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Josh
Hi, everybody, and welcome to [Un]churned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter, also the founder of UpdateAI. And I’m really excited for this episode. Today I’m talking to the author of one of my favorite books that’s been really helpful in running our business. I’m talking to you today, Rob Fitzpatrick. The book that I’m talking about is called the Mom Test. Rob is the author of The Mom Test, also the author of write useful books, a book about writing books, and the workshops or survival guide, a book about how to facilitate really energetic and productive workshops. Rob, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So I like to give a little bit of a background about folks that are joining us on this show. I talked about the companies they worked for, or they work at and that sort of thing. You’re an interesting cat. You’ve got your self published with these books that you know, have really taken off. You live in the Pyrenees, you have this

Rob
northern Catalonia, if anyone’s not familiar with their European geography?

Josh
Yes, which we know many, many, many in the North America area are not as familiar. And, you know, you’ve consulted or some of the largest companies in the world and facilitated workshops for them on how to facilitate workshops and the Mom Test customer development literature, and processes. How would you I’ve already given part of your background here, but like, how would you describe yourself if I was asking you to introduce yourself to the audience,

Rob
I’m happiest when I’m making products, but to make products, like they have to be useful for someone, right? It’s no good to make a product. It’s pretty. I think early, I went to university, I learned how to program I learned how to code things. And it sucks when you pour your heart into this product, and no one uses this you Okay, so how do I figure out how to get people to use this. And so I kind of found that in order to make products that people actually wanted to use, I was like, Okay, now I need to learn sales, and I need to learn marketing, I need to learn customer research. I need to learn whatever partnerships and distribution and fundraising. And ultimately, I’m sort of like I feel like a product person and a techie who has gone way off track because like the the product skills on their own, and I like working on small teams or by myself, which means it’s not like I ever had the marketing team to help me out or the sales team was like, Okay, well, if I want my products to matter, I need to learn how to do this. And, you know, I kind of like I get a bit latched on to these questions. And it was my first company, we went through Y Combinator, we were a scalable startup, we had good investors, we had some good customers, and we ultimately failed. And I was the person what was the name of that company, it was called habit industries. Our first product was called MiniFit. Wood. And it was basically animation technology, and originally aimed for kids to kind of build their own cartoons and little music videos. And then the idea was, it would be used for user generated content campaigns by big brands. So we did a couple we did one for, for Sony for MTV, for the BBC for a few others. But we were just slow. And part of the reason we were slow is because I was going to customers and being like, what do you want? What should we build next? What should I do? And they were telling me and then I was telling the team, hey, I knew what the customers want. Let’s do it. And we would build what the customer said. And then they’d go, Oh, we’re not going to use that. I’m like, what? You lied to me. They’re like, No, no. I mean, like, isn’t New Year’s resolution that you don’t follow through on a lie? Not really. It’s more like we’re pretty bad at guessing at our future behavior. Right. So I was like, yeah, so anyway, I was really frustrated.

Josh
But but that was like, that’s the whole textbook right there. Like talk to your customers. That’s all that matters, talking to your customers learn what they want. Listen, actively listen to your customers digested debrief circulate that through the organization, like so you did all the right things. So in the wrong way, urging it but

Rob
okay. Okay. Because it turns out that the way you ask the questions matters and the way you even even before you get to ask him a question, the way you frame the meeting, like the room you have the meeting in is going to fundamentally change the type of data you get. Because if you’re in a fancy boardroom, that naturally that setting naturally puts people into negotiation mode, because or presentation mode or judgment mode. So whereas if you meet that same person, and you give the same description of what you’re working on, but you’re in a cafe, even the cafe that’s in their office, but instead of going up to the boardroom, you just chat in the cafe in the office, you’re gonna have a fundamentally different conversation. And so I was going through the motions, I felt a bit like I was doing like Cargo Cult customer research, or I was doing like it superficially looked like customer research, but I didn’t understand what was supposed to be happening with the way I framed the conversation, the what I was trying to learn. And also like, we go into these things, and sometimes we have unreasonable expectations, because we expect our customers to tell us what we should be doing. And in many cases, they can’t. The customers can give you their reality. They can give you their goals, their frustrations, their challenges, what they’ve already tried, why they tried that, why they haven’t already solved it, you know, they can tell you which products they’ve looked at and not used. They can tell you why they’re still using post it notes and Excel spreadsheets instead of one of many 1000s of SAS app that have already tried to solve their problem. Like, you can understand what they’re already doing and why. But then there’s still a bit of a visionary leap from there to what you should build, right. And even sometimes, sometimes you’re wrong. And sometimes there’s like everyone says they hate traffic, but no one wants to ride a Segway, like the Segway was originally pitched as a solution to inner city traffic. You know, we don’t need cars, everyone will just roll around on their segway. And everyone’s like, Yeah, it’s amazing trillion dollar business. And, you know, sometimes the product matters. So there’s a bit of a hands on skill. And, like, sometimes founders, you know, or product whoever, customer researchers, they asked me, they go, hey, this person was really disinterested, it didn’t seem like they wanted to talk to me. How do I fix that? It’s like, no, no, no, they’re disinterest is the data. That is your answer. You know, like, it doesn’t mean the whole product is doomed. But like, that person does not care, they are not going to be your first customer, you know, or they’re having a bad day, and you’re not going to learn from someone who’s having a bad day. So it was, it was all this stuff. And anyway, I just latched on to it, I got really interested. And since then, I’ve been doing a bunch of little goofy businesses by myself, like bootstrapped, I kick started a board game, I learned how to sail and spent like, a few years living on a boat and rebuilding an old sailboat from the 70s, and learning all about, you know, boat repair and stuff. And I did this education agency, I’ve done more software companies. Now we have kind of a hybrid, that trying to help indie nonfiction authors called useful books. And we have like an information product, we have a paid community, like an outcome oriented community, we have software products we have, it’s like kind of all mashed together. And that’s a fun little boot ship that bootstrap business and I’m working on with five people. And I don’t know I’m, I’m just goofing around and doing more things, but you have

Josh
fun living your life. I mean, so let’s talk about that. Then your your, your bootstrap business right now about useful books. What are some of the ways that you’re gathering customer research for your development?

