Christie Kaplan is the founder of Startup Design Partners, a design-led venture studio that helps early-stage teams go from chaos to clarity, before they waste six months building the wrong thing.

In this episode, Christie and Josh dive into the real work of product design: making hard decisions, listening well, and separating signal from noise when everyone just wants to be polite.

This is a crash course in how to lead with empathy, think like a researcher, and stop mistaking “busy” for “validated.”

Some things you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why most founders fake validation without realizing it
• How to use the Five Whys to uncover real user pain
• The biggest misconception about product-market fit that founders get wrong
• What Christie means when she says “design is an investor’s greatest insurance policy”
• How to course-correct founders who are building the wrong thing (without killing their momentum)
• The biggest emotional trap early-stage teams fall into
• Why user surveys are almost always misleading—and what to do instead
• The truth about founder mental health, decision fatigue, and building an MVP that actually resonates

Christie’s not only a designer. She’s a venture strategist, a founder psychologist, and an artist capturing the emotional truth of startup life.

If you’re a founder, product lead, or operator building through the fog, this one will hit home.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.