You have a great product idea and you pitched it to potential investors only to get very little support or no real dollars.

That rejection stings.

Trust me, this could be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Here’s an opportunity to get creative and scrappy and to learn as much as you can about your customers so you can create the best experience for them.

One of the things I’ve learned as a UX Designer and Researcher is that a lot of the time, companies miss the mark in knowing exactly who their customers are. When you don’t know your customer it leads to all kinds of business and marketing mistakes.

So what’s my advice?

Do what Stuart Landesberg did. When he was rejected by several investors to fund his idea for a sustainable living startup, he got creative and scrappy. He bought a stack of $5 Starbucks gift cards and spent his time soliciting feedback about his pitch deck from hundreds of potential customers for a year and a half. The result was a game-changer for him. He refined his target customer, he found he was wrong about who he thought it was it was actually a much bigger market. He changed the company, to be more aligned with what users said they wanted from a sustainable company. He even refined his marketing strategy as a result of the feedback he got. Today his company Grove Collaborative is valued at $1Billion after securing his latest round of funding.

My final piece of advice is for you to fall in love with talking to your customers. Learn as much as you can about who is willing to use your product/service, how they want to use it and where.

Make sure the idea you have in your head is aligned with who would actually pay for your product or service. As the old saying goes, you don’t even know what you don’t know. Never be afraid to talk to your potential or existing customers. Do it as often as you can. It’s an investment that can help you turn that rejection into a win.