Rob
So there’s a couple different answers, because the way you learn is going to depend on what you’re trying to learn and the product category, right? So if we started with a book, so it’s like, alright, book, how do we make sure because we need to educate our customers, and part of our kind of customer success. Instead of writing it as digital docs, we decided to write it up as a book where we’re like, Okay, this is, why it matters, how it works, how to do it, it was basically our docs. It’s just packaged as a book, slash manifesto, slash whatever. And it puts people into the mindset and gives them the training and the context where they become perfect customers for our software product, which is it’s kind of like a new category. You know, it’s for beta reading. But a lot of authors are like, what is beta reading is beta, you may ask my friends, but the thing is, like, now there’s a way to do this. So to test the book, it’s like, okay, well, teaching is essentially the prototype of writing. So we do lots of teaching upfront to figure out the right metaphors, the right stories, the right examples, then there’s like beta reading gives you qualitative, quantitative and observational data, you follow up with people after they’ve read the book. And it’s like, Hey, did you do it? Did it work? Right? So there’s like a toolkit that’s category specific there. Then for the software, what we did is we set up this community, and the community has a business model role, where it’s acting as a Customer Success community. And it’s also extending our retention window. Because the software is for a very specific moment in the book writing journey. It’s like manuscript complete, ready to get feedback. And but that’s hard. It’s hard to catch people right at that moment. So we’re like, okay, we need to cast a wider net, so the community can catch them anywhere from excited about writing a book someday, up until finish manuscripts, right? And that like gives. And so once we had people in the community, what we did is part of our onboarding early on, as we said, Thank you so much for joining, we want to help you. At any time, we will give you a free like book consultation meetings, zero cost as part of your membership. Now what is that if you phrase it differently, that is the ideal customer learning customer discovery conversation, right? Where they show up and they spent 30 minutes talking about all their fears, their objections, their problems. And this is an example of what I mean by the way you frame the conversation. Because if you got two people calling you go hey, can I please interview you for 30 minutes about where you’re struggling with your book? They’re like who are you? No way Get out of here. Like I’m not wasting my time on you. But if you can reframe the value equation so that they’re like oh, wow, you’re gonna help me if I share my problems. And that’s not a trick of like cold email phrasing right it’s they were

Josh
they were they were coming to you right it like you weren’t you weren’t this was an outbound that you were trying to pitch them right they also didn’t see it as a way for like, come for a free 30 minute consultation you’re like nah, I know that trap you know, I know where that this was a genuine offering for them to to get advice from you.

Rob
And it was and we helped them and we also learned about all their fears, problems frustrations, and then that’s the stuff that we baked directly into our software product. And so with the software we think of it like so if you think of it as like a health metaphor as like surgery is like emergency reactive like quite dangerous. So we treat customer support as surgery where we will do it when a customer is having a bad time we will engage directly will solve their problem. etcetera. But we consider that like, there’s an upstream problem, right? Because surgery is only necessary if the health is bad earlier. So then we go upstream and we go, could this customer support issue have been avoided through better product design? Like, could we have avoided it completely? And if not, that could have been avoided through better documentation. And so we think like, in problems, we kind of try at triage, then we go, Is this a customer support native problem where it has to be dealt with individually? Is this a documentation native problem where like, it can’t be dealt with in product? Or can we deal with it in product. And to get that stuff like that? Yeah, the access to the customer community was incredible. And once we kind of knew what we were trying to do, once the product is working, we kind of have product. I don’t know, I, it’s always hard to say if you have product market fit or not, like we are growing by default, which is always good, you know, so like, each month is better than the last without any active marketing. And we’re like past the profitability line and stuff. So we’re on like solid grounds. And we kind of know what our next however many big milestones need to be right? Like, because we have this understanding now. So what we’ve done is we just dialed down, we just turned off the tap a bit of this one to one, like big qualitative customer learning. And next time, we’re at a crisis moment where we’re not sure where to strategic fork in the road, or we’re not sure whether to take the product this way, or this way. We’ll turn that tap back on, because we’ve now created the context, we’ve created this, this pool of customers who we can very easily learn from. That’s how we’re doing it currently. But obviously, it’s different if you’re sales driven, or, you know, dealing with big enterprises. So again, it’s like part of the challenges. Everyone wants a checklist for this stuff. But it’s the design challenge, like how do you create the context where people want to be sharing their problems with you, where they feel safe to do so where they don’t feel threatened, where they don’t feel like it’s a sales tactic, or a negotiation tactic or an upsell there. And like all of this is part of the design. You can brute force it by cold outreach, but it’s pretty soul destroying.

