold--both for getting other customers and for getting onto some analyst radars. However, it's important not to pivot towards building what a customer wants so much that you basically end up being a consulting company doing a bunch of one offs. (Assuming that's not what you want of course.)