What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so
the rest of us can do the same. Alright, I'm here with Michelle Hansen. Michelle,
you are many things. You are the founder of Geocodeo. You're the co-host of the excellent
podcast Software Social. You're the author of a brand new book called Deploy Empathy,
which we're going to talk about a lot today. Welcome. Welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. So why don't we start by talking about Geocodeo?
Because this is like the most Indie Hacker-ish thing that you do, although every one of these
other things is like a very Indie Hacker thing to do. What is Geocodeo? And how did you come
to start it? So Geocodeo is a software as a service company that my husband and I started together
in 2014. So the genesis of it is that we had a little mobile app called What's Open Nearby
that at the time, you couldn't just like type into Google, like which grocery stores are open
right now. You had to like remember that like there was a Safeway near you and then like go
to the Safeway website, like go to their store locator and like type in your zip code and find
the one near you and then find their hours and it was like five clicks deep. And so we built this
app and said that you just pulled it up and it was a map and it showed you which grocery stores
and convenience stores and coffee shops were currently open. So you didn't have to do all of
that. And the whole idea of it is if you needed you know milk at midnight or a coffee at 3am and
you didn't have the brain power to do all that searching, you could just pull up the app. And so
the central point of this app was this map. So for Geocoding, which is the process of turning
addresses into latitude and longitude so a computer can understand them. So you can for
example show a map on a mobile app. Basically everybody got it from Google and they would give
you 2500 lookups for free per day but you couldn't cash them or store them. And then if you needed
any more than that you needed to pay like tens of thousands of dollars a year for an enterprise
contract that gave you like a hundred thousand a day. And we were like well like we had this
app going and we had some ad revenue like couple hundred bucks a month and it was like it felt
like it was working and we were adding more and more stores getting some good press about it.
But we had like 3000 stores at one point and we're like hold on so we're 500 over this limit
and there's just nothing like we just can't get the data like how are we going to keep this going.
So we initially built a super rudimentary geocoder just for our own purposes for this app just to
keep it alive. And as we talked to other friends about it who were you know who were developers
they were kind of like oh like I have the same problem. And eventually somebody was like have
you guys ever thought of just like slapping a paywall in front of this and then like maybe other
people could pay your server cost so that you don't have to like pay to host this. And we're
like yeah like that would be amazing like other people paid the server costs. And so we launched
Geocodeo in January of 2014. We had two tiny little digital ocean droplets for 10 bucks a month each.
So our expenses were basically $20 to keep it going. And to our great surprise you know we
put it up on Hacker News and prayed and then somehow it ended up on the front page the whole
day. Tons of signups. Of course we've never come anywhere close to that traffic that we got on the
first day and most of it didn't stick around. But we got some customers out of it. We ended up
making about $31 our first month. So about you know $11 when you take out the server costs.
We were so surprised that anyone wanted to pay us that we actually had not
written the code to tell people to tell Stripe to bill people. Wow. Yeah we because we did a
media pay as you go for one of our plans. That was the only one we launched with initially.
But that to us was a smashing success because we had more than paid our server costs. That was the
goal. And that was such a crazy experience you know getting so much feedback from people on
Hacker News. And that was really where I started to be interested in like the role of customers and
building a business. There's so many lessons in that and that story particularly this is this
idea that as you're building your first sort of side project your business you're building tools
to help you out. And the fact that these tools that help you out could be useful to other people.
You know this geocoding service that you created for yourself is something that others might need
is such a cool insight. And I consistently see this pattern of founders who end up pivoting to
a business that at first was just a helper for their previous business. It's almost as if the
best way to come up with business ideas is to start something literally anything. And then when
you find yourself needing problems solved that are valuable go do that as a business instead.
Yeah and what I love about that approach is you are already passionate about the problem.