Josh
That it is. So that’s pretty cool. Because it’s, there’s so much strategy. And the whole thing is strategy, that you’re setting up the process, like you said upfront. And it’s once you have that proper setup, only then do you have the foundations to have meaningful conversations and get real feedback,

Rob
there’s, I’m looking a lot. So the way I’m thinking about all customer contact these days, I’ve been doing this for 15 years now. And all of my businesses, like the thing they’ve had in common is like a lot of time spent with the customers to understand them. And since the first one, they’ve more or less all been successful to the, you know, to some degree. And so the way I think about it is customer contact is very time costly, it’s very expensive to engage one on one with people, right? Especially early on when it’s found your time, or when it’s like product lead time. And so you get a discount on your customer learning if you can overlap it with business activities that you’re already doing. So a couple examples to make this clear, like we need the customer community in order to support this retention and acquisition business model dynamic. So it makes sense for us to then overlap our customer learning with this thing we’re already doing right. Another company I know, called bilena. They do kind of Internet of Things, edge devices, etc. They are a very engineering led company, the core of their product is open source. So their main activity was open source tickets and support requests. They overlap their customer learning with that, where they basically gave they had the engineers do all of the customer support themselves. During customer support conversations, they say, Hey, do you want to jump on a quick phone call and talk this through in more detail, maybe we can help you out. So they offered the cuts during customer support interactions, they offered the opportunity to shift the phone. And then on the phone, they gave the engineers like that tiny bit of training to turn that into a customer learning Customer Success sort of opportunity. And they did some cute things with the reverse leaderboard, where if you had answered the fewest tickets, so if you’re at the bottom of the leaderboard, as an engineer, you had to do support full time until you’re not in last place. So created this culture that like I got five minutes before lunch, let me jump on a call with a customer real quick. And then some cake another example. They’re a music app out of London. And they started everyone they hired love live music. They were really good at building like a live music team because they’re a live music app. So they’re like, Okay, live music. One of their perks was they gave concert tickets to all of their employees. They’re like, yeah, we want you to live music, like, you know, keep loving it. And they’re like, Wait, can we take that money and bring the artists to us. So they started instead of buying concert tickets for their employees, they started hiring the artists to do private shows in their office. And then they would invite their local super users to come to these amazing private concerts with top tier bands. They’re like, yeah, there’s only 100 people there 50 from us and 5050 of you guys. And then they would just let the team mingle with the super users, right? And they had a permanent user research room set up. And the user research team would come out and say, hey, you know zero pressure, but I don’t want to pull you away from the party. But if you want I’d love to show you a new version of the app. It’s not out yet get your thoughts you No. And so they are pulling people out of this party. And they do this every Friday. And you can see where they started doing this on their growth curve. It’s like transformational. And like these are all cases of like overlapping the learning, right? Because you don’t want to just brute force it or you run out of time and enthusiasm. And in my experience,

Josh
you’re mentioning this, maybe this is something that I’m doing right now with update AI. So myself, myself and our head of go to market Mickey, we run kickstart sessions with which are a fancy word for onboarding sessions. With every new user, it’s right there in the onboarding flow, would you like to sign up for a kickstart onboarding session, and we’ll teach you how to use the platform. Now there’s really not much to learn about how to use update AI, you connect to zoom, you connect to Google, we start recording the conversation, we give you your transcript and all the insights after the call. It’s not rocket science. But a we want to make sure that people you know that we’re hands on and show people the product and that they’re actually going to activate and stuff like that. But the first thing that we do with when we jump on the onboarding call is not, you know, so let me show you this or whatever. It’s How’d you hear about us? And like, what’s going on? You know, SAS is a tough place right now for everybody what’s going on? How are you doing? How are you really, you know, just get them to open up and talk about some of the things that they’re encountering whether or not it has anything to do with meetings and meeting recordings of that nature.

Rob
It’s nice also, because a lot of learning conversations or customer success conversations, they do not require an hour, they don’t even require 30 minutes, right? Like often it’s it’s that key sentence or a few words. And so when when you schedule these things individually, it’s like, I don’t know, you kind of ended up wasting time or padding it out for 30 minutes. And I really liked the idea when I was doing enterprise sales, like no one would take a customer learning meeting with me, right, but they would take a sales meeting or a pitch meeting. And once you start to pitch, people get defensive, right, because they’re in negotiation mode. But you’ve usually got a few minutes at the beginning, when you’re walking to the meeting room, or you’re grabbing a coffee. Sometimes you can engineer this. You can do it online, if there’s a few minutes while you’re waiting for someone else from your team to join. This can be engineered as well, of course, where you’ve kind of opened up this little space for small talk and chitchat. And that’s all you need. It’s like a few minutes. And you’re not going to learn everything from every customer. But you don’t need to, you know, you learn

Josh
how would you engineer that? How would you engineer that Rob for you know, let’s talk about the Zoom online because that’s here in the Pyrenees right now. There’s not so many IRL meetings taking place in the world these days, which we can probably get into the benefits and some of the pitfalls of that. But

Rob
although hilariously, my town has 20 people in it not 20,000, but 20. And it’s 10 kilometers to the nearest like stop sign or streetlight. And of those 20 people, one’s an executive coach, one runs a bootstrapped software business of 30 people. And then there’s me so like, you know, 15% of the team is like, you know, reasonably Anyway, whatever, it draws that type of crowd.

Josh
I heard that call your town, silicon Catalonia. Yeah. This is the silicon sheep farm. Exactly. Yes. Looking cheap. Yeah. So how do we engineer that like, because I think everybody on that listening right now would would love to learn, you know, in the first three minutes of my Zoom calls, whether it’s sales or customer success, or any other customer experience function, what do I do to create that safe environment to and to gain some initial insights?

