What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the
Andy Hackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses,
and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where
they are today? How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal
lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so
that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet
businesses. Now, one thing I want to do on the podcast, a little bit more often going forward,
including in this episode, is to bring on subject matter experts, people who are really good at a
particular thing so they can share their knowledge with all of us. Today, that expert is Rob
Fitzpatrick. Rob is a serial entrepreneur and a Y Combinator alumnus. He's also a software
engineer and a sales expert. And he is perhaps most famously known for being the author of a
book called The Mom Test, which is kind of the definitive guide for how to talk to your customers
effectively as a founder. Rob and I were already mid conversation, so I'm just going to jump in
where we left off. But if you find this episode useful, and you'd like to see me interview more
experts, feel free to ping me on Twitter. I'm at CS Allen and send me some suggestions. Without
further ado, Rob Fitzpatrick. Okay, why should founders care about talking to their customers?
Why is it even something they should be spending time on? So before I answer that, which I will,
I just want to say that there's two parts to this, there's two challenges you got to deal with,
there's the kind of the willingness or the emotional challenge, like, yes, I'm going to do
this, I'm going to engage in this scary way with strangers, or almost strangers, or I'm going to
expose my idea. And then the other part of it is like the actual hands on skill of running these
conversations properly and asking good questions. You know, you need to be willing to get out there,
but that's not enough. Because if you go out there like I did, I tried so hard. You know,
I was miserable, I wanted to be coding, but I was like, I have to do this for my team,
for my investors, for myself. It's like two years full time, all I did was talk to customers,
and I was so miserable. And then we went out of business anyway, and I was pissed off, right?
Because I'm like, man, like, if I got to suffer this much, I wanted to at least work.
And what I eventually learned, you know, leading into my next company is like, you got to do it
right. You know, these conversations can easily go off track. And just trying to talk like not all
feedback is good feedback. That's an important thing to realize. And we'll talk about how to do
it properly, I'm sure. As for why it's going to benefit you and why it's worth overcoming these
learning curves, emotional and skill, it's that it ends up acting like a programming superpower.
For example, early in my first company's history, we kept building features based on market research
or building features based on strategy or intuition. And we might spend like four or six
months building something, we'd launch it, people don't like it quite as much as we had hoped.
That's a very expensive way to explore an idea space, right? Especially if you've got a team,
I mean, even by yourself, and if you're working nights and weekends, like development is slow,
right? So if you lose four months of development, that's such a setback. And it really clicked for
me when I was having a conversation with someone, and I'm like, Wow, that just saved me four months,
you know, this 30 minute conversation just saved me four months of development time,
that's incredible. And so that's when I started to get excited about it. Another piece that made
me excited emotionally was when I realized that customers actually enjoy having these conversations,
if you do them respectfully. When I first started, I was in very much a sleazy salesman
mode, where it's like, I'm taking your time, and you're getting nothing in return, screw you.
And that made me feel guilty, because that wasn't the way I wanted to interact with strangers, you
know, or my customers. And over time, I realized actually is valuable for them as well. If it's
the worst part of their day, they love talking about it. And over time, you build up this
expertise, and you can offer real value back to them in return, just from your perspective on
the problem, how other people are dealing with it. Another way it clicks, which is valuable is,
you know, you've all launched like a landing page, right? And you're like, Okay,
do people want this? How am I going to market this? How am I going to get people to see this,
like you tried the product on you try all this stuff. And it doesn't quite work. But you don't
know why it didn't work. Like, is it the way you describe the products, the copy of the value
proposition? Is it the way you built the website is that the user experience of the app, it's very
hard to debug that. If you don't have any contact with the people, you can tell if it worked,
because you're rich. But when it hasn't worked, you don't know why it hasn't worked. Whereas if
you're talking to people, you can figure all those things out before the launch, you know exactly
what the tagline should be. Because the customers have told you, you're like, Hey, why do you care
so much about this? Why does this even matter to you? And they just tell you and you go, Okay,
take that put that exactly on my landing page. That's my value proposition. That's my advertising
copy. That's my marketing tagline. There's so much stuff you can figure out. And it gives you a lot
more confidence to stick with it. Because I see a lot of people give up on their ideas too soon,
they like launch an MVP, and it doesn't work. And they go, Well, I tested it, it didn't work.
And they give up. That's wrong. That's always wrong. Because all that proves is that that
particular version of the product didn't work the particular way you marketed it. Whereas if
you've talked to people first in person, you're like, Okay, that MVP didn't work. But I know for
a fact 1000% they care. I know this matters. And that makes it for me a lot easier to keep
throwing away versions of products and looking for the correct solution. So it helps with
everything with motivation with language with features. Like it to me, my programming got so
much more efficient and more satisfying once I learned how to talk to customers properly.
I love that point that, you know, you and I were both developers, we both love writing code.
But it's actually way more efficient to iterate through these conversations. And it is to iterate
through months and months of writing the wrong code, building the wrong features. And I think,
you know, early on in your sort of life as a founder, you're just excited to build something,
you want to get something out there. And it seems like talking to customers is gonna be a waste of
time. But for all the reasons that you've stated, it's not how early should you be talking to
customers? Should you be talking to them as you're coming up with your idea before you come up with
an idea before you write any code? Or should that be something that happens later?
It's important to understand that there's different types of companies and talking to
customers has different value, depending on the type of company you're building.
So if you're building a phone game, or any sort of video game, really, like the classic,
like it's not a sharp pain, it's kind of a commodity product. People love new games,
like if you give them fun, and it's better, they will love that. But there's not a lot of customer
market risk there. It's all execution risk. Like my backgrounds in game design, and with games,
what you try to do is you try you start with a prototype, and you try to prototype the core
mechanic and make it crunchy. Like does the core interaction feel good? And so you lead with that
simple prototype, obviously, you don't build the whole game world or do all of the art or anything,
you start with the core mechanic, like for Diablo, it's clicking on a monster and seeing it explode
in a loot pinata, you like get that right. And you keep working that until it feels crunchy and
satisfying. And then you're okay. And then you start expanding out from there. And that's also
true for what Peter Thiel would call his like 10x product improvements, like product innovations.
So Uber was an example of this. To some extent, Airbnb was an example of this Pinterest, certainly,
these are cases where you couldn't talk to someone and be like, hey, would you like to see
photos in rectangles around topics? Like that's not really a customer interview you can have.
So Pinterest, that type of consumer idea is very difficult to prove in advance, purely through
customer conversations. So there you need to lead with the prototype a bit more. Now, you'd still
like to understand people, right? You might have some conversations to be like, hey, how do you
like get inspiration online? Right? It's open ended, but it's not going to prove or disprove
your idea, it's just going to give you a foundation of empathy and understanding.
Now, at the other side of the spectrum, you've got things which are solving an explicit unsolved
problem, stuff like enterprise software, stuff like people talk to the pain relievers, the hair
on fire problems, this is costing my business money, this is causing me misery, I need this
dealt with right now. When that's the case, you can learn everything you need from a conversation
before you've written a single line of code. So the conversations are valuable in both cases,
I would feel like I was going to battle without a sword. If I wasn't allowed to talk to my customers,
it's not like you can always prove everything just by talking. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I think most people listening to this podcast,
most any hackers are probably building the latter kind of business, the kind of business where
they're trying to solve a specific hair on fire problem for customers who are willing to pay for
it. And we're having these kinds of conversations early on, probably makes a lot more sense than
than having those kinds of conversations for a game or something.
Absolutely. It's actually one of the reasons I choose those types of ideas now because I want
to be able to prove them in advance. And choosing something that's a sharp problem,
it just de-risks the whole business because you don't need to build it first. It's great.
It has so many benefits.
