Create, communicate, deliver value.
My first goal as a college senior was to have the kind of job where I would never have to wear a tie. Achievement unlocked. But that didn’t really get to the core of the issue. I was really trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. A person who helps customers every day was the answer. Continue reading “The first goal is to keep learning”
A couple of years ago, my wife started a donut business. Her purpose was simple: make delicious vegan and gluten-free food that people liked for a reasonable price. She test marketed batches of donuts, did some product-market fit work by selling in batches to friends, and then opened a market stall in a farmer’s market with her business partner. The business did well – they got repeat customers, sold lots of donuts, and became known at several farmer’s markets around Seattle. Yet the business wasn’t making money.
Donuts, it turns, out, are expensive when you don’t mass-produce them (and even then, you have to price them to match the expectations of the market). The component ingredients – fair trade cocoa, non-GMO soybean oil, organic sugar – and the permit fees and daily costs made the business more expensive to run than people wanted to pay for the end product. We still enjoy the donuts when my wife chooses to make them (like today). But she decided to end the business because running a business wasn’t the reason she got started making donuts, and the choices that she had to make to sell more product required changing the business so much it wasn’t recognizable.
Successful businesses deliver delight to their customers while managing to adapt to the changing business itself. When you look at the example of producing specialty donuts, you have a challenging environment (special ingredients, limited product life, and specialized demand from a certain kind of customer). If you focus on the variables you can control – how to cap the costs of the special ingredients, what to do to extend the product life, and how to market the product to a wider audience and get mass appeal – you can make that business bigger.
The business of producing frozen donuts in a mass-produced model didn’t match the original vision of delivering delicious food in person to a clientele that didn’t have a place to get tasty treats. My wife wanted to look the customer in the eye and hear their stories in person – and they were great stories! But you can only eat so many donuts. Donuts do make everything better, but you can’t eat them every day.
If the original model had looked more like a frozen food business, it might have been more successful as a business, but wouldn’t have been anything like the experience of hand crafting food delights to an underserved customer that really appreciated that product (and told you so in person). Adapting to the changing business is the real challenge – maintaining the spirit of the idea while scaling the delight.
This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.
When was the last time you were right? Absolutely, positively certain with no chance of being wrong. Now, think of the last time you knew you had the answer, and someone asked you to be right? How did that feel?
If there’s one lesson I could share with young entrepreneurs (and with my younger self), it would be that you should only try to be right when someone asks you for that absolutely certain answer. The rest of the time, be nice – wait for your moment until you get asked the question you’ve been anticipating.
Can you gather facts? Sure. Can you prepare persuasive arguments? Absolutely. And until someone’s listening, those facts and arguments don’t matter much.
Being right doesn’t prove you’re smart – it often proves that you are impatient and can’t wait for the right moment to make your point and back it up with the information the other person or people need to understand. Being right also doesn’t make you right in a given situation (sounds strange, right?)
Compare and contrast the feeling of blurting out the right answer in a crowd that hasn’t asked for it yet against the feeling of being just the right person to answer just the right question at the moment it’s asked. Answering the call for an important question can be an amazing feeling – you get to show how smart you are, you know you’re solving an important problem, and you know someone actually wants to hear the answer.
Wait, you say. Aren’t some of the most important questions the ones that haven’t yet been asked? Yep. That’s true also. And if you can manage to lead an individual, a group, or an audience to ask you the question that you know how to answer and help them to feel that it’s their question? That’s charisma – the ability to lead and inspire without the implication of being a know-it-all – and it’s a great goal to pursue.
There are other lessons young entrepreneurs need to learn. These are ideas like “do more of what you love,” “hang out with lots of smart people and interesting things will happen,” and “don’t spend too much time at big companies without also talking to people at small companies.” You’ll find lots of these ideas (and the ones that work for you) by continuing to learn and meet new people.
When you meet new people and want them to listen to your ideas, answer the questions they ask. If they haven’t answered the question you wanted to ask yet, guide them to ask it. You’ll be happier when you see the spark in their eyes as you enthusiastically answer the right question.
This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.
This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.
People are not effective at self-reporting, or letting you know what they will do with your product when you’re not there to help them. Often, customers will tell you that they are going to take action or that they “like” something. And then it doesn’t get done. It’s easier to appease and give positive feedback (“it’s great!”) than to tell you it’s awful or give you specific, constructive advice.
How do you discover what people – and in this case, your customers – really want? To understand what customers want, you need to put a feedback machine in motion and continue to test what you learn over time. As the flywheel for feedback begins to turn, you’ll get more data, which will allow you to test and change faster.
Here’s what one feedback machine looks like: Ask, Observe, and Track.