Rob
So there’s a couple of different answers the like, sneaky answer. So the more formal the meeting needs, to be the sneakier you need to be it’s kind of a rule of thumb. So if you’re selling to a fortune 500, they’re like, they’re professional buyers. They’re like, go go go. In those cases, the like, sneaky, it’s not sneaking that it’s like deceptive. It’s just a bit more tactical. So you set it up so that two people are going to be joining from your team. And you ask the second person to join five minutes late. And then you have five minutes at the beginning, where you’re like, Oh, I’m so sorry. I heard they’re gonna be here at five minutes past. But like, in the meantime, a weird question can ask how you deal with this, or like, Oh, I saw on your blog, you’re struggling with this. You had a big breakthrough here. How does that work? And you can just like get going, and this little in between space. A lot of people do it with podcasts also, where they’ll, you know, they’ll want to learn from and talk to customers who would never take a call with them. So they’ll set up a podcast about the industry. And you got to follow through here. This is like a big time commitment. In the real world. We used to do this with business lunches, like industry lunches, networking lunches. And so when any one of your customers would never take a meeting with you, if you invite 10 of them, and you tell them that all the others are going to be there. And you asked one of them to present a couple lessons learned from their their last quarter. Suddenly everyone wants to show up and then after that, they’ll all take the meeting with you because you demonstrated value by being the host. And even while they’re there you can be like next top of a topic of discussion. is like why we’re all struggling with blah, blah, blah and like, you know. And that’s again a case where whether it’s the podcast or the business lunch or this this little like small talk in the beginning, people in their their conversations, they feel comfortable when they’re following a known script. So that one of the challenges with doing like outreach based customer success or customer learning is that it’s very unclear what the script is. Because in the customers have had, they’re not sure if it’s an upsell script, and they should be on the defensive, or if they’re legitimately being helped. But then if they’re legitimately being held, they’re not totally clear on, they almost don’t believe that that’s possible, because they’re like, No, I know, you want something I’ve been tricked before. And so it’s a case where we’re not just being compared against our own behavior, but we’re being compared against the bad behavior of everyone else. And so what these things do like the podcast, the small talk, the business meet up launch the another version, as you say, Hey, I’m doing a white paper on industry best practices, you know, we’d like you to be one of the 10 companies is featured. Well, Sunday anonymized benchmarks, everyone back there, again, that’s very popular in the academic world, when you’re doing like heavy r&d based innovations that are going into like big industry like aviation and whatever. It gives people a script, they’re like, oh, yeah, I know what a podcast is, like, I talk about my experiences, and they give me exposure and credibility, or whatever it is, like they know what the small talk script is. And you’re like, part of setting the context of these meetings, part of creating a safe space, it’s not saying you’re really saying You can trust me, it’s like shifting onto a script where people feel like they’re supposed to be having this conversation and giving these answers. And like in focus groups, this is one of the reasons why focus groups are such a debacle is because the script for a focus group is like trying to sound smart. That’s what people are doing. They’re like, Oh, they’re paying me, I need to say something to justify getting paid. And so they’re sitting there waiting for an opportunity to sound smart. And then they’re like, make it blue, integrate with Excel, you know, and you’re like, oh, integrate with Excel, good idea. And they’re like, they don’t care. They’re just trying to sound smart, because that’s what the script is they’re trying to earn their $20, or whatever you paid them. So then if you’re what you can do, if you’re more like marketing lead, or sales side, so sales lead, what I really like is, I use this this like in between space, the coffee, cooler space, someone else joining is fine. Or you can do it. If you gotta read on the person, you can kind of ask them for personal advice. Like sometimes when you’re talking to a customer, you realize that they’re kind of on your side of the table, like you feel like whether or not this sale is going to close, you feel like they kind of get you right, like it resonates for whatever reason. And you can go like, hey, this kind of a weird question. But we’ve been having a lot of trouble getting our customers to train their engineers to use this product. Like if you’re in my shoes, how would you be thinking about that? Like, what can we be doing better? And, you know, sometimes people come around to your side of the table, and they go, and you’ve kind of given them permission. People don’t really like to give unsolicited advice. They’ll give unsolicited feature requests, but they won’t really give unsolicited strategic advice. But if you kind of open that, that door for them, and you say like, Hey, if you were this my favorite phrasing is like this the situation we’ve been having trouble if you were in my shoes, how would you approach it? Because if you’re like, What should I do? Like, no one’s going to say like, you should shut the whole thing down. You’re being ridiculous. But if you’re like, if you were in my shoes, they’d be like, honestly, I’d be considering a heavy restructure. It’s like, ooh, like, you know, you can remove some of the bias by the way you frame it. Sometimes.

Josh
It’s like in as a founder, you’re told, ask when you’re when you’re raising money, ask for ask for money, get advice, ask for advice, get money. It’s similar to that. It sounds like you’re disarming people.

Rob
Yeah, it’s changing the script. So what ask for money, get advice, ask advice, get money. Like what that does is when you’re asking for the money, it puts both of you in a pitch judge script, right? It’s like, and there’s a power dynamic there. Like you’re not equal in that situation. When you ask for advice, it’s more of like a peer support mentorship script, they like it becomes more equal. It shifts the power balance, and it’s helpful like customers also feel they’re like, Oh, this is their pitching me. It’s like it’s a weird power dynamic. Also, it’s, it’s all this stuff. And

Josh
let me ask you, though, Rob, when you start out like that, and you build a relationship by asking for advice, and you’re genuine and wanting that advice, you really want that to to alter your roadmap to make for a more enriched product and business. But there does come a point when you do want to then leverage those relationships to sell but now the setup has been on this coffee talk, just open therapeutic advice giving foundation. Do you have any any tactical or strategic advice for then pivoting that into you know, going for the