I think it's super important if you're an indie hacker as well, because you're not raising
money from venture capitalists. You don't probably have a super long runway. As you mentioned,
you might be working nights and weekends that you could be spending time with your friends or your
family or on your hobbies. So it's super important to not waste your time on one of these ideas.
You have no clue if it's going to work. Oh, you asked how early to start.
Yeah. And I would say start. And one of the reasons to start talking to people like
ASAP immediately, you want to be able to get active users in your product as early as it's
able to support them. And if you make your product ready to support them, and then you go looking for
the users, it feels like you're not getting anything done. And so maybe a week passes or
two weeks pass and you go, you know what, screw this. I'm done waiting. This is slowing me down.
This talking to customer stuff is stupid. It's a waste of time. I'm just going to build the next
features. I know it needs to happen. You keep repeating that decision over and over. And it's
sensible every time you make it. And soon you've wasted two years going down a rabbit hole and
you're screwed. And you're like, okay, next time I'm going to do it properly. And so by talking to
people early, by forcing yourself to do that, it means that you have them on reserve when you're
ready to use them. And I did this for everything. I do it for my books as well. Like as soon as I
have a book idea and I start writing, I'm also starting to talk to my future potential readers
to understand them, but also to line them up so that as soon as I've got a manuscript for them
to look at, boom, I'm getting feedback from day one instead of having to scramble for it.
Super, super valuable. And then oftentimes also I realized I'm just dead wrong, like dead wrong,
completely wrong. Like I had this idea once for like a CRM for investors to manage their inbound.
It was like kind of an email CRM hybrid to manage their inbound deal flow.
So this was like 10 years ago. I thought it was a pretty good idea at the time.
And so it was one of these ideas that like woke me up in the middle of the night. I'm like,
I'm a genius. This is it. It's going to be incredible. Because I was so stressed about
email and I figured the investors must get a hundred times more than me.
So I set up a conversation for that day. I found a friendly investor who I happened to
kind of know through my network. And this is important in terms of actually doing the
conversations right. You never want to pitch your idea. If at all possible in the early stages,
find a different excuse to talk to them and then just ask them how they already deal with it and
why they do it that way. So I set up a, I was, hey, you know, it's been forever. Let's catch up.
He goes, okay, yeah, I'll meet you for coffee. And just during small talk, you know, I'm like,
hey, man, email is killing me. It's killing me. I'm so miserable. You must get so much more
email than I do. How do you stay alive? How do you deal with this? All these inbound leads,
you know, and so here I've brought up the topic, right? We already have an excuse to be talking.
I've brought up the topic and then I pushed it straight back onto his life. And this is the best
way to do your early stage customer conversations. They're not about your idea. They're about the
customer's life and how they're already dealing with that problem. And he starts talking. I can
just see I've got dollar signs in my eyes, right? He goes, oh my gosh, email, the inbound leads,
we get like 1000 inbound leads a week. It's a nightmare, you know, no one could go through all
of them. It's a mess. You know, and I'm thinking, yeah, this is good. I'm getting validated,
going to be rich. And I'm like, well, talk me through it. And this is another technique you
want to be doing whenever someone gives you a generic answer, you go tell me more about that.
Talk me through that. How does that work? Like what do you actually do? And he goes, oh, well,
actually, to be honest, our associates get most of the email, they delete 90% straight off,
we got a whole team of them doing that. I probably only see 100 a week and maybe 10 of them look
good to me. So I write their company name down on a post it along with the founder's phone number,
put it on my wall right there. He pointed up to like a little cluster of post-its on his wall,
they're probably 10 or 20. He goes once a week, I give them a call, see how they're doing. If I
don't like them anymore, I throw away their post-it. I was like, man, that's old school,
but it actually sounds like a pretty good system. Yeah, super simple. And he thought for a minute,
and he'd been so agitated about email, he thought for a minute, and he sort of relaxed it. He goes,
he goes, actually, it is a pretty good system. And then he's like, so what did you want to talk
about? And I'm kind of like, you know, you've just destroyed my hopes and dreams. Nevermind.
But that's great, because like, I saved my time. And I ended up deciding not to pursue it. But you
might have easily said like, aha, the people with the problem are not the partners, it's the
associates, I need to go talk to the associates, not the partners, figure out if I can make their
lives easier, or whatever. There's other ways like just because you get a negative signal doesn't
mean you need to give up. It's like driving, you know, and there's like a tree across the road,
you don't go, oh, I need to go home, you go, I need to reverse a little bit and find another route to
my destination. And that's the attitude you want to take into finding out that your idea doesn't work.
It's just like this version of the idea doesn't work. And then you reverse a bit and find a way
around. I love that story, because it illustrates one of the big reasons why you should be talking
to customers. I think it's very easy as a founder, especially if you're a first time founder,
to become overly confident in your ideas as they exist in your head, you're like all this ideas
gonna work for sure. I'm so confident. I'm so excited about it. And it's easy to underestimate
like the difference between reality and the world that exists in your head. And you actually talk to
real people and ask them about their lives and what's going on with them, you realize like there's
this huge discrepancy. And oftentimes, I talked to more experienced founders, and they're
significantly less confident about their ideas than the inexperienced founders.
Yeah, it's it's humbling. You know, you can be so confident, you've done all these business model
canvases, you check the market size, you've like, you know, mocked up the landing page,
you're all pumped. And then you're like, Oh, literally no one in the world cares at all
about this. Like, they just don't care. And sometimes it can be confusing too, because
they can say they care, but they're just straight up lying to you, especially about
aspirational topics like health and the environment and sustainability and recycling and all this
stuff. People like security people like yeah, our business really cares about security. It's a top
problem. It's like, Oh, what do you do about people using their personal devices? Literally
nothing. Oh, what do you do about this? Absolutely nothing is but like, you're not going to be like,
do you care about security? How important is it? And they go, my business doesn't care at all about
security. Like we don't care. Our customers data means nothing to us. Like they just can't say
that. And equally, no one goes like I don't care about well being like I don't care about the
environment. So sometimes with those like aspirational topics, you need to be incredibly
skeptical about what you're being told by your customers and really, really bring it back down
to their current behavior. Like if someone goes I care about the environment, like I'm not going
to be like great, my carbon credits business is going to work. I'm going to be like prove it to me,
show me what you're already doing. Show me how much money you're already spending. Show me how
much effort you're already putting toward this. Show me what you've tried that's failed. Like I
want to see hard evidence that you're already doing something because if you're not, I think
this is all just fluff. It's fascinating how much people lie sometimes even inadvertently. One of
the things I've noticed is how much people will complain about things that aren't problems like
people would loudly complain about how much they hate slack and how distracted they are. But they're
doing absolutely zero to change it. And it turns out they actually love slack and use it all the
time. And they just like complaining about something because it's easy to talk about.
And it's easy as an entrepreneur to get really like tricked to think, oh, this is a real problem.
People complain about it all the time. But the reality is it's not a problem worth solving.
I mean, the willingness to actually change things. And one of the reasons that starting
with the pitch is such a problem is that it multiplies the lies you get by like a factor
of 10 or 100. Like if I go to you and I'm like, all right, I got a product. It's going to make
you live 10 years longer. You're going to get skinny. You're going to get sexy. You're going
to get laid. You're going to feel great. You're going to be full of energy. It's like you have
to come in for treatment three times a week. It's like this pill. It hurts a bit. It's going to
wipe you out for 20 minutes. But whatever, you move on with your life, right? People are like,
oh, yeah, I want to live 10 years longer. I want to get laid. And then you're like,
my product is a gym. Come on in. And they're like, I don't want that.
It's like, but you just said you want all the benefits. But you can lead people to anything
if you start pitching because you're exposing your ego. They want to support you in your dream.