And worst case scenario you have solved the problem for yourself. You have made yourself
more efficient. You have an accomplishment you can feel good about. And maybe you know nobody is
paying you but you have solved your own problem. I think the other thing that I take from your
story which you didn't quite dive into but you hinted at it was that you are a husband and wife
team working on this side project and also working on Geocodeo. What do you think is a lesson that
you've taken from I guess seven plus years of working together for other people who are working
together with their partners? Working with my spouse for me is my dream job. In a way it's a
reason why I never plan to get a job again if I can help it because we work so well together
that it just works. We both bring unique things to the table. We respect each other professionally
and as people so much and so it works for us. It doesn't work for all couples and I think whenever
the topic of founder couples comes up there's always at least one person who has a horror story
about working for a founder couple that should not have worked together. So it's so funny because
I think people self-select into it because I remember I think I was at microconf where this
happened where you know just like chatting with people and whatnot and people who don't work with
their spouse who knew that we worked together would be like how do you guys work together like
we would kill each other and then the people that do work with their spouse they would be like
isn't it just the most amazing thing like I'm so happy for you and it was just this huge
dichotomy like there are two reactions to hearing that we work together. Well it sounds like people
have slotted themselves into the right buckets because the people who aren't working together
the people who know that they would kill each other. Did you and your husband did you have to
do a lot of work or any work to like make it work or was it just sort of naturally natural from the
very beginning? We met at work working at a pretty small company and we actually worked together as
co-workers for six months without any sort of romantic spark or intentions or anything.
You've never not worked together. Yeah yeah we have since we have known each other we have worked
together. There is no before that's cool. Yeah so it's normal to us like in in a way when Mattias
finally went full-time in 2018. I went full-time in 2017. It was like returning to normal.
Very cool. Well obviously the two of you are doing a great job. I don't know how many employees
Geocodeo has but I do know that you're doing north of a million dollars in annual revenue.
You're crushing it and you've had the time on the side of that to engage in some other side projects
so I feel like I need to have you on the show like three times. I want to talk about your podcast
software social. We don't have time to do that now. I want to talk about the whole story of Geocodeo
because there's a lot of interesting insights there but in this episode I want to talk about
your book that you recently just published. It's called Deploy Empathy. I read it. It's great.
What inspired you to write a book? Why write a book if you've got a company that's making
millions of dollars, if you've got a podcast, if you've got you know a family, you've got all
the stuff going for you. Why do the arduous tough task of sitting down and banging out a book that's
I think well over 330 pages. So there's two directions for that answer. One of them is
where the need came from and then the other one that's a bit simpler and I think makes it all make
more sense is that I have ADHD. And so doing many things at the same time is like completely normal
to me. I actually need to have multiple projects going because that just makes me excited about
things and you know I get bored and I want to move on to something else and so having multiple
projects going is just super normal for me. Where the book came from, so for years now I guess I've
sort of been sort of on and off having calls with people who are trying to get started with customer
research. So it's sort of my favorite topic. You know my functional expertise is in product
management and my little niche within there is customer research. And at one point you know I
was one of the leaders of the Washington DC jobs to be done meetup. You know gave some other various
talks. I gave a talk at microconf about interviewing customers. I guess some some people kind of knew
that that this was my area because most of the writing on customer research with the exception
of the mom test is not written for indie hackers. It's not written for developers. It's not written
for people who are getting started on their own without funding. It's written for UX people. It's
written for product people but it really wasn't until last fall when I was mentoring a sprint
group through founder summit and they were asking me questions about customer research
more frequently because I was meeting with them every week and I didn't have one good place to
send them with the stuff they needed that I sort of started to be like maybe I should like do
something with this. Yeah so it's interesting because you're you're sort of experiencing this
problem that people have. People clearly find it valuable to get this advice. They clearly have a
problem talking to customers learning what to build learning how to build it and then the
solution to that problem is shitty. It's like you said it's this piecemeal you know collection of
breadcrumbs through a bunch of different books and blog posts and sections to ignore and pay
attention to. I think that's like again like another perfect formulation for like aha business
idea validated problem that people actually have existing solutions are really crappy for this
particular group of people. Yeah and you know into what we were talking about geocodeo and solving
your own problem in many ways the book came out of solving my own problem and I had this thought