Rob
self First, let me just clarify, it’s rare that I would ask for advice from a customer, from customers, I primarily want to know what they’re already doing and why they’re doing it that way. I want to know their decision making and their past behavior. And then with that kind of understanding of their worldview, their life, their past decisions, like that gives me the foundation to make my own, like, whatever entrepreneurial leap or whatever you want to call it, like to decide what needs to be done. And when people do give me feature requests, or suggestions, I treat that like a metal detector going off. So when a metal detector goes beep, beep, beep, the beep is like the feature request, or the advice from a customer like, the beep is not the data, the beep is telling you that there’s data buried underneath maybe. So after the metal detector goes beep, beep, beep, you start digging, right, and maybe you find treasure, or maybe you find trash. And that’s the way I view feature requests, suggestions from customers. It’s like the metal detector beeping and I go, ooh, why do you want that? What would that let you do? Like? Like, why haven’t you already cancelled since we don’t have that currently, like, as you dig in, underneath, you’re like, Oh, it’s just a bunch of tin cans. But then sometimes it’s treasure. And sometimes you’re gonna solve it in a very different way from what the customer originally suggested. Because like, customers think and talk in terms of features, and you need to find a way to bring them back to goals and problems, right. And so the features of the BBB couldn’t you know, but that’s your job to decide how to solve it. And other customers in most cases, that’s part of the art of it. So the other question you asked about are like the real question before I sidelined, it was about transitioning from learning to selling. And there’s a couple insights here. So first, like in general, if it’s someone new, and you’re talking to them, you have a great learning conversation, or it’s like, whatever it’s like, let’s say you’re doing like customer success on one product, and you realize they’d be perfect for a much more expensive product and you’re thinking about an upsell. You want to honor the way the conversation was originally framed. But you can ask for permission to transition in a very low pressure way. So what I mean by low pressure is the default has to be no. So it’s the difference between asking for someone’s phone number and giving them your phone number. Like if you give them the phone number and then walk away. It’s like, hey, it’s an option, not an obligation. If you ask for the phone number, and you stand there and you look over them. It’s like, suddenly, they’re in this awkward situation where the burden of like, Ah, it’s like on them. So when you’re, when you’re transitioning, you want to structure it the same way. So I’d say something like, Hey, like, thank you so much. This has been incredible. I’ve learned so much. Zero pressure, I know we’re already like, at the end of our time, we are working on a product in this space, as I’m sure you know, sounds like it’d be good for you if you’re ever keen to take a look. And let me know what you think I’d be delighted to show it to you. But again, thank you so much for you. This has been amazing. And usually you’re gonna get one of three answers. So there’s the polite delaying tactic was like, oh, yeah, super interesting. Sounds great. It’s basically a compliment and a stalling tactic. That means they do not care. 99 times out of 100. And you go, okay, sure, like in three months when you launch? Yeah, why not email them fine. But like, you shouldn’t be hard selling these people, right? Because they’ve kind of like they’ve been like, then the other two is like, some people take the offer, and they leave and they come back to you on their own. They’re like, hey, so let’s let’s schedule that meeting, you know, or they say, Oh, look, when can we schedule it for I’d actually love to see it. And that’s a commitment of time. And then some people the most passionate they go, I’ve got another 10 minutes right now, can you show me now and you go alright, and this is like really nice. And so by, by setting the default to be like, we’re done, thank you so much, you’ve already helped me a means that if they do offer the time to listen to the pitch that’s already an expression of interest, like some amount of intent to buy. It’s not a guarantee, of course, but you know, and then you find that you’re on pitch mode. And the way I think about it is once you get into pitch mode learning becomes binary learning becomes yes or no. And so as your product gets more mature, and you’re further toward product market fit, and you understand all that stuff, you can get into pitch mode a lot sooner, right? Because you’re like you’ve already done the big learning where it’s early on, you want to delay pitch mode, because let’s say you have a brand new product or feature or market and you give the pitch and people go no, you’re like, What do I change? There’s no information there and you can’t pitch and then learn because then you’re in this like feature request opinions like ego lala land. So you know, I like to do the learning first ask for permission to transition.

Josh
I love that. And an idea just just came in my mind based on what you said here told me if this is is a solid one or not. If I’m starting a new business, and I know that there’s a current incumbent out there, call them a competitor or a competitor adjacent should I go after their existing customers for learning customer development. Honestly learn what’s working, what’s not working and be genuine about that wanting that learning and then at the end as a way to validate my own concept which Here’s a twist on the competitors say, oh, you know, if you have a couple more minutes, if you’re interested, I’d love to show you this. Would that be a? Is that a valid strategy?

Rob
The the phrasing is a little delicate. But yeah. Like, when you play it out, you want people to like not feel tricked, not feel like oh, like the whole point of those first 10 minutes was like to set me up for like this request to pitch, right? That’s not to say it doesn’t work. I’m just saying it’s delicate. There’s like the wording matters and the delivery matters. And it’s something that came very unnaturally to me. And it was something where before important meetings, I would talk to my co founders and sort of be like, hey, if it goes well what should I ask for? And I would kind of like think through those the the requests and the transitions, you know in advance and then overtime or if you’ve got sales or customer learning experience, you know, it gets a lot more comfortable. If you’re in customer success, in a lot of ways it’s like easier in some Product Categories and industries customer success is well known enough that there is a known script there. And people go like, yeah, I get what this is, you’re here to help me out because it’s going to be good for your business in the end, problem solved, right? They like it. They’re like, yeah, it’s a total freebie, no obligations, no pressures. In other industries, especially with consumers, where they’re less familiar with customer success. They’re like, what are we doing? Am I paying for this? I don’t want consulting, like, I guess they’re another product, they don’t know what’s going on. And that’s where you need to be a lot more thoughtful about how you frame and set it up. And like, do you plant the flag and bring them to you, so that you can flip the value equation and they feel like they’re getting instead of giving and, you know, like, the less common the script is in your product category or industry, the more thoughtful you need to be. And the last kind of mindset thing I wanted to mention about transitioning to a pitch is that you don’t, so learning and selling are separate, right? So I can learn from 10 Customers figure out what my product should be, or how I can bring customers to success in a more scalable way through documentation or product or training or whatever. And by spending a lot of one on one time with 10 customers, I can then sell to 10,000. So the conversion rate of the 10 I talked to me is a completely irrelevant data point, I do not care at all about my conversion rate of the people I’m talking to, I care about the quality of learning from the people I’m talking to, because that’s a scalable insight, the 10 people I talked to converting those only ever going to be 10. But getting the scalable insight from them as 10,000 is 100,000. I was 10 million. Right. So like that, for me the insights scale.