They don't want to slam your ambition. So you've really got to resist that pitching instinct.
You're like, the whole thing of customer conversations is trying to avoid all these
compliments and ego-driven lies and these little annoyances that people aren't actually
motivated to change and try to get to the core underneath. What are they already doing or not
doing and why or why not? And you just keep like, well, what are you already doing? How have you
dealt with that? What have you searched for? Can you talk me through how that works? Those sorts
of questions are where the real goal is, at least in the early stages.
So we're talking about the fact that generally speaking, it's not good enough just to talk to
your customers. There's actually specific techniques and strategies you can use to make sure those
customer conversations are productive. And in your book, you've got a framework that you call
the mom test, which is three rules for how to talk to customers. Number one, which we've been
talking about, is to focus on their life instead of immediately bringing up your idea. Number two
is to ask for specifics from their past instead of opinions about what they want or what they
might do in the future. That's basically how you get lied to. And number three is talk less and
listen more. So let's get into some specifics here about how you phrase these questions.
Let's say I do the kind of default ND hacker thing. I talk to somebody about what I'm working on
and then I ask them, hey, do you think this is a good idea? Why isn't that a good way to start a
customer conversation? I don't know if this is a thing, but it's something you'll notice. It's
like you can offload the burden of truth onto the other person. So when you say, do you think this
is a good idea? What you're doing is you're offloading the burden of truth onto them. You're
forcing them to tell you the hard truth. That's an emotionally draining task for them. It's like
when someone asks you if they're pretty, you're like, I don't know, man. Don't ask me that. That's
awkward. It's an emotionally draining question because you're forced to like, oh gosh, is there
ego involved? Are they going to cry? It's just like you're asking to get missed. You're putting
them in a difficult situation. Whereas if you go like, let's say you're building an email tool
and one version of this conversation is like, hey, I'm building a new email tool that does this and
this and this. Do you think it's a good idea? Would you use it? Would you buy it? That pushes
all the emotional burden onto the other person. And they're meant to deal with all their emotions
and somehow deal with the biases themselves and they're untrained and they don't really care and
they're meant to tell you the truth. That's super hard. The other way to do it is to take that
responsibility yourself where you go like, okay, forget about my idea for now. Let me just try to
understand you and how you already deal with email and what you do and don't do. And then I,
as the entrepreneur, I'm going to take the responsibility for turning that into an insight
from which I can take a visionary leap to my product. You're not trying to collect feature
requests and you're not trying to build a product by committee. What you're trying to do is understand
the goals and frustrations and lives of your users so that you can take a more accurate visionary
leap or a visionary leap from a more accurate foundation. And you can still be wrong, right?
You can get a good foundation and then leap in the wrong direction, but like, hey, that's life,
that's entrepreneurship. But your foundation is still valid because you still understand your
customers. So you go, well, version one did not work at all. But you still got your foundation
of understanding. So you can try a different visionary leap to like a different product
version or a different way of dealing with it or a different business model or whatever.
So I mean, is it a good idea? It just asks too much of the other person, right? That's not their
job. Your job is the entrepreneur. It's your job to figure out if it's a good idea. All they can
do is tell you about their life. That's the only information they have access to. Plus people are
just so optimistic about the future. Even if you go like, hey, would you pay for this? They will
go, I would definitely pay for that. I would pay $50 per month for that for sure. Then you go,
great. You launch it and you build it and you spend a year on your life savings. Then you're
like, hey, it's ready. And they're like, actually, I don't need it. You're like, what? They're like,
yeah, I didn't really think about how much of a pain it would be to change my whole workflow.
I have to learn a new tool. I have to install it. Deal with the security thing. I don't know. It
just, I'm fine. I'm fine. You're like, ah, you just wasted a year of my life, right? But that was
your mistake because you put the burden on them. You expected them to tell you the truth instead
of you taking responsibility for finding the truth. And as a side point, like never ask people
if they would pay hypothetical money. Either make your own decision based on what they're
already doing or ask them for actual money. Hypothetical money means nothing.
Yeah, these are some great points, especially the point about founders asking customers to do their
job for them. Nobody's going to be able to tell you if your idea is good or you've got a great
business. That's your job to work out all those variables. It's an incredibly complex question.
And I've been in the other situation before plenty of times. People have asked me, hey,
Cortland, would you pay for this? And I do exactly what you're describing. Like, yeah,
I think I would pay for it because I'm not going to sit around for an hour really thinking
like in detail about all the things that would get me to pay for it. And then the time comes
around when they've launched and I'm like, you know what? Nevermind. And it's not because you're
mean. Like I do it as well. I'll try to trick people in the moment. I legit just like every
day. I think I'm going to go to the gym and I never did like, you know, every time a founder
pitches me an awesome new product, I think I'm going to use it, but I never do just some busy.
I'm doing stuff, but like all your customers are busy and doing stuff. So you need to kind of be
able to navigate that with that quote, like, like expecting other people to always use common sense
is itself a failure of common sense. It's like the same sort of deal. So there are these questions
you shouldn't ask. You shouldn't ask, Hey, is my idea good? You shouldn't ask, Hey, would you
pay for this? Or how much would you pay for this? What are some good questions that you should ask
when you're telling people about your initial idea? So as you progress through a new idea,
you're going to get increasing confidence, right? You're going to move from like, does anybody care
at all through to like, which features should I build in which orders and which do I need for
launch? And what should my pricing be? So it gets more specific as you go, because you're building
this foundation. Why don't we talk about the early stage questions when your idea is still super
nascent. So at the beginning, it's like, do they care at all? And do they care sufficiently that
they're going to be motivated to like bother learning about installing and learning a new
piece of software or new tool or whatever. So what I'm looking for there is I just want to explore
how they feel about the problem. So you know, give me a give me a problem space, or an industry
about productivity software, productivity software, great. So super aspirational also,
right? Everyone thinks they want to be productive. They read a lot of productivity blogs, but they
never actually do anything. Like they're just like being actively unproductive while trying to learn
about this stuff. And so you talk to someone you go, Hey, do you care about productivity? These are
bad questions. By the way, don't do this. Hey, do you care about productivity? Yeah. How important
is it to you? Very important. Oh, like, would you be interested in tools that help make you more
productive? Yes, I would. Like, okay, if something could really help you get more work done, do you
think that would be worth $10 a month to you? $50? Oh, yeah, $50 a month. My work's valuable.
My only it's like, boom, you've just destroyed yourself, right? You come out of that and you
feel like you've been rigorous. But it's an enormous false positive. So a better questions
are about what they're already doing and why. So you go, Hey, you know, you pay any attention
to productivity stuff. Do you care about that? Like a classification question? It's just like,
am I talking to a potential customer? Or are they completely irrelevant? So if you're building a
product for babies, and you're like, Hey, do you have a baby? And they go, No, you're not going to
be like, well, imagine you did. And let me pitch you something. Like, so the first question is just
like, are they in my customer segment? And then after that, you go great. Okay, I know they care
about productivity. And if they don't care about productivity, you might ask a couple more questions
to figure out why maybe they're like on the fence. So that's an interesting segment. But once you
realize they really don't care, just leave them be right. Even if you've only been talking to them
for like 30 seconds, the hour long meeting is like the curse of customer development. Because
most custom meetings take like five minutes, you really don't need an hour. So anyway, so you know
they care and you go like, Hey, well, what do you do about it? Like talk me through your habits at
the moment, like what tools do you use? And they'll tell you. And these sorts of questions like talk
me through it. What do you use right now? No one lies. Like the lies disappear. It's just a fact
about their life. You are not exposing any ego, you're not putting any burden of truth on them.
