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Kindle Notes & Highlights
On a personal note, I really feel that third factor is important; it’s worth choosing customers you admire and enjoy being around. This stuff is hard work and can be a real grind if you’re cynical about the people or the industry you’re trying to understand and serve.
Don’t fall into the trap of only talking to the most senior or important people you can find. You want to talk to people who are representative of your customers, not the ones who sound impressive on your status report.
A common anti-pattern is for the business guy to go to all the meetings and subsequently tell the rest of the team what they should do. Bad idea.
The most extreme way to bottleneck is to go to the meetings alone and take crappy notes which you don’t review with your team. At that point, your head has become the ultimate repository of customer truth and everyone just has to do what you say.
To deal with working remotely at FounderCentric, we keep a chat window open exclusively for sharing our customer learnings whenever we finish a meeting.
Meetings go best when you’ve got two people at them. One person can focus on taking notes and the other can focus on talking. As the second person, you may notice the lead asking bad questions or missing a signal they should be digging into. Just jump in and fix them.
If you’re shy and have no cofounder to take the lead, call in a favour with a friend to come to your first couple conversations with you. Play the more passive role of the note-taker until you’re comfortable.
Taking good notes is the best way to keep your team (and investors and advisors) in the loop. Plus, notes make it harder to lie to yourself.
When I first started, I would make audio recordings, but that suffered from the same problem as notebooks: I’d end up with a ton of content and no real way to sort it or find the bit I wanted.