Josh
Rob, how do you scale those insights? I know you’re not a big, you know, corporate guy. But how do you scale those customer insights throughout the organization? Like, how does that knowledge not just get trapped at the end of that Zoom call?

Rob
I’ve got some experience, but it says like a consultant or a trainer, it’s not, you know, deep firsthand. For small teams, it’s as easy as so I’ll tell you what you don’t want, there’s two things you don’t want, you don’t want the knowledge to completely disappear. So you have to take some kind of notes. But you also can’t record everything. Because honestly, these these conversations are kind of boring the first time you have them, and they’re super boring to watch again, incompletion, they’re not like, you know, they’re not, it’s not the latest Marvel movie. They sit on the bookshelf. Yeah, exactly. And you can have a lot of hours of footage people like I got other stuff to do, man, like I can’t spend three hours watching your weeks like customer conversations. And so with small teams online, I basically clip out highlights and the highlights, there’s tools to support this, I mean, you guys support it. And then the highlights can go to the Slack channel or to the notion page or wherever. So then the other people on the team are getting firsthand view, because you want to see the emotion in the face, you want to see the frustration, the excitement, the joy, the annoyance, like people really believe it when they see it firsthand. And I don’t like to bring people the decision, I like to bring them the data. Because the idea is that I put smart people on my team, like I work with smart people, I should use their brains, if I come to a decision, and I give them the decision that’s removing their brains from the process. Whereas if I try to gather the best data possible, and then I give them the data that I’ve curated down to just the relevant bits, then we can all make a better decision together. And then I’m using everyone’s brain, right. So that seems way better for me.

Josh
I love that. Okay, so I’m actually writing that down right now, I don’t want to bring people the decision, bring them the data, I’m writing it down on the front page of your book, the Mom Test, folks, most of you’re listening, and they’re not on YouTube here. But they can see that it’s got many, many bites, and it’s ripped off from the rest of the book, because not only is it one of my favorite books, the Mom Test, but it’s also the favorite book of my puppy Jackson, who has just devoured it. But I haven’t thrown it out because I had so many notes in the margins from that chapter. But I love that don’t bring people the decision, bring them the data.

Rob
So that’s what I like to do at a small team were kind of everyone’s involved in in product and they get it in bigger teams, it gets more complex, because you’ll hear managers say don’t bring me options bring me or like don’t don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. And so in that case, they might want they might want both in that case, right? It depends how your team is organized. One of the biggest challenges in larger organizations is that the ideas of statistical significance and the one pager and charts really work against this sort of deep qualitative customer learning.

Josh
Yeah, but you need that because otherwise product and leadership are going to tell you that sounds anecdotal, right? I mean, how do you exactly yeah, so what’s that’s a contradiction right there.

Rob
This is possibly why I’m unemployable at a large company, I don’t know. But they do occasionally bring me in to consult and they pay me lots of money. And the reason is that they’ve learned that there’s different types of challenges or different types of innovation challenges or product challenges. And when it’s incremental Innovation. So like the next phone, the next washing machine, the next whatever, like, where all of the vectors of improvement are understood, in those cases like focus group, but all the statistical significance research tools work really well. But there’s another category that’s more like leap of faith visionary, disruptive. And those tools don’t just not work. They’re they’re actively harmful, because they stop you from from innovating. And that’s why historically, they’ve kind of outsourced this by acquiring startups. So they let startups figure it out, then they acquire them. But some of them are getting interested in like, Okay, can we just do this, and I always tell them, you can, but you need to change the way reporting works. And you need to change like the the buy in of the executives, because any data that can be reduced to a pie chart, or a one pager is fundamentally not valuable for this use case. And now, that doesn’t mean you can bring people 1000s of pages of transcripts, right. And it doesn’t mean you can say like, well, one person told me, but what you can do is you can compile a list of quotes along with the context that that quote came from, you know, and the emotion if you can do that as video clips, I used to do it as text where it’d be like, This person from this company and this situation. So as a context, then I’d be like, super angry. Here’s the money quote, kind of embarrassed weirdly, like, this is how they described the problem, like super excited. This is how much money they said it’s worth. And I mean, can you make a big money decision off of this sort of anecdotal data? Well, I would argue that every startup pitch is like that, in the early stages, and plenty of millions get get thrown around for that stuff, right? Yeah, like, but But you need by it. And also, sometimes it goes wrong, it’s true. And you ideally need to feel safe if you’re in a large organization that you can do the qualitative research, get the qualitative data, make a best decision with the smart brands on your team, and still be wrong. And sometimes that’s true, you need to stack product iteration on top of this. What this learning does is it gives you the foundation, but then you still need to take the visionary leap and do the product cycles, right? This makes your first guess better. And it makes everything faster, it means you don’t run down as many dead ends. But you still need to iterate it doesn’t give you 100% Like vision of the future. It just makes you better not perfect. It’s still