one day that I was like maybe I should write a book and it was like everything I have read from
writers makes writing a book sound awful and like really lonely and like they had to go lock
themselves in a room for six months and not see other people and have these strict rules for
themselves on how many hours they write a day and I was like I mean this is mid-February
we're in the middle of a strict lockdown I did not need any more loneliness in my life
so I was like I should not write a book and I was like but you know what I could write a
newsletter like people are doing this like newsletter thing now like maybe I could just
like start writing stuff as a newsletter as I need it like the stuff that I need to be able to
send to people and then the archive of that newsletter like the next time somebody asks me
hey how do I do this I can just send them this newsletter archive and then I don't need to
have this conversation over and over again right so it was solving my own problem yeah I think the
the topic of the book itself talking to customers is a challenging topic to get people to care about
too because having worked with a lot of indie hackers if I think about the problems that are
at the top of their mind it's things like how do I come up with an idea you know how do I even know
what to build right like how do I find the time in my day to even finish like building this product
and get it out the door like it's so hard just to like finish it and have something that's
releasable and then like how do I find customers like nobody's paying for this like I don't have
any money uh you know how do I you know continue making this business work these are like kind of
the biggest pressing problems and I think when people hear oh you need to you know go do customer
research and talk to customers and check out this book deploy empathy and check out this book the
mom tests people are like I don't have time for that I could barely I barely have time to do all
the other things I'm trying to do so how do you address that notion how do you I guess contend
with the fact that like a lot of founders don't see customer research as something that's worth
putting the time into doing yeah you know that's something I'm very aware of that understanding
customers is perceived as a vitamin rather than a painkiller but what has been really
unexpectedly delightful about this process is learning that it's more like a gummy vitamin
like once people know how to do it they actually get really excited about it and I have had people
tell me who have been running their own businesses for years and barely spoken to their customers
never mind interview them that like now they're excited about it after doing it after reading my
stuff which is really really exciting and you know I sometimes find that the people who are
the most against it are the people who tried it but they went into it without enough guidance
and they went into an interview and they asked someone you know is this a good idea would you
buy it what should I build next and then they did that and then the person didn't buy it and they're
like well that was a waste of time like I'm never doing that again and I actually I posted on
industry hackers a couple months ago when I was writing like like have you found talking to
customers to be useful because I wanted to understand what people's perceptions of it were
what their experiences were you know what those hesitations were and someone actually like
commented on it that they were meeting their potential customers in coffee shops near them
Robert Bielsi I'm sorry I'm probably butchering your name last name Robert he's an indie hacker
in Romania and he like commented this whole thing about how he was meeting people for coffee and
like getting you know understanding their process and all this stuff and I was like
I need to talk to you because you are exactly in this group of developers who people often think
are you know not going to go out and talk to the customers and don't want to and you're getting
all this out of it and you're doing it and you're like living it and this is so incredibly exciting
it told me it really was possible to get people excited about this I had so many soul nourishing
phone calls with people about their customer research during the process of writing the book
and that one that one really stands out and it just came from a you know comment thread
on indie hackers because I think people believe that stereotype that developers are bad at talking
to people and it's just not true and the research shows that it's not true like research actually
shows that you know engineers were actually better at pulling insights out of a usability
session than experts were and that's a study from 1993 like this has been known for a very very
long time and yet people believe that and allow it to you know hold back their projects and then
they wonder why isn't anyone buying it you know they they could have talked to people and tweaked
their idea and found that thing that really did make it work there's always these stereotypes
that I think society tends to propagate that's really they're really easy to buy into and once
you just sort of accept them as true you end up succumbing to confirmation bias where you're
you're looking for evidence that these things are true you're ignoring evidence against it you know
engineers suck at talking to people it's like well you know if you think that you're really
going to see the truth of that all over the place but if you actually look at the data like you're
saying it's actually not true that's the case and I think even worse if you believe that you might
fall into the trap of like saying I'm not going to be good at talking to people or it's a waste of
time for me to talk to people but I think given how many people are good at engineering nowadays
how many people can code an app how many people can build you know the sort of fundamental parts
of a business that way I think one of the best differentiators is to get good at talking to
