More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
However, the big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late.
But when I asked him what the implications were, he sort of shrugged and said “Oh, we just ended up throwing a bunch of interns at the problem—it’s actually working pretty well.”
Rule of thumb: Some problems don’t actually matter.
Rule of thumb: If they haven't looked for ways of solving it already, they're not going to look for (or buy) yours.
Often, you'll find yourself talking to someone other than the budget owner. Your future pitches will hit unseen snags unless you learn who else matters and what they care about.
"Who else should I talk to?" Good question. Yes! End every conversation like this. Lining up the first few conversations can be challenging,
One of the recurring “criticisms” about talking to customers is that you’re abdicating your creative vision and building your product by committee. Given that people don’t know what they want, that wouldn’t be a terribly effective approach. Deciding what to build is your job.
boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.
Most of your meetings will end with a compliment. It feels good. They said they liked it! Unfortunately, they’re almost certainly lying. Not necessarily intentionally.
Fluff comes in 3 cuddly shapes: Generic claims (“I usually”, “I always”, “I never”) Future-tense promises (“I would”, “I will”) Hypothetical maybes (“I might”, “I could”)
The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.” It just sounds so concrete.
They had asked for analytics. We had jumped to the conclusion that they wanted to better understand their data. But they had really just wanted a way to keep their own clients happy.
And instead of a self-serve dashboard, we could set up a little scheduler to send it to them every Friday.
When you hear a request, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause. Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature? Dig.
Symptoms of Fishing For Compliments: “I’m thinking of starting a business... so, do you think it will work?” “I had an awesome idea for an app — do you like it?”
To deal with The Pathos Problem, keep the conversation focused on the other person and ask about specific, concrete cases and examples. Once someone detects that your ego is on the line, they’ll give you fluffy mis-truths and extra compliments.
Rule of thumb: If you’ve mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings.
“Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer” is generally a good quality for a founder to have. But when it creeps into a conversation that’s meant to be about learning, it works against you.
After you introduce your idea (either intentionally or accidentally), they’re going to begin a sentence with something like “So it’s similar to…” or “I like it but…” You will be hugely tempted to interrupt and “fix” their understanding.
In each case, the customer was about to give you a privileged glimpse into their mental model of the world. Losing that learning is a shame. You’ll have the chance to fill them in later.
If you get an unexpected answer to a question and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing, it wasn’t a terribly important question to begin with.
Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? Customer/market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them? You can’t overlook either one.
The founders take this as strong validation (“They have the problem and committed to pay!”) without recognising that the vast majority of the risk is in the product, not the market.
Video games are pure product risk. What sort of question could you ask to validate your game idea? “Do you like having fun? Would you like to have even more fun?” Practically 100% of the risk is in the product and almost none is in the customer.
What all this does mean is that if you’ve got heavy product risk (as opposed to pure market risk), then you’re not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations alone.
Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person (e.g. customers, investors, industry experts, key hires, etc). Update the list as your questions change.
The time cost of a 1-hour meeting is more like 4 hours once you factor in the calendar dance, commuting, and reviewing.
Let’s say I’m trying to build tools to help public speakers get more speaking gigs and I bump into one at a conference. I’m not going to try to set up a meeting. Instead, I’m just going to immediately transition into my most important question: “Hey, I’m curious—how did you end up getting this gig?”
Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting.
If it feels like they’re doing you a favour by talking to you, it’s probably too formal.
Once you have a product and the meetings take on a more sales-oriented feel, you’ll want to start carving out clear blocks of 30ish minutes. You might lose 5 minutes due to miscellaneous tardiness, spend 5 minutes saying hello, 5 minutes asking questions to understand their goals/problems/budget, 10 minutes to show/describe the product, and the last 5 minutes figuring out next steps and advancement. That's your half hour.
When you fail to push for advancement, you end up with zombie leads: potential customers (or investors) who keep taking meetings and saying nice things, but who never seem to cut a check. It’s like your startup has been friend-zoned.
It took me years to learn that there’s no such thing as a meeting which just “went well”. Every meeting either succeeds or fails.
First customers are crazy. Crazy in a good way. They really, really want what you’re making. They want it so badly that they’re willing to be the crazy person who tries it first.
In the enterprise software world, they are the people who: Have the problem Know they have the problem Have the budget to solve the problem Have already cobbled together their own makeshift solution They’re the company who will commit way before it makes rational sense to do so.
Firstly, when someone isn’t too emotional about what you’re doing, they are unlikely to end up being one of your crazy first customers. Keep them on the list and try to make them happy, of course, but don’t count on them to write the first check. Secondly, whenever you see the deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close.
The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them.
The practical downside is that no matter how well the chat goes, it’s impossible to transition into a product or sales conversation, since doing so reveals your initial deception and destroys trust. When I open with an excuse, I tend to consider the chat to be a throwaway for one-time learning instead of an ongoing relationship.
relied heavily on advisors in my first company. We didn’t know the industry and nobody took us seriously. Our 5 advisors each had around a half percent of equity and basically just made credible intros. I met with each once per month, so I’d get a fresh batch of intros weekly without it being a huge time burden for any of them.
Warm intros mean the person wants to give you the benefit of the doubt, but is still terrified you’re going to waste their time with a vague, chit-chatty meeting.
I don’t think the added volume is worth the information you lose by not being in the room. I get confused enough by what people are telling me in person. Losing access to their face and body language feels like shooting myself in the foot.
The same is decidedly not true on the phone or Skype. People try to squeeze calls in between other activities, wondering how quickly they can “finish with business” and hang up.
Willpower is a finite resource. The way to overcome difficult situations isn’t to power through, but rather to change your circumstances to require less willpower.
The UX community (who knows their customer conversation!) says you should keep talking to people until you stop hearing new information.
If you’ve run more than 10 conversations and are still getting results that are all over the map, then it’s possible that your customer segment is too vague, which means you’re mashing together feedback from multiple different types of customers.
When you have a fuzzy sense of who you’re serving, you end up talking to a multiple customer segments all at once, which leads to confusing signals and three problems: You get overwhelmed by options and don’t know where to start You aren’t moving forward but can’t prove yourself wrong You receive mixed feedback and can’t make sense of
However, she was running in circles because the bodybuilders wanted one thing, the restaurants wanted another, and the moms needed a third. Making one of them happy always disappointed the others. She didn’t know how to start.
But when we’re in the moment, choosing a really specific customer segment just feels like we’re losing all the other options. And that loss is painful. Remind yourself that you’ll get to the whole world eventually. But you’ve got to start somewhere specific.
Start with any segment and then keep slicing off better and better sub-sets of it until you’ve got a tangible sense of who you can go talk to and where you can find them.
Within this group, which type of person would want it most? Would everyone within this group buy/use it, or only some? Why does that sub-set want it? (e.g. what is their specific problem) Does everyone in the group have that motivation or only some? What additional motivations are there? Which other types of people have these motivations?