Josh
a guess. Yeah. I want to transition here in the final segment of this conversation. Robin, this is the pitch. I’m not actually pitching you or am I. But I talked to a lot of people, we’ve been building our product now for the past two years. We recently launched it, and it was based on hundreds of conversations. So I kind of like chest thump a little bit. When I’ve talked to investors and just out there. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people and doesn’t that make me a great customer development, product manager, entrepreneur, right. And but then I also think to myself, you know, a lot of these people have become friends, and I no longer trust their opinion. And even the ones that are not yet friends, I still don’t necessarily trust their opinion, I think that I am somehow leading this conversation into an authentic response, even though the first thing I tell them is the most helpful thing you can do for me in this conversation is to be candid, and tell me the product is awful, or the idea is awful. But you probably tell me it’s not the best intro either right to disparage myself and kind of powerplay in that direction. So what I want to do now is my team and I have a strong hypothesis for what we’re currently building as the next feature on our roadmap. And that is, you know, we offer a bookmarking button inside of your zoom conversations when you’re talking to your customers. It’s natively embedded into the Zoom player. That’s why we chose to work with zoom as part of their zoom Apps ecosystem. And it’s just a big Bookmark button. I call it the staples. That was easy button, right? Because it’s in your periphery. You can you can

Rob
let me let me jump in to predict what you hear. Go ahead. I bet people go like Oh, that’s so cool. That’s such a great idea. Like,

Josh
because I want it to be cool. Okay, so let’s stop there. I haven’t even gotten the idea yet. And this is like the pretext to the idea. But But stop me right there. In Yeah, What’d I do wrong?

Rob
Well, first off, you’re just like oozing passion, right? Like it’s like so the entrepreneurs superpower is that you care and because you care and you’re trying to do something that matters to you and to the people you’re serving like people want to help you. This is why it’s possible to get your first employee first fundraising first customer right? But that cuts in both directions. It also means that like people want to buy in and they want to support you and in a certain way, like the better you are at fundraising and selling the vision the worse you aren’t learning from from from customers, because that same thing gets them out. All excited. And they’re thinking of all the benefits, right? And they’re like, Yeah, I wouldn’t say you’re doing anything wrong. Like I’d say you’re setting up like great for a, the beginning of like a product pitch or a usage pitch, and then you can still learn from that, because then people are gonna go, Wow, that sounds amazing. And you’re like, Let’s check back in two weeks, and they go, okay. And then you check back in two weeks, and they’re like, I need to cancel this call. I didn’t even install the plugin. And you go, Okay, well, that tells me something. And there, you might be like, I like zero pressure. I totally get it. There’s a million things going on. But like, can you tell me like what was going through your head or why and like, most people won’t respond to that, because it feels a bit embarrassing. They’re not sure if it’s going to hurt your feelings, or if they feel like they screwed up. But you only need a couple to respond to get a three line, you’re like, oh, that’s what it is, you know, fine. So, but it’s fine to set up for the pitch, right? Like you can set up for the pitch. And then you can watch them. And there’s a reason that we have like product analytics and usage analytics, observational data is amazing. If you can watch people what they’re doing, then you don’t need to worry about what they’re saying. Because what they’re doing well, it’s far more truth and less bias. If you were still way pre product, like there’s other things you’d be trying to learn, right. So like questions is like, how do people get stuff from the Zoom marketplace might be one of your like risks, right? Like a channel risk or adoption risk. So there’s like you could talk to people just like, hey, weird question, use Zoom everyday, right? It’s like, yeah, like, Do you use any add ons, plugins that like, what? Zoom has plugins, you’re like, you’re like, yeah, like I, you know, and you’re like, okay, they didn’t know that exists? Fine. That’s maybe zooms problem, or is that our problem? So yeah, let’s let’s look through it.

Josh
Let me get to the punch of it. Rob. Right. So all right. Here’s the thing, like I mentioned Mickey, before our head of go to market, he and I have been tagging tag teaming a lot of these calls. And we noticed that there’s no like in the Zoom world. There’s no more meeting after the meeting internally, like the client, or the prospect doesn’t leave the table from Starbucks. And then the two salespeople stay behind. You know, what do you think? What do you think and like, debrief and digest and share those notes? And we found ourselves like doing that, right, like calling, I call it, Mickey, so what do you think, right? And you know, but maybe I have to take my dog out, or he has to take his dog out, and maybe the conversation doesn’t happen, etc, right? And so we’ve got this bookmark button. And so our our thought here is, what if everybody’s got the Bookmark button, right in the conversation, so I have it Mickey has, it’s not just the host, right? And even even the customer has it. And we’re all just, you know, slapping that staples. That was easy button at the moment that we think is interesting that we want to memorialize and hold on to either for our own, you know, regurgitation afterwards, or to share for institutional knowledge. We think that that’s a great idea. I’m actually revealing right now what we’re working on, which is a little bit vulnerable. But that’s okay. That’s why we do this. And I tell people about that. And I show them the mock, which of course is like oozing enthusiasm when you show somebody a vaporware mock, right, or what’s in in development. So everyone Oh, yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. But like, there’s also so many risks to that, too, right? Like, no, people don’t really give a crap, what others thought was interesting. No, the customer is never going to be actively engaged enough to actually pop open this zoom app during the meeting, like there’s all these things where people could tell me, Oh, it’s so cool. And then they never actually use it at all.