There's nothing emotionally difficult about them answering. They're just be like, Oh, I use this,
this, this. Oh, what did you try before? I use this and this. Why did you switch away? Because
of this? Like, have you looked for any new alternatives to what you're currently using?
No, I'm pretty happy. Okay, like they're pretty happy. Like probably to me, they don't have an
urgent problem. Where some people you might ask that same series of questions. And these are all
what are you already doing? And why talk me through it, that sort of thing. And they go,
yo, it's driving me frickin crazy. I've tried Slack, I've tried, they named 10 other alternatives.
They're like, I've tried Kanban. I've tried this, I've tried that. I've used everything. It's a
nightmare. Like, right. This cost me a fortune. Like client deals are slipping by. It's like the
worst part of my life. I tried a PA, but she stole all my money. Like I tried a virtual assistant,
but like he ran off with my clients, like whatever. And you're like, wow, this person really cares,
right? They're spending a fortune of either their attention or their resources to deal with this.
They're super motivated. Now, obviously, as your product becomes more mainstream and established,
not every customer is going to be this insanely motivated. Like as you become more mainstream,
you become acceptable to less motivated customers. But when you're a brand new, unproven thing,
certainly with businesses, you kind of need that crazy first customer. And they're so emotional.
They're so like, so I'm looking for that emotional signal when I'm talking to them about their life.
And I'm like, and then I'll ask them for a commitment to kind of prove that they're serious.
So I was once talking to a woman who ran a creative agency and I had some software that I
was thinking of, but I hadn't even built it. And to be honest, I hadn't even decided if I wanted
to build it. I was still exploring like, is this even worth it? And we had like the perfect customer
discovery conversation. We got along well, we're having a fun chat. She told me all about her
workflow, her life, like the way they handled problems at their agency. She seemed like the
perfect customer for me. I was like, listen, can we switch the mode of this conversation a little
bit? I'm actually working on some software. You know, I know I said I wasn't going to pitch you
anything, but it sounds like it would be perfect for you. If you wanted to take 10 minutes,
I would love to tell you about it. And this is a good habit. Like often when you set up these
customer conversations, you do it by saying like, I just want to learn. I just want to like you can
help me out so much by just telling me about your life and your work. And it's a bit dishonest to
then switch into a sneaky pitch. So if I'm going to do that transition, I always ask permission.
I'm like, Hey, would it be cool? And if I detect even the slightest discomfort in their face,
they're like, I'm like, forget about it. Forget about it. Like you've helped me out so much
already. I really appreciate it. You gain nothing by pitching someone who doesn't want to hear it.
But anyway, but she was like, Yeah, I'd love to hear about it. Tell me. So we went through,
I drew some wireframes, we like talked about it. She's like, this is so important. Like we need
this. Like how soon can we have it? Now that sounds positive, right? But it's hypothetical.
This is imaginary money. It means nothing.
She's saying she might pay for it. Or she thinks she would pay for it. So she's predicting the
future. Yeah, she's predicting the future. And I don't know. Am I going to bet my future
on her guess at her future? No, no way. I want proof. And so the way you do that is by putting
them into a buying decision by asking them for something that hurts is the wrong word,
but by asking them for something that they'd only give you if they're serious. And usually that's
time, reputation, money, or if you're selling to big businesses, it's secrets about their buying
process, like their budgets, their procurement process, that sort of thing. So time, reputation,
money, reputation is usually intros or public testimonials. Money is obvious, pre-order,
letter of intent, blah, blah, blah. Time is the interesting one. And it's also it's the weakest,
but it means more than nothing. So I was sitting there and I was thinking, what can I ask her for
that's appropriate given the fact that I have nothing to show I have no product yet, that would
prove whether she's a customer. So I thought about it for a second. I was like, Listen,
this thing's not ready yet. We're going to start development soon. It sounds like it's really
important to you. What would you think about me coming into your office this week, spending about
two hours with the rest of your development team to figure out if this product would really solve
this problem for them, the whole tone of the conversation changes, right? Because I'm now
asking for something that matters. I'm not asking for words. I'm asking for her development team's
time. That's cash money. And she gets real serious. She's like, ah, you know, and I can see
she's like conflicted. And eventually she goes, Yes, this is really important. When can you come in?
And I'm like, Okay, she's a customer, right? Yeah, money had changed hands. But now I completely
trust that she's will and she may not like stuff happens, right? She may not convert in the end or
life may like whatever. But like at this moment, I'm like she was in a buying mindset and she made
a buying decision. So I'm going to take her very, very seriously. So those are kind of the stages
it goes through. It starts with this like early, just tell me about your life, what are you doing
and why? And then at a certain point, you've learned everything you can you understand you've
got a good mental model of how they make their decisions and their priorities. And then you can
switch into this like, okay, what commitment can I ask for to put them in a buying mindset to prove
that like, yeah, they're actually going to follow through on this. And again, you're not tricking
them. Sometimes people hear me say this and they're like, Oh, yeah, it's like a clever sales tactic.
It's like, no, it's like the reverse of a clever sales tactic, you're intentionally trying to get
rejected. Because you only want to spend your time with the people who really care. It's like,
anti sales, you know, you're like, please reject me, I'm giving you every opportunity to reject me.
And like, if they get the slightest hint that they are rejecting, you're just like, I'm out,
right? Because like, trying to push them, they will eventually say yes. It's like,
if you're annoying enough in a bar, you can always get a fake phone number.
But that doesn't actually help you. Like with a customer, you can always get them to say you're
smart and your idea is brilliant. But that doesn't help you. Like if you're annoying enough,
you can get people to lie to you. But like don't do that.
You're only hurting yourself. I used to I used to date a therapist and she was excellent pointing
out all these subtle almost unconscious reasons why we do things. And I think for a lot of founders
and the hackers, we say we're talking to people about our ideas in order to like learn and improve.
But if you listen to what we're actually saying, we're just fishing for compliments. We just want
someone to say something nice, someone to say our ideas good. Whereas you're, like you said,
you're trying to get people to say no, you're trying to get like a definitive answer, you're
trying to find out if there is some reason why this person isn't a customer, if there is some
reason why your idea isn't important, or if there is some reason why they're not actually going to
buy. Yeah, and the ones who are lukewarm, like I still write down their name and email, like I
keep track of them and I send them updates and I stay friendly. And maybe in six months, I'm like,
hey, you know, that thing we talked about ages ago, it's out, people love it. If you want to
take a look, it's there, like you can always convert them later. But they're not going to be
your first customer, like your first customers are going to be frothing with emotion. So you know,
look for that. Let's talk about validating your idea by asking your customers questions and your
book you talk about the fact that you should be terrified of at least one of the questions
that you're asking the customers. What does that mean exactly? I mean, maybe this is only me,
but sometimes there's questions that if you ask them and you get a certain answer,
it just means you're going out of business. Like, for example, a common one is like,
do you have the budget for this? And, you know, obviously any salesperson listening to this would
laugh at me. But as a non salesperson, as a techie dude, who was asking for like what I felt like
was a lot of money at the time, it was terrifying to me. And so I was stuck in this song and dance
of like these unending meetings. And I was demoing better and better versions of products. And they
were giving me nicer and nicer compliments. And I was sort of like hoping it would magically turn
into a sale. And they never did. And I was like, and then eventually, I was going through this
terrible, infantile sales process with a company, well with MTV, actually, and one of my buddies
worked there. And he came to me through the back channel. And he's like, Hey, you know why that
deal didn't go through, right? And I was like, I do not know, but I would love to know. He told me,
and I was like, Wow, I really screwed that up, huh? And it was like something with legal and
something with budgets and something with music rights, whatever. It was like simple, just facts
that were in the way. And I had always feared those things might be problems. But I like didn't
want to mention them in case I spooked the customer. Whereas now I'm like, what's the scariest thing
possible? What's the worst thing they could tell me? And then I'm going to try to actively search
that out. Now there's an appropriate time for this stuff, right? If you've just met someone
for the first time, it's difficult to be like, what's your budget? But also, that question's got
to come at some point. You got to talk about pricing, you got to talk about money, you got
to talk about the legal side, you got to talk about their boss. It's like, Hey, it seems like
this is really exciting for you. But your boss would need to sign off on this too, right? And
maybe legal and maybe tech and maybe procurement. And they're like, actually not legal or procurement.
