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Uber Conquering San Francisco: Involving Travis in the Operation - The Upstarts - Podcast Challenge
Transcription:
We know that zooming prematurely and introducing your idea too early creates biases and can get you stuck on a local maximum. In his original book on Customer Development, 4 Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank solves this by recommending 3 separate meetings: the first about the customer and their problem; the second about your solution; and the third to sell a product. By splitting the meetings, you avoid the premature zoom and biasing them with your ideas.
In practice, however, I’ve found it both difficult and inefficient to set them up. The time cost of a 1-hour meeting is more like 4 hours once you factor in the calendar dance, commuting, and reviewing. It’s also a big time commitment to ask from the customer before you’re in a position to show them anything in return.
When you strip all the formality from the process, you end up with no meetings, no interview questions, and a much easier time. The conversations become so fast and lightweight that you can go to a industry meet-up and leave with a dozen customer conversations under your belt, each of which provided as much value as a formal meeting.
The structure of separate problem/solution/sales conversations is critical for avoiding bias, but it’s important to realize that the first one doesn’t actually need to be a meeting.
Rule of thumb: Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting.
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Transcription:
Being pitchy is the dark side of the “seeking approval” coin. Instead of inviting compliments by being vulnerable, you’re demanding them by being annoying. It’s when you hold someone hostage and won’t let them leave until they’ve said they like your idea. Normally, compliments are well intentioned. In this case, they’re just trying to get you out of their office.
“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.
Symptoms:
- “No no, I don’t think you get it...”
- “Yes, but it also does this!”
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Transcription:
They say that to bankrupt a fool, give him information. Practically everyone I’ve seen talk to customers (including myself) has been giving themselves bad information. You probably are too. Bad data gives us false negatives (thinking the idea is dead when it’s not) and—more dangerously—false positives (convincing yourself you’re right when you’re not).
There are three types of bad data:
1. Compliments
2. Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future)
3. Ideas
Sometimes we invite the bad data ourselves by asking the wrong questions, but even when you try to follow The Mom Test, conversations still go off track. It could happen because you got excited and started pitching, because you had to talk about your idea to explain the reason for the meeting, or because the conversation is just stuck in hypothetical la-la-land.
These things happen. Once you start to notice, it’s easy to get back on track by deflecting compliments, anchoring fluff, and digging beneath ideas.
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Transcription
The measure of the usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers' lives and world views. These facts, in turn, allow us to improve our business.
Our original idea looked like this: old people like cookbooks and iPads. Therefore, we will build a cookbook for the iPad. It’s generic. There are a thousand possible variations of this premise.
With an idea this vague, we can’t answer any of the difficult questions like which recipes to include or how people will hear about it. Until we get specific, it always seems like a good idea.
After just one conversation (with our mom, of all people), we have a higher fidelity vision. We now see that there are at least 2 specific customer segments we might serve, each of which needs a slightly different product. We’ve also identified some major risks to address before we commit too heavily.
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