people it is to like develop these soft skills and read books like yours and figure out how to
actually talk to customers I think that helps you if I was trying to sell somebody in why they
should read this book or why they should talk to customers quite frankly like the number one
problem that any hackers have is building something that nobody wants you spend six months
nine months twelve months of your life coding this thing that you're super excited about
and at the end of it like nobody pays for it and it doesn't grow and you're dejected and you quit
and like that sucks and like a lot of that can be avoided if you're really good at talking to
customers which it doesn't take that much effort to get good at and I think in your book you know
like I would expect a book like this to be called like learn how to talk to customers
or customer conversations or something like that but it's called deploy empathy the sort of main
theme running through the book are these tactics and techniques to help you become more empathetic
and demonstrate empathy in these conversations how would you define empathy and why is it important
to have empathy when talking to customers why is that the title the so important that it's the
primary concept of your book this is such a good question because I think people mix up the
definitions of empathy and and compassion and sympathy very often so the definition of empathy
that I use in the book which is a quote of Brene Brown is empathy is understanding that somebody
else's thoughts and emotions and actions make sense from their perspective and it's seeking to
understand their perspective appreciating it as valid from their perspective and that it makes
sense from their perspective even if it is different from your own perspective and it's
important to talk about the definition of empathy because there's also sympathy which is you know
sort of feeling bad for someone and and and compassion and I think sometimes and this is
some sometimes people give me a little bit of pushback here because they define empathy as
feeling what the other person is feeling and I don't use that definition Brene Brown doesn't
use that definition either and I think actually attempting to feel like truly feel what the other
person is feeling is distracting because then you are focusing on your own feeling and the whole
point is to focus on the other person and understand what they are feeling and almost
suspend your own judgments and preconceived notions and your own feelings about what they're
saying and just completely submerge into the other person I like to think of it as becoming a sponge
or as it's phrased in the book and with the cover picturing yourself as the rubber duck that is just
there to listen to whatever it is they have to say and this is way way easier said than done
it is not easy to just sit down especially if somebody's like describing like an industry you
know a lot about or they're describing using your own product that you spent like years building
it's hard to just sit there silently and just try to like empathize with their point of view
like no you're doing it wrong like you should have this button or you should have done it this way
like it's just like hard not to interrupt but like if you do that you're sort of taking yourself
out of I guess effective interviewer mode and you're sort of making it about you and in fact
in your book you have what you call the most important section of your book it's section
number four basically it's all about how to talk so that others will talk to you and it's intriguing
because like right in the beginning of that section you say look this is going to be a list of tactics
and tips and you need to promise me reader that you will not be manipulative you will not use what
people say against them you will not use this these tactics to do harm on to others because
they can make somebody open up to you much more than people normally would and I think normally
if I see something like this in a book like that's like kind of like on the cover you know or like
on the very first page it's kind of like an ad to get people intrigued but in yours it's like an
actual promise that you want to extract because like the tactics that follow like actually could
be pretty manipulative like they're very powerful techniques they're things that therapists do to
have very good conversations with people and they're very effective and so if you're willing
like I want to go through this list of techniques because I think they're very fascinating and
there's something important to be said about every single one of them yeah and and you know
on that it is very important to me that people use these tactics and what they learn from people
ethically and so someone asked me recently about the fear that people might you know manipulate
it and I'm am I just giving fuel to people who are manipulative and that is a question I have
thought about quite a bit over the past few months someone pointed out to me that people who are
manipulative and who seek to do harm to others they do not need instructions on how to do that
they instinctively know how to do all of this and so much more and use it in ways as weapons against
people it's people like us who are a bit more naive maybe a bit more on the socially awkward
side who actually need instructions on like validate what someone is saying and leave a pause
for them to to fill the people who are charming and manipulative don't need to be told how to
be charming and manipulative because they have probably known how to be that way since they were
children so maybe before we jump into this list what's the broad sort of the broad strokes of
why this list is even important because the book's kind of divided into like these these tactics for
empathetic conversations and then also these very useful scripts for like hey do you have this
problem are you at this stage in your journey here's a script for how to talk to a customer
about topic x or topic y why do you need like these soft empathetic conversational skills before