This is a small enough purchase. It's under five grand. But yeah, my boss would need to see it and
our tech guys. You go, can I talk to them? That's the scary question in that moment. Will you
introduce me? Because if they say no, it means the sales over. That's a reputational ask. You're
saying, will you risk a reputation by introducing me to your superiors? So that's the scary question.
So I found that I have a natural compass where the thing I least want to ask is probably the
most important question. And I try to hold myself accountable. And like now it's easier for me,
right? Because I've been doing it for 12 years or something. But for the first like six years,
I was still terrified of these conversations every time I was having them. And so I came up
with a couple little hacks to keep myself honest, I would write on a piece of paper, like my note
taking paper, I would write the three big things I wanted to learn about. So like, which tools do
they use? What else have they tried and abandoned? And what are their thoughts on security, for
example, whatever, your questions will change depending on the stage of your company and where
you're at. And then at the bottom, I would be like, if it goes well, what am I going to ask them for
as a commitment? And one of the three like questions or things like somewhere on that had
to be something I was terrified of. So it's like, I'm ready to ask for money. And that's terrifying.
Or I'm ready to ask for an introduction to the boss. And that's terrifying. I'm ready to talk
about budgets or legal or whatever I need to learn about whatever. And that's good. It bubbles out
those problems sooner, it keeps you on the straight and narrow. How do you figure out
what these scary questions can be? For you, I think you're experienced enough to just sort of
intuitively say, Hey, here's a question I'm afraid of asking, you know, I should ask for a lot of
newer founders, they're not really sure how to detect whether or not their idea is important,
or people are going to buy or people have the budget for it, or even what the existential risk
factor is, how can they figure that out? If it's a long sales process, you'll get the idea.
Eventually, it's like the unspoken thing, or it's what's holding you back from like closing
the deal in smaller sales processes, you'll still probably figure it out over time. It's
just you figure it out across multiple different customers instead of just a single customer.
But it's really, really helpful if you can get a sales advisor or a sales coach,
they're really expensive. So you wouldn't want to hire one probably. But if you can swap favors
with someone who is good at it, and they'll help you do post mortems on your sales meetings,
or your all your meetings, really. And ideally, someone who's good at like startup early stage,
like a sales founder would be preferred. Because like sales people are too focused on pitching and
converting. Whereas what you need is someone who's like, well, you know, comfortable with the mom
test stuff for the customer discovery stuff where they're like exploring and looking for the strong
signal. But what you do is you take good notes during the meetings. And then afterwards, you
don't go that meeting went really well, because that gives them no information. What you do is
you talk them through the whole whole meeting, like the conversation, I said this, then they said this,
then I said this, then they said this, then this happened, then this happened, I showed the demo,
they asked this, you just play by play back from your notes. And then it's like, what should I have
done differently? Did I miss any important questions? What should my next question for them
be? What's the most likely thing that's going to sink this sale? What do you think they didn't tell
me that like, there's a lot of clues, like between the lines that someone who's a bit more experienced
with this stuff will be able to immediately pick up. And like often, like when I'm advising teams,
I'm advising a team right now, and they're the best at this ever. And I'm able to be so helpful,
because every meeting, they take total notes and every week they post all their notes of all the
meetings they had that week. And I can just read through all their transcripts. And then I know
exactly how, like what they're missing, the important questions, it's so, so helpful. With
a lot of other teams, like they don't give me that information, they're like ashamed to reveal the
actual facts. They're just like, yeah, we talked to a customer went really well, I'm sure they're
going to convert soon. And it's like, well, I can't help you. So if you want to use like a sales
helper, effectively, you need to take notes, and then you need to walk them through a play by play.
And then they'll be able to help you with all this stuff. There's some indie hackers who are really
strong at sales, like Louis Swiss, and there's I'm sure there's a bunch of others. So there's
people who will help you for free. And there's people you can swap favors with.
Shout out to Louis Swiss, we'll see how many emails he gets asking him for some free help.
He just writes such good stuff. Every time he writes an article about sales or marketing,
I'm like, yeah, that guy's smart. Yeah, he knows who's doing it.
I talked to Heaton Shaw on the podcast last year. And one of his big rules of thumb is that you
should solve problems related to your customers' top challenges. And it's really true for me,
because I get a lot of emails pitching me products. And a lot of times, the products
are actually useful. But they're just solving like problem number 55 or problem number 100
on my list of priorities. And so like these founders are actually solving my problems,
or they're solving problems that, quite frankly, don't matter that much to me.
And so I just don't end up using them. And I worry that so many people are starting companies
where they're just solving problems that don't matter that much. It strikes me as
like a potential scary question. How do you ask a question to find out if the problem your product
solves is even important to your customer? So that one you can't ask directly,
because they'll lie to you. It's like a very lie-inducing question.
Because you're putting people in the moment. You're leading them there. And they have nothing
to benchmark it against. So you're like, how annoying is it that sometimes your shoes come
untied? Or like, how annoying is email? Or how annoying is traffic? And people are like,
traffic is super annoying. Traffic is the worst part of my life. And it's like, oh, have you
thought about bicycling or switching jobs? And they're like, I would never do that. I love my
car. And it's like, so just asking how much a problem matters, to me, it means nothing.
Whenever I see that on a survey, I'm like, well, first off, surveys are a ridiculous waste of time.
But you can't ask people how important the problems are. You need to look at their existing
behaviors, and not their aspirations, but what they're already doing. Say you're making anything,
like a music training app. And you're like, hey, would you love to learn an instrument?
Of course, everyone's going to say, yeah, I'd love to be more musical. Who wouldn't?
But then it's like, well, what are you doing about it? How much time are you currently
spending on learning music? How much time have you spent the last five years? And if someone's like,
well, I do nothing now. I kind of gave up. But three years ago, I spent like 100 hours
on YouTube tutorials, I bought a bunch of books, I was trying to learn this, I looked for a coach,
but couldn't find one I trusted in my area. I travel a lot, it's hard to stay regular.
You're like, Oh, actually, that's really interesting. Even though right now they're
doing nothing, they've like in their past, they've like devoted resources to this, right?
So that's the main thing I look for is like, have they already done something about it?
Even if that search resulted in failure, the fact that they attempted it, like legitimately,
it means a lot to me, like security, like all sorts of people have bad security. But like,
well, how much have they looked into it? If they haven't looked into it at all, I'm skeptical,
no matter how important they claim it is. Whereas if they're like, I tried all these things,
but honestly, it's impossible. Like there's always a new phishing attack, there's always
a new scam, feels like whatever I do, I can't stay on top of it as a nightmare. You know,
I did a ton of research, and then I just gave up. It's like, Oh, that might be a customer.
So that's like the non consumer, but maybe a customer, as opposed to the non consumer who
really doesn't care and will never be a customer. So I watch what they're doing rather than listen
to what they're saying, if at all possible. I love the point you made about seeing where
they're diverting their resources to where are they spending their time? Where are they spending
their money? I just wrote a post on Andy hackers about how to brainstorm good business ideas,
the very first step where you're just trying to come up with an idea before you even talk to
anybody. And a huge clue is like, well, what are companies or customers already spending a ton of
money on? That's a pretty huge clue that there's something that's valuable there, right? People
don't spend a ton of money on things they don't care about. And so I love this idea of asking a
question, you know, how much time have you spent trying to do this? How much money have you spent
doing this? How much do you really care? That's kind of a shortcut way of asking that.
