Most aspiring startup founders take completely the wrong approach when it comes to courting investors, according to Alistair Croll, an emerging technologies expert and noted author. He’s worked with myriad startup accelerators and learned that venture capitalists aren’t as concerned about whether you can build what you’ve suggested. They’d rather know whether anyone will really care if you do.

“This idea that ‘if you build it they will come’ is wrong. … Instead, think ‘if they come you will build it’,” Croll said during our interview at this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin. He was in town leading a workshop about advanced social media monitoring, and as a social software reviewer, I  wanted to know more about it.

The idea is based on a concept called the “Lean Startup,” coined by famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries. He advocates that companies go out and test the riskiest part of their business first, then learn from those results before spending a bunch of money building out the idea. Croll and his co-author Ben Yoskovitz recently published a book called “Lean Analytics” that describes how you find the data to support this learning cycle.

“When you are an early stage company, you often don’t know what business you are in,” Croll said. Instead, many companies really grow up into their business model based on how customers end up using their service or product. Flickr, for example, started out as a massively multiplayer online game – users starting uploading photos and eventually that evolved into the photo-sharing site they are today.

Thanks to the swath of data now available, entrepreneurs now have more insight into what markets exist. As a result, they can speed growth with less risk. In the video interview below, Croll describes further how startups can use social media and other data to empower growth in this way. Chime into the conversation with a comment below.

About Ashley Verrill

Ashley Verrill is a market analyst at Software Advice. She has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising. She is a University of Texas graduate with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.