Rob
So you can always like validate a problem. Usually, like you can always understand customers like previous and existing behavior and analogs are really nice for this. So the fact that you’ve got this strong, like analog of the post meeting, you know, like Team power, which I’ve been in a bunch of those, and you’re right, it is conspicuously missing from from zoom calls. Sometimes we do it still, but it Yeah, it’s a bit awkward. So that analog to me carries a lot of power in validating the problem. But then there’s the second question of like, Okay, what about the solution? Is it correct to be this way, and like maybe, like, maybe, and that’s a case where I think it’s really hard to get a signal just from talking, you can understand how much people care about the problem. But like, you know, it’s gonna depend on the workflow. There were some zoom apps that I thought sounded really cool. But then, the way they kind of announced themselves on the call, I was like, ah, it feels like I’m spying here. So I like, like, they, they sounded great. I liked the benefit, but it like wasn’t worth the, just the presentation, the optics of it, right? Which you could argue is the same for segway, people liked the idea of a Segway, they just wanted to be seen riding on one. It’s like an optics thing. It’s like a workflow friction. And so then there’s not, or at least, I don’t know, a great way to get a clear validation signal on that, but I feel like if you think that there’s good analogs, and like the problem resonates, and you can see the use case you understand people’s workflow then like, yeah, like, take a crack at it. Right. And this is a case where the the yes, no decision comes down a lot to what the engineering cost is going to be. It’s something it’s going to take two years before you can get any sort of day. Data and even a credible prototype, then it’s a lot harder to pull the trigger on that than if you’re like, actually, this is like a two week cycle, we can get a prototype in a few people’s hands who said they were keen, we can see if they actually use it or not. Usually, like reality is somewhere in between those extremes. But I think it’s cool. And like, certainly, like I can already see other use case is like I was talking to a fellow named John Smith the other day, about yesterday, actually. And he was talking about live like communal live note taking during zoom events. So like, everyone opens the same Google Doc. And it’s like, taking live notes together. And he was talking about it as a way to kind of strengthen community and you know, embrace knowledge sharing and that sort of thing. Get people to pay attention better to these cool conversations that are happening. And I was like, ah, it would actually be also nice if people could just like, press the button, because we were trying to do and we’re all like looking down and trying to type and take notes on what was happening. It’s like if people would just be like, Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Because He also pointed out, I guess, the same thing you’re getting out, which is Oh, tell

Josh
him don’t tell him about our, my, my big breakthrough here.

Rob
All right. He mentioned is like someone asked, like, can you just do this with the transcript after the fact instead of worrying about live? And he’s like, Yeah, but no one does, like an hour’s worth of video is 10,000 words, you know, once you look at the transcript that’s like, like, no one’s gonna go through that and edit it down and refine it, you gotta you gotta have some way to filter it or curate it as you go.

Josh
I guess my point is that you just use the word that I think is was is the kiss of death. A second ago, you said, I think that’s cool. And you seemed pretty earnest in using that word. Cool. I never whenever somebody says my product sounds cool. I just want to wave on the middle finger. Because that’s not what I want. Right?

Rob
Yeah. But but you’re shifting the burden of truth onto someone else, right. Like, there’s things I can tell you. And there’s things I can’t tell you. Like, I can give you my opinion about the product. But my opinion about the product does not correlate with the products likelihood of success, nor does it correlate surprisingly, with my likelihood to use the thing, like and so like, when I give like a cooler, it’s like, you know, it’s like, how are you doing? Great, even if you’re not, you know, it’s just like, it’s so baked in to just like, well, dumb question, dumb answer, whatever. Like, it doesn’t matter what I think about it, you can use that as an Leu, like a setup where you use that to engagement. And then we’re having a deeper question. You go, oh, like, have you something like this before? are you how are you doing it now? And if you ask me about what I’ve done in the past, I can tell you the absolute truth, right? Yeah, but So, and no one lies to you, when you ask them facts about their life, or their goals, or their problems, or their frustrations, like these things are true. People don’t lie about that. And even lying is probably the wrong word. It’s like the whole concept of truth as like a product opinion. The truth is, I thought Instagram was stupid when I heard it as an idea. And it turns out, it’s not stupid. I use it even. It’s not just like, it’s stupid for me and good for other people. It was even good for me. Right? And I thought it was stupid. So like, my honest truth was, this is stupid. It’s never gonna work. And I was just wrong. And that’s happened to me so many times now that I like you don’t know your own behavior, even my own products, right? It’s like, yeah, so I think it’s so let’s find out.

Josh
But that brings me back to what you said, which is focused on the workflow, right? If I’m if I’m presenting this idea, maybe I spend more time focusing on, you know, how are you guys having the debrief the meeting, after the meeting? Does that matter? Did you use to do you not anymore? Like, maybe, and maybe you spend all this conversation talking about that, and then at the end, maybe just sprinkle in oh, by the way, with this be cool, quote, unquote, all right.

Rob
I mean, I personally don’t even talk about my product until I’m ready to ask for some kind of commitment. So if I can’t ask them to give me time, reputation, or money, or to use the thing, I don’t even bother, because like, I just don’t trust the data. And it’s so easy emotionally to latch on to these compliments. And like, you know, cool is obvious fluff. Like if I just say that, but I could have told you like a much longer and passionate story about how meaningful this would be, and it would be equally garbage feedback. Whereas if I tell you like how much work we’re spending now to go through transcripts, and ended up videos, and to do this, and which other tools we use, and how much we spend, and how many things we tried that weren’t good enough for us. There’s a ton of data and all of those experiences, and then you know, you can make a better decision. And sometimes you’ll talk to me and you’re like, Okay, Rob’s experiences are interesting. He is not our customer. And that’s fine, too. Like, and imagine listening to my opinion about your product. If I wasn’t even your ideal customer, then you’re just driving yourself off a cliff, right?

Josh
Yeah, makes sense. Rob, I’m gonna cut us off there. We both kind of run this. This was a such a fun and fascinating conversation. I learned a lot about my presentation here, but also just about your wisdom and customer development. For the folks listening. Read the book, you’ll get much more even in this conversation on how to really just get the most insight from your conversations with customers. Thank you, Rob, for being on the show.

Rob
My pleasure. And I wish you all well with your work.