Exactly. I mean, any sort of attention, it doesn't have to be money. Money works. Sometimes money can
backfire as well. It's such like, it's so non obvious. It's such a subtle thing to get to the
truth. It's really like it's a craft. It's something you learn about. Because I was trying
to sell some stuff to universities once. And during the talks, they're like, yeah, this would
uh, this would do the job that we've currently got a team of four full time people doing,
you know, and I'm doing the mental math. And I'm like, Oh, that's worth at least a quarter
million a year. You know, and I sort of like, you know, public salaries and stuff, you can figure it
out. And I'm like, Oh, wow, this is great. So I'm only charging them 20 grand a year. So this is a
no brainer. That's a 10x savings, right? But what I hadn't realized is like a public institution,
they're not allowed to fire anyone. Everyone's unioned, everyone's protected, right? The salaries
are already an allocated budget, and they can't just switch salary budget into tool budget.
Their tool budget is also already allocated and is much smaller. And the pitch of like,
you get to fire for employees, well, that might be compelling to a business is not compelling
to a public institution. So that was a case where the money really misled me. And I thought that
because I was saving them 230 grand per year, that they would like my software, when in fact,
it was a total non starter. So this is whole broader, this whole broader, I guess, range of
questions where you're just trying to find out details like that about your customers. What do I
not know about these people? What assumptions might I be having? In this particular case,
your assumption was a university operates like a business. And at some point, you discover that
that wasn't the case. How did you find how did you find that out? Well, I went out of business
was the main way. No, no, what happens is, over time, you'll like you'll find some of the people
you're talking to, you'll click with really well. And it's a phenomenon that I described as like,
they come around to your side of the table, it's start it stops feeling like you're pitching them
or interviewing them or learning about them. And it starts to feel like they're on your side helping
you to understand the rest of their company or the rest of their industry, the whole dynamic
changes. And you feel like all the shields drop. And you can just be like, Listen, I am so confused.
I think we're on to something exciting. But I have no idea what we should be doing about this.
And you feel like you can reveal that level of weakness. And they don't see it as weakness,
they see it as an opportunity to help. They're really on your side. They're almost like the
the customer co founder. I mean, this is what Steve Blank calls his early evangelists.
They're rare, one in 20, one in 100. But when you find them, they're super precious. And that's
when you can really fill in all these blanks about what's going wrong and all these weird little
quirks of the industry. You can sometimes also get it a bit more directly by going to industry
experts, journalists, investors, founders who have sold a company in this industry and have since
quit. So they no longer have a competitive interest executives who were senior in your
industry and have recently retired. All of these people are quite bored. And they're happy to share
their hard one expertise about the industry. So you can sit down with a person like that. Now
they're not a customer. So you don't value their feedback in terms of whether or not people are
going to buy your product. But you very much value their feedback in terms of like, Hey,
how does this industry work? What obstacles are going to be standing in my way? If this
was your business, what would you be most frightened by? What information would you be
looking to gather most aggressively? And a couple conversations with an industry expert,
I don't have nearly as much of them as I do with customers. I try to talk to a few customers every
week just to keep a steady drip of information coming in. Whereas I might talk to one or two
industry experts at all, like just, you know, one time just like do my due diligence. And obviously
you want to learn as much as you can from Google at first, because you don't want to seem like
you're not respecting their time. But they understand, even with an industry that seems
simple, like online advertising, there's so much subtlety under the hood. That's just not written
about anywhere. And you really need someone who's been in that industry for 10 or 20 years to kind
of explain to all the nuance. So they get that and they're like super happy to share this secret
knowledge. Yeah, I see this a lot on any hackers. People confuse talking to potential customers or
people who might actually buy their product with talking to other founders or maybe experts. And
it's like, that's not the same group of people. These people are not like, they're not your users,
unless they are, if you're selling starter founders, that's fine. But if I'm talking to you,
Rob, I'm going to be asking you for strategic advice. I'm going to be like, Rob, how do I
talk to customers? Should I send surveys? Should I do whatever? I'm not going to be asking what's
going on in your life or asking what you think about my landing page or whatever, because your
opinion doesn't really matter on that. Yeah, I think it's crazy. They're not your customers.
What do you care what they think? It's like, unless you have a specific ask, you're a non-native
speaker and you're trying to make sure your language is sharp. You said something earlier
that I wanted to ask you about, which is that you shouldn't send surveys, that surveys are
ineffective. Number one, why are surveys ineffective? And number two, what are these other forms of
communication that you should be using to talk to your customers?
Occasionally, someone makes the mistake of sending me a survey and asking me what I think
about it or whether it's good questions. And I always just end up being like, don't use surveys.
It makes me so mad. It's a real pet peeve. So the issue with surveys is that anything that fits on
a survey, someone else has already done the research about and you could just Google it.
Any question you can ask on a survey could be Googled. Whereas the things that you can't ask
on a survey, like decision-making process or where they get nervous or scared about this area
or the emotional side or the decision-making side, that stuff does not come across at all in a survey.
You're like, yeah, I'll leave a text entry field. That doesn't work. You get random ideas and
garbage. You can't evaluate, are they customers? Are they fans? And this is a case where having
a big audience works against you because you get a bunch of people who are just fans of yours trying
to be helpful. And they're like, oh, yeah, I'll go fill this in. And now your data is all corrupted.
A million pieces of bad data is not as good as one piece of good data.
The bad data at scale is still bad data. It becomes worse. It decays. It has negative value
because you get more confidence in it. But it's now statistically significant bad data. That's
not the way to run a business. If you're tempted to survey it, Google it, get what you can from
Google, and then sit down with five people in person. I've honestly never seen a survey question
that I thought was actually useful. And a lot of people have sent me their surveys to have me look
over them. Maybe if you were a super non-native speaker and you really felt like you could not
have a conversation fluidly, I could imagine potentially like the survey being a fallback,
but I'm still not sure that meaningful insights would come out of that. I would rather that you
look for representative customers in your native languages, learn from them, and then hope that
those learnings apply. I think it's still bad, but that would be like a better signal.
Is there really no use for surveys? Is that about quantitative data, trying to figure out
where your users are from, whether or not they know how to code, stuff like that?
After you have a bunch of users, sure. I think it's a fine tool for understanding your existing
user base, because that has given you a population that is unique, and no one else has data on it.
It is now the population of your user base. So yes, by all means, to learn about your own
user base, sure. But to do it, to validate an idea, or to learn about your customers who you
don't yet have, I'm up for being proven wrong. If someone wants to send me their genius survey
that totally fix their business, I'll write an addition to the mom test and I'll add it in there,
because that would be a breakthrough if you figured out how to do it. But I've never seen one.
But yeah, for your own customers, absolutely. There's the product market fit survey,
which seems to be effective. It's got a lot of data behind it. I've never used them in that way,
either. I have no opinion, but I could see it being useful. But I know they don't work for
customer discovery. So on the subject of talking to your existing customers, let's say you have
a business that's working pretty well, you have people using what you're building, and you're just
asking them for feedback. I had Sarah Hum on the podcast, she has a company called Canny.
And it's a tool that's explicitly for requesting user feedback, your customers can go, they can
make suggestions and feature requests, they can file bug reports, they can upvote each other's
feature requests. And then you're sort of left with dozens and dozens of these requests, you have
to figure out what to do with them. And it's probably not the right thing to just add them
all to your to do list and just work through them one by one, you got to figure out which ones are
good, which ones are bad. How do you sort through this kind of customer data?
