The most important thing you have to do as an entrepreneur or a performer is connect with an audience. Perhaps for performers, that is an instinctive thing. You get up on the stage just like this one and you know that you have to move the people that are sitting in those chairs and make them feel important, make them feel part of whatever you're creating. It's the exact same thing as somebody releasing a new product or a new service. You need to understand who your customer is. The people that are coming to your shows and the people that are tweeting the hashtags, I mean, they're the reason why you're able to keep making music. I even like inbox people on Facebook like, "What do you think we should do next?" Or, "What do you want me to write about?" It's all about the relationship that you build. So, you bring your fans into the creative process. You allow them to be a part of it and converse with you. Yes, because it's the reason why they're going to come back and keep listening. It's all about them, really. And it has to be all about them. Early in my career, I worked without really listening to the audience. And then things shift and they can shift pretty quickly. So I started paying a little bit more attention to bringing people in the studio. When I would point out to someone the cool guitar part behind the vocal or the little synthesizer sound behind the vocal, invariably, the audience/person that I brought in the studio would say, "What sound are you talking about?" So that kind of opened my mind up to that there was a focal point in all music, like a focal point in all business. This is the thing that we do better than anyone else. And for a song, it's the lead vocals. So if the lead vocal can communicate something to the audience member, I think that that's really where the power is. When you show that respect to your customers, when you truly want to understand who they are and what needs they have, in many ways you're shifting the way that you're communicating with them from a one-way conversation to a two-way dialogue. When I started Sonicbids, I was a talent agent booking very well known artist. I had developed a product that was primarily appealing to young independent musicians who were just getting started out. My challenge was to understand what needs they had, what move them, what drove them. So we started organizing what we called member dinners around the world. These informal gatherings really helped me understand who my customers were, what needs they had, what insecurities they had, what fears they had. And I was able to bring that perspective back to the team that I was working with. And that became, in many ways, our true north when it came to product development. I am not the target audience for Nike, but I was a creative director at one of the most powerful brands that are focusing on the 18-year-old football crazy kid. So my rigor was to really understand the heart and mind of this kid and do that through observation, and do that through listening, and do that through having a great team of designers who were all focused on that same kid, because I believe that muse will lead you in the right direction. And I think, it's okay to follow, right? I think a lot of times entrepreneurs are like, "I don't follow. I lead. Its my idea. It's great." You're following something. And I think that's what Nike and the strong brands are incredibly good at. They're obsessed with who their consumer is. They're obsessed with their muse and they're following them. One of my favorite stories about the importance of getting out and seeing customers interact with your products is a story I got from my friend, David Kelly, at the Stanford d.school when he talks about Doug Dietz's a GE medical who built the famous MRI machine that we've all seen in hospitals. And Doug was a very serious product designer. And he went to the hospital once and saw a child running down the hall in tears. And he said to the technician there, "What happened there? Did something go wrong?" And the technician sort of laughed and said, "Something go wrong? Every child who gets anywhere near one of these machines burst into tears." And Doug Dietz was heartbroken. Here, he'd thought that he'd built these beautiful machines that would save people's lives and yet a significant population of the patients who were going to come in contact with this machine wanted nothing to do with it. And so, Doug pulled back and started thinking about the entire experience of how a child learns that he or she has to get an MRI. And they redesigned the whole room to feel more like Disneyland. And they tell the kids like, "Be very still so the pirates won't find you when you're inside the pirate ship." And they give the kids special uniforms to wear while they're getting these tests. And this understanding of a human interaction, they re-designed the way the whole experience went, not just the machine, drastically reduced the anesthesia rate, the throughput, therefore, the cost of operating the facility for the hospital, and results were better. And this is something that he never would have realized had he just focused on the core engineering of how this machine is supposed to work. Remember, if there's one thing you do as an entrepreneur, that is to make sure that you understand your customer better than anybody else. This means, get out of the practice room, lift your head up of your laptop, get out of your house or your office, and just go out there and meet with the very people that you're trying to connect with. The insights that you get by interacting and talking with people one-on-one, by paying close attention and listening to what they're saying, may lead you to interesting breakthroughs that may fundamentally change the course of whatever you're developing whether that's a product, a service, or a song.