You can talk to customers, give them surveys, and hold focus groups. And each of these methods have caveats. Asking customers what they want is the core way you can find out what they really want – because some of them will tell you. Because customers won’t always tell you directly what they want, it’s helpful to ask them in a few different ways and then correlate the results to see if you hear the same things in different places. And make sure you keep the number of questions low so that customers balk at your survey. You also need to ask them the right questions. Asking a leading question like “given a perfect situation that matches my product perfectly, would you use my product” doesn’t help you or your customers. Zero in on the “I need” and “I want” statements to get closer to the true customer needs.
Surveys are another good way to get feedback. You can ask for preference using a multiple-choice or free-text survey. You can ask people what they think in a group setting using a focus group – this often spurs new ideas and can also induce “groupthink” – and learn more about many people at once. You can also ask people “what others would like” to try to remove individual self-reporting bias.
Asking customers what they want isn’t enough. Observing what customers do is another key way to learn what they really want. Customers may show you non-verbal cues in a focus group that give you new ideas. And you can also learn a lot from in-person or remote usability studies. The key is to observe what people do without being prompted or providing instructions.
Focus groups provide you with a natural place to observe non-verbal reactions, though you may get some false signals when the customer is not in their natural environment. That’s why in-person and remote usability studies are really valuable.
Even if customers tell you what they think they want at the moment, the best way of knowing what they want and value in your product is to track their behavior over time.
The best products create or augment habits – things that are done repetitively. They also create or react to triggers – natural behavior cues from their environment and emotions – to spur the customer to do something. And if they are easy enough to do the customer can learn how to do them with little effort until it becomes almost subconscious (thanks @bjfogg for your Behavior Model to describe these aspects of behavior.)
So tracking habits should be one part of your feedback machine to find out what people really want. You should also be tracking any changes in the Word of Mouth that surrounds your product. If your customers aren’t talking about you or your product, that’s probably a sign that you haven’t zeroed in on things that people want – and have not yet exceeded the threshold of what they expect. In an ideal world, everyone would be talking about your product in the right channel at the right time. Some products aren’t ideal for public sharing – but many are after you demo your product for the target customer and they “get it”.
In the real world, you need to find the people who like (or love) your product and then understand how to find more people like them. If you’d like to learn more about this, start by reading Kevin Kelly’s classic 1000 True Fans. You also need to learn how to extrapolate from the things those early adopters love to the things that later adopters will love, too.
The Feedback Machine of Ask, Observe, and Track will get you closer to the goal of learning what your customers want. But it won’t speak for itself – you’ll need to use the information you learn to have conversations with your customers and find out what they truly value.
This essay is written as part of the Startup Edition project – check out the other essays here.
This post is a contribution to Startup Edition.
We could talk all day about the tools we use. Agile is Best! Pomodoro is Best! Pen and Paper is Best! Getting everyone in a room is Best! (You get the idea.) Because everything in a startup changes ALL THE TIME, it’s also important to consider the conceptual tools you should be using in your startup.
You might pronounce them as Empathy, Resilience, Learning, and Persistence. Doubtless there are other conceptual tools that people find useful and beneficial, but these are the ones I use most often.
Empathy means understanding what it feels like when you are a customer. It also means literally walking a mile in the customer’s shoes. If you are not shaking your fist at the screen when your code does something stupid that customers experience every day, you are not modeling empathy. To get more empathy, stop being a smarty-pants startup person, and think more like a customer. (And get out of the building.)
Resilience is the ability to rebound when bad stuff happens. Because startups do not act according to Standard Operating Procedure. If you are resilient you’ll be better able to pick new paths, to take care of yourself and your teammates, and to invent new ways of solving problems in the course of doing business. You also won’t really know that you’re being resilient until you look back and see the obstacles you’ve overcome. So trust in yourself, do the right thing for you and for your teammates and the people you care about, and you’ll get more resilient. You can always have more work and money. You cannot have more time with the people you care about and you cannot get your bad decisions back. Embrace sunk costs and don’t let them become an anchor that prevents change.
Learning is the most important tool you can use in a startup and generally in life. Learning ensures that you can test ideas and decide when they are wrong and when they are right. Learning also gives you the ability to adapt to a new environment and add new skills. And learning changes you without you even realizing it. So you should keep on learning everywhere. I keep a stack of books on my bedside table and read one or two books per week.
Persistence is the glue that allows you to respond when you are not feeling empathetic, when you are not very resilient, and when you feel that the learning you should be doing is stalled. Persistence is getting up in the morning and understanding the 20% of the work that you absolutely must do that will deliver 80% of the reward. When you are persistent, you are doing the hard practice that makes many other things possible. And when you can’t be persistent (this happens too) you should embrace the sunk cost and go outside. Meet people. Exercise. And above all, embrace the Cult of Done. Perfect is the enemy of Done.
Why are these the tools that I use in a startup? I use these tools because they are portable, I can share them with other people, and they are additive. There are many tools and services that people could be using in their startups, and they are all dependent upon the people in these startups to use them well. Start with the tools that reinforce empathy, resilience, learning, and persistence and your startup will prosper.
This post is a contribution to Startup Edition.
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