You just need to ask one or two extra questions. It's like, why do you want this? What would this
let you do that you can't do already? How often would you use this? How are you getting by now
while this doesn't exist? That sort of thing. It's kind of like the customer discovery around
the feature request, you're trying to get one level deeper, I think of it a bit like a metal
detector, like the feature request is the metal detector going beep beep beep. That is not the
information that shows you that there's information below ground, but you need to dig to get it.
So to me, the feature request is the beep beep beep. But then the follow up questions is how you dig
underneath to get to the real insight. And what normally happens is the customers have a goal or
a problem or frustration, but they want to be helpful. So they take the extra jump and turn
that goal or frustration into a feature request. And then they give you the feature request.
I don't know why, but that's what they do. And so then you'd need to reverse engineer that and go
back from the feature request to the original goal or frustration. And then sometimes they're
correct, and you build exactly what they want. But other times, you're the product visionary,
other times you can find a much better way to accomplish their goal or deal with their frustration.
So even the appropriate response to getting feature requests is to just ask more questions
and dig deeper. If possible, I feel like this is a place where indie hackers probably aren't
struggling. It's like you know what to do with feature requests. You're probably not just
blindly building every feature request you get. You're probably already dealing with them somehow.
I'm not sure I have massive value to add on that one. But something I would suggest is to find some
excuse to have a couple customer conversations each week, like one or two, not a huge amount,
two or three maybe, and find a way to make that time efficient.
So there's a huge time cost to organizing a meeting from scratch, like commuting and following
up and taking notes and all that stuff, the calendar dance. Huge time cost. It takes like
half a day when you could have been programming and stuff. So what you want to do to make this
sustainable, especially if you're still part-time, is you want to find moments in your week when you
already have incidental contact with your potential customers or your current customers,
and then use that opportunity to ask a couple more questions. And support tickets and feature
requests work really well for this purpose. So it's not just that you can kind of like you're a
product person, you can kind of intuit what the feature request means, maybe like you get it,
whatever. But like if you can use that when the customer has already reached out to you instead
of you reaching out to them, and use that as a cheap and easy way to transition into a little
learning conversation, you can get a lot of value with a very low time cost. So sometimes when I
say like, yeah, have a couple customer conversations each week, people are horrified.
They're like, oh my gosh, my schedule. But it's like, no, no, no, find the ones that are in your
life. And if people are like, there's zero customers in my life, I'm like, like, that's
worrying, you know? Like, can you do something to put more customers in your life? Like when I was
serving universities, instead of going to drink at a regular bar, I would go to drink at the
university bars, and specifically the ones that the professors went to. And it was just like I was
in contact with them. And it's like, I got to know a few of them. And it's like, Oh, once your
buddy's one professor, it's easy to talk to all the others. And it meant that like, I would go
there once a week or something, and I would go to the pub, and I'd have a couple pints, and I'd talk
to five or 10 professors or school administrators or whatever. I was like, cool, that's my customer
learning done for the week. Like it doesn't need to be a huge task. Songkick, a London startup
around live music. Every Friday, they threw a party and invited 50 of their most active users who
are based in London to come to their office. And they hired a band, they had a ton of food and beer,
and they just had their team mingle with customers. It's like, Hey, just hang out with them have some
beers Friday after lunch, hang out, no more work. From that the user experience team would be pulling
people aside and be like, Hey, if you're interested, like we'd love to show you the upcoming version
of the app, like we're going to be video recording it, do you want to come see what's new?
People are like, yeah, so boom, they're getting their user tests, they're getting their casual
customer conversations, like everyone's staying like empathetic with their users.
That was a consumer app, but you can do it with business too, you can do the business lunch,
organize a meetup, go to meetups, like there's so many ways. Like, for example, meetups,
I'll mention this one, and then I'll be done with these little tactical tips. Everyone screws up
meetups and events, they go to a meetup or event in pure sales mode. And they go, Hello, I am Rob
Fitzpatrick, I am an entrepreneur, I have a business, this is what my business does, what do
you do? And the other person gets the same pitch. And it's like, great, good to meet you. It sounds
like we could do business together, let's exchange business cards and set up a meeting. And then they
both ignore each other. Because that's like a zero value conversation for both sides. Whereas if
you could, but that was like a potential customer, right? And you just wasted that opportunity. You
wasted a conversation to try to set up a meeting. That is insane. You could have just asked what you
wanted to ask in the meeting during that conversation. So my whole life changed when I started, well,
not my whole life, but my whole like customer development life, when I started going to meetups,
and I stopped bringing business cards, right? I'm like, this is not for pitching. And someone would
come up to me, and they'd be like, Oh, blah, blah, blah, I do this, I do this, and they'd give me
their business card. And I wouldn't even tell them who I was, I just be like, Hey, super weird
question. How do you guys deal with email security? And like, boom, I'm in a discovery
conversation, like they're there to chat, right? And they love it, because you're the first person
who hasn't just tried to pitch them. And then after that, if it turns out they are relevant,
you've actually had a real conversation, you've got a relationship started, then it's easy to have
the meeting, because you already know you're relevant and valuable to each other. So like,
ah, if I say it, just stop pitching, like pitching should always be the last thing you do,
never the first thing you do. How would this look over email? Because I get a lot of emails from
people who are like, Hey, Courtland, here's what I'm building, can I get your opinion? And I'm like,
well, that sounds like a lot of time. And on the flip side, sometimes people will be like, you know,
hey, can we get like a quick lunch or a meeting? I'm like, well, that seems like even more time.
What's the best way to sort of solicit someone's feedback or have start one of these customer
conversations over email if you're trying to validate your idea? It's super hard over email.
There's a section in the book, I think it's chapter seven, where it's like, how do you get
these meetings? And it's like, I kind of divided into the cold approaches and the warm approaches,
like inbound and outbound, let's say, there's a bunch of tactical suggestions for how to like
cold approach people into but it's deeply inefficient, right? You have to email like
100 people to get one good conversation. And that's a huge waste of your time. And it's ironic
because the whole reason people do the emails is because they think it's going to be more efficient.
And then they've sent 100 emails, they've been rejected 99 times, they're sad, they're depressed,
they're crying, like they got no energy left to program, they're like, you know,
their tear stained fingers are slipping on the keyboard. It's like brutal to be rejected that
many times in a row. It's like, even if you rationally know it doesn't matter, it's still
like it gnaws at your soul. And so like, I would much rather like, when I talk to people, it's like,
they're like, who do I talk to? And they always rank their leads by like, potential or profitability,
or how important they are. And I think that's the wrong way to do it. I think what you should do is
you should rank your leads by friendliness and ease of contact. And then start with the
friendliest ones first. And you have to know someone through your extended network who's
representative of a customer, right? Someone your dad used to work with someone who used to go to
the same university as you someone who used to work at the same company as you. If you start
thinking about it, you can you can start to find these people you have some conversation with some
excuse to get a coffee or catch up or say hello. And you start with those friendly people who will
talk to you for no reason at all. And as you start answering the obvious questions, it's like
the low hanging fruit, like it would be crazy to go to an apple tree and be like, I sure want an
apple, I'm going to get the one at the top first, you like start with the apples, you can reach and
then you work your way up, right? And so like start with the easy leads, don't worry about the
scalability. Because after five conversations, you're going to know a lot, a lot more than you
knew at zero conversations. And some of those people you talk to will be like, well, like you're
really authentic. And you're trying to improve my work in my industry. Like, yeah, I know some more
people who'd be into this. And it starts branching out from there. So I see people worry way too much
about scaling their conversations. But like, you don't need that many. And once you get started,
more become available. So start with the easy ones, see what happens. And the last thing you
want to do is start with your most important conversation. Do one of these crazy things like
there's these stories like sitting in some company's lobby for 20 days until they talk to
you, like what a waste of time. And that's your first conversation, you're definitely going to
screw it up. Like you want to burn your friendly bridges first because they're more fireproof,
like friendly bridges don't burn, right? So start with this.
