[MUSIC] So all this makes good sense, yet most entrepreneurs skip all this stuff, right? >> [LAUGH] >> Why? >> The main reason, and certainly in my first company, we spent almost two years just locked in a room programming. >> Building a product. >> Building a product. >> That maybe or maybe not anybody would want. >> We knew it was very innovative, and that was true. It was technologically very ambitious, people were amazed when they saw it, but our users had no interest in it, and customers even less. Nobody wanted to use or pay for this thing, and we realized the first time it was a product for kids. The first time we put a kid down in front of it and we said great, make a cartoon. It let them make their own animations. Within five seconds, we're like we have to start over. This is a disaster. And that was just, we were afraid. >> After two years of work. >> After two years, yeah. And we were afraid. We thought well we can't show it to anyone until it's perfect because otherwise, they're not going to like it. And so we tried to make it perfect, but we made the wrong thing perfect. So that's one big reason, is fear. And I think the other reason is a little bit more subtle. Where, maybe you hear one of these experiences, and you think I'm going to do it correctly. I'm going to talk to my customers, I'm going to understand them. I'm not going to make that mistake, but talking to people takes a lot of time. And I've seen founders just put their entire business on hold for three months or six months while they do hundreds of interviews. And then at the end of it they build the product and like you said it might be wrong anyway, because all of this is more learning, you're just bringing in data. It's not perfectly reliable. So then they go that was a huge waste of time. >> I'll just go build some product. >> Yeah, and so you sort of flip flop back from the two extremes. Talk to nobody, only talk to people. And there's a nice balance where you're bringing in the learning from your customers but in a time efficient way. And you're also building the product, but you're doing both of these things kind of together in parallel. I think that's a tough balance to strike, and easy to get wrong especially if you're just starting out. >> So how many customers do you find that you need to talk to before you have maybe 80 or 90% of what you're going to learn? >> If you're coming out of an industry that you already have experience in, say you've worked in an industry for a few years It can be very, very quick. You have a hand full of conversations, you talk to your colleagues even during your lunch hour, after work when you're having a beer and you go okay, this is kind of, I'm hearing the same stuff from everybody that I'm talking to. That's great, if you're entering a brand new industry that's very complicated, it can take ages. Like when I was entering the advertising industry, a lot of moving pieces. You're selling to big companies. Even one company has so many different people that matter. It can be a real challenge and take a while. But the rule of thumb, I just borrowed it from the user experience community. They say once you start hearing the same stuff over and over, you're probably done. >> Then you're there. This set of ideas is very intriguing. And potentially, one could use this in consumer settings, where you have ordinary people who you're trying to understand in order to build something for them. Or you could do it in B to B settings where there's a more complicated maybe, commercial user. Do you find these ideas, how they're applied in those two settings? >> Yeah, there's a bit of difference. For one thing consumers are a lot easier to find. If you're making an app for say busy moms, it's easy to find busy moms. >> You can find busy moms. >> You can go to the grocery store, to the baby food section. You're not trying to be weird, you're not trying to accost strangers, but there's a lots of way you could spark up these conversations. Even in your personal social network there's going to be tons of people. So that's the upside of consumers. The downside is that it's a lot harder to get a buying signal in advance. Consumers make a lot more impulse purchases. Nobody knew they needed Uber before they got it, and now they can't live without it. Same with Instagram. Same with Pinterest. So with consumers, you can learn what they're already doing and why, but you have to take a bit more of a leap to a prototype, to a product. You get less clear validation just by talking to people. However with businesses it's the opposite, much harder to find but you can get a much stronger signal just by talking to them. And it's also nice in that when you're dealing with businesses, the conversations, the talking it very closely mimics the sales process. You're trying to get to understand people. You're trying to learn about their problems. You're trying to find out how they're solving it today. All of this is exactly the same information that you need to close a big sale or a big partnership. So with customers you learn about them in person but then you market to them through wherever, through Facebook, through Google ads, through content marketing. They're quite different. When you're signed to businesses you're learning process naturally transitions into your sales process as you learn more and more and as the product evolves one day you can just ask for more money. And boom you've closed your first sale. So that's quite nice, there's no wasted time. >> So tell us a story here of how this set of ideas has played out and practiced to good effect. >> So I can tell you about one of my favorite failed ideas and the reason is my favorite it's because I only spent about an afternoon on it. And that's a great result, right? >> Yeah. >> I woke up, I had an idea. I was like I'm a genius. This is amazing. And the idea, I was suffering under email. And I thought they- >> Aren't we all. >> [LAUGH] Aren't we all, exactly. And I thought someone who suffers the worst would be investors. Investors are constantly getting pitches from startups emailed to them. And I thought, how do they deal with all of this? And so I did some quick Googling, and loads of investors on Twitter, on blog posts just complaining about this. So I thought okay, this is worth having a conversation with some investors. Figure out if it's a real problem and try to get a grasp of what the product might be. And so I set up a quick meeting. And my favorite way to have these conversations is to not even tell people that it's an interview. I try to keep it as casual as possible, because once you introduce that you have a business, and you're doing an interview, you start introducing these biases. People are like, ooh, I need to be careful not to hurt his feelings. So I met with an investor, and just before the meeting I said hey, you guys must get a ton of email. He said, yeah, it's unbelievable. Thousands a week. And I said, it must be awful. And he goes, yeah it's terrible. And I was like aha. I'm figuring out there's a real problem. He's getting emotional. And I go, well how do you deal with it? I don't want to ask him whether he'd like my product. I want to ask him about the facts, the specifics, and his life. So I go, how do you deal with it? And he goes, well, actually we have interns and they look at all of the email first. They delete 90% of it straightaway. A few emails get through. We take a quick look at them and then the companies I like I write their name on a Post-it note along with a phone number, put it on the wall, once a week I call them. >> [LAUGH] >> If they're no good I throw away the Post-it. And he pointed at his wall and there's a cluster of about ten Post-its. And I go, that sounds pretty okay. And he goes, yeah, actually now that you mention it it's really good. [LAUGH] I thought okay, there's no business here. >> Done. >> He thinks he has a problem, but when I push on it >> But he's got a good solution to his problem. >> He does, yeah. And later someone suggested that maybe I should've talked to the interns because they're the ones who are really suffering. That's a fair way, but I think this is great, and then after that he said, so what did you want to talk about? We'd managed to have the whole interview before he even realized the meeting had begun. >> Yeah. >> And to me that's the best result, that's how you get the best learnings. And my positive results have come out of this as well. Someone goes yeah, it's so annoying, we've tried everything to solve this. It costs us so much money, nothing works right. And you go aha. >> Rob, thank you so much. Eye-opening stuff, extremely important for entrepreneurs. This little book, The Mom Test, is the most concise piece of writing, the most valuable piece of writing that can go on, what, 134 pages. Rob, really well done. Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, John. [LAUGH] [MUSIC]