Is there ever a point where you stop talking to customers? I know you said you're still doing two
or three customer conversations a week. What if you feel like you've learned what you need to know,
your business is going well, it's growing, you should still set aside time to talk to customers.
And if so, what should you even be asking them about? I like it. But one of the ultimate business
hack is to choose customers who you like hanging out with. I like hanging out with authors and now
I'm building software for authors. And it's like, well, that's fun. I love talking to people about
their books. It excites me. So a lot of my friends like writing books and I find them interesting.
So if you can do that, that's a little life hack. It doesn't feel like such work. But if you can't
do that, there's times where you get into a deep slog where it's like, okay, I've gained all the
validation and all the evidence and all the learning I can and I just need to crack this
hard technical problem. I need the 3D renderer, I need whatever, the hardware to be better.
It just has to happen. And you go into the tank for six months or 12 months and you just get it
done. There's also some stuff like content marketing. You're like, okay, this business is
going to grow via mailing list and blog. You don't want to be looking at your metrics every day or
even every week. You want to be like, I'm going to commit to this strategy for at least three
months. I'm going to hit it hard and then I'm going to reevaluate. Because one week's worth
of content marketing is as good as zero week's worth of content marketing. You need to put
enough wood behind that arrow for it to do anything. Those slogs, you just commit to the
plan and there more data can hurt you because it can sway you when what you need to be doing is
following through with your plan and seeing it to its conclusion. But then you reach the next plateau
and then you look around and then you want to reengage with customers. It's very hard to rebuild
the customer habit if you've let it slide for too long. You get into different... I don't know,
it's just a different way of working. So I like to keep it fresh. I just think it's part of my
weekly job. It's like stay in contact with a couple of customers. It's not that big of a deal.
It's like email a couple, be like, hey, how's it going? Just checking in on you. Don't send an
automated email to a thousand of them. Just hand email a few of them. They're like, hey,
hey, just checking in. They're like, hey, I saw you send a support ticket. They're like, hey,
thanks for your feature request. I saw you made an Amazon review. Whatever. I don't know. Stop
making it so hard would be my thought. If you feel like it's miserable and hard, then stop
making yourself do the hard thing and start finding a way to make it easier and less miserable.
But yeah, it's really good for your business if you can get into that habit.
Now you're making everything sound so easy and pleasant, but I guess it doesn't have to be hard
or difficult. It's changing a different variable. Everyone does it the hard way and tries to
make themselves work harder and be braver. But I think that's really stupid. It's better to accept
that you are lazy and cowardly and then make it easy enough so that you can do it anyway.
That's my whole strategy with life. With dating, with business, with customer conversations,
I'm not going to try to make myself more brave. I'm going to try to make the situation more easy,
bring it down to my level. We're going to have to have another episode all about you giving
dating advice, Rob. I wrote that book once, but I had beta readers and everything. It was a
fifth draft and I just deleted the whole thing. I'm too ashamed to publish this. I have opinions,
but I do not want to release them to the world. Listen, Rob, you shared a lot of great opinions,
a lot of good advice so far in this episode. You've written an entire book about this too.
It's called The Mom Test. I feel like we barely scratched the surface. There's so much in there
about how to talk to your customers, what questions to ask, and which situations.
I recommend everybody go out and buy it. It's super short. It took me like two hours to read it.
It's only like 120 pages or something crazy. You could probably read it in the time it takes
to listen to this. Yeah, you probably could. The audience listening to this is full of first-time
founders of people who want to become founders. You started numerous companies. You've done so
much around customer conversations and sales. What tips would you leave them with if they're
just getting started as indie hackers? I'll give one about customer conversations and then one
about startups in general. About customer conversations, think of it like a craft or
a hands-on skill like skateboarding or pottery and be willing to fall on your ass a few times.
It's not like science or math. You can read it in the book and you'll get the framework and you'll
know what you're trying to try, but you still got to go practice. You're going to have some
embarrassing moments and some whoopses, but you get good at saying sorry. If you're respectful
of people's time and you're authentic, everyone loves an entrepreneur. You get a lot of benefit
of the doubt because what you're trying to do is understand the worst part of their life and make
it less bad. That's a pretty noble goal. I know there's exceptions. You might be trying to screw
them out of money or abuse their gambling addictions or sell them fake drugs. There's
some evil businesses, but assuming you're a good founder making a meaningful business,
you're probably trying to actually help people and build something that's good for their life.
That's cool. People like that. It gives you a lot of forgiveness for your mistakes.
I've said such dumb things in meetings that should have been so offensive and people just
laugh. They're like, I've even had people be like, look, I know what you're trying to do here.
You're doing it wrong. Let me help you out. Let me tell you how this works. It switches from me
trying to sell the meeting to them coaching me about how I should be trying to sell the meeting.
People are really kindhearted to entrepreneurs if you're trying to do good work. Be willing to
make your mistakes. It's like skateboarding. You're going to fall over a bit, but give it a try
and find ways where you've made it easy enough. You've chosen the low hanging fruit and the
friendly first contacts such that falling over isn't overly painful. You want to be able to make
your early mistakes in a safe environment where it doesn't make you miserable or terrified.
As you get more confident, you realize like, I'm ready to get into bigger situations now,
approach strangers and whatever. Then in general, for business and for startups, I think
it's helpful to figure out what you want from the business in terms of your own life and the sort
of life you want to lead because a lot of the Silicon Valley approach is you sell your company
and then life begins. Whereas for the indie hackers and even like, I mean, that narrative
though, I tried to do that for my first company. We went through YC, we raised a bunch of money,
we had good customers, we worked our butts off for four years. We were miserable and we were
like, but it's going to be worth it because we're going to get our private island and our helicopter.
And then we like failed anyway. And suddenly that like sacrificed four years didn't feel so good.
It only feels good if you succeed. And so like, whereas since then I've tried to be like, okay,
well, what's my day to day life that I want? Like what are the activities I want to spend my time
doing? So for example, I hate marketing. So I don't choose businesses that rely on marketing.
I choose businesses that allow me to talk to customers I like and hang out with them and spend
time with them and build cool little products that don't need a big support team. And it's like,
oh, that's great. And so now I really, and like nothing I need to show up to work for.
Like I can do it from my home or do it from a cafe. Like you can make those choices. And I
think I see way too many people focused on the exit and not enough focused on like, how many
hours per day am I going to be spending on the activities I like versus the ones I don't like?
And will I get to hang out with people I like and admire, or people I'm cynical about? For me,
that's been a huge night and day shift in the way I chose my ideas. And everything's been a lot more
fun and a lot more successful since I started approaching it that way. But anyway, it's exciting.
I wish you guys luck. And you can find all my email and everything at robpitts.com and links
to the book. I'm Rob at Rob Pitts. And I'm on Indie Hackers and always happy to answer questions
about this stuff. If you've got any. Rob, thanks so much for coming on the show.
It's been my great pleasure. Thank you for having me, Portland.
And listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you reached out to me and let me know.
I am at CS Allen on Twitter. That's C-S-A-L-L-E-N. Feel free to just send me a tweet. Give me your
feedback. Tell me your thoughts. Send me some suggestions as to who I should have on the show.
I'm trying to mix it up and do a few more educational episodes like this one every month,
in addition to, of course, three or so interviews every month and maybe some debates and discussions.
So again, that's at CS Allen on Twitter. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next time.