you can just jump into the scripts because how you ask the questions and how you treat the other
person matters so much for the kind of output that you're going to get and the kind of results
you're going to get you know the book has all of these scripts and in some ways i often think about
what i what my questions i have to ask someone as the first half of an interview and and what
you're doing is priming someone to think about the topic you're building rapport with them you're
showing them that you care which you know for for many indie hackers you know especially if you're
building something b2b you're asking somebody about an everyday business process that nobody
in their life has ever cared about so you're getting them comfortable talking about it and
comfortable talking to you and then in the second half you use all of that rapport and they open up
to you about how they really think about it what they're really doing and so the tactics are so
important because the questions are really only a small part of building that rapport
and asking the questions in a harsh tone of voice or interrupting someone or talking over them or
not making them feel comfortable you're not going to get very good results back you know i could
ask you what led you to sign up on indie hackers today and you would kind of be like like i don't
i don't know like i just i wanted to comment on something yeah but if i ask you so what led you
to sign up in indie hackers today you're gonna be like oh well you know like it's just it's right
you know you're trying to be as i sort of often put it as harmless as possible yeah so the the
the scripture is sort of the what you do and the tactics sort of how you do them you got a list of
sort of 12 tactics and you just use the very first one which is use a gentle tone of voice
which i think just to me an example demonstrates obviously like why i'm gonna react very differently
to the first question than i would to the second but what are your thoughts on using a gentle tone
of voice and a customer interview like how does this help put customers at ease i guess how does
it help you learn more as a person interviewing them you need to speak in a gentle tone of voice
in order to put them at ease and to make them feel safe and to show them that whatever they say is
is acceptable and you can do that through your your tone of voice and you know i mentioned in
the book that a lot of the tactics come from tactics that therapists use and negotiators as
well and speaking in a calm gentle tone of voice helps the other person calm down therapists do
this intentionally to bring calm to maybe someone who's agitated so do negotiators yeah and it's
cool because it has that effect on yourself as well like if you just try talking in a gentle tone
of voice like you end up calming down yourself and i guess if you were like new to customer
interviews and it's something you haven't done a lot as a founder you might be a little amped up
a little nervous a little shaky and so if you can calm yourself down you can calm them down
i think that sounds great and if it's good enough for like someone who's like a hostage crisis
negotiator then i think it's probably good enough for founders yeah and you know for those first
couple of interviews if you notice that you're shaky and you're excited and you're talking over
them and you're not following these tactics it's okay but what's important about that is that you
noticed you were doing that and that gives you the opportunity to improve on it the next time
it takes time to understand how to use these tactics and use all of them in an interview
but starting to notice where you're not using them is so powerful and that in and of itself
is a sign of growth and it doesn't mean you're doing this process wrong it doesn't mean you're
learning it wrong if you find yourself accidentally not speaking in a gentle tone of voice it's okay
you can do it the next time so the second tactic is i think my favorite it seems like i don't know
if you would agree but it seems to me like one of the most powerful tactics on the list and it's
just the word validate validate what people are saying but what does that mean so we talked about
the definition of empathy and how it you know in some ways it means simply acknowledging that what
the other person thinks and does make sense from their perspective and you can make that known by
when they say something to you simply replying with yeah that makes sense and that is a profoundly
powerful phrase because it gives them permission to keep sharing it's super it's super unintuitive
because it's it's like okay well why would you need to tell somebody that what they said makes
sense of course they think it makes sense like they just said it you know what possible help
can it be for you to sort of tell them something that they already know it's all about building
that environment of safety and calm and where you're putting them in control and and you're
also elevating them in many ways to the position of teacher so you know you were saying earlier
about interviewing people about an industry or a problem that you're very familiar with
saying you know i'd like to understand how this works from your perspective
and then you're elevating to them to that teacher position it's one of the most powerful ways
to influence someone as found by the marketing researcher uh robert cialdini he found that when
he he for research for his own book influence one of my favorite books yes by the way i love that
book so he did a podcast with i want to say it was freakonomics radio a couple of months ago
and he was saying how he embedded himself into all of these companies with really spammy
marketing basically so at the time it was you know encyclopedia salesman and like use car
dealerships like all those sorts of things and he would be a trainee in their programs and then he
wanted to use that for his research for his book and when he asked people you know told he outed
himself and said he was actually a professor and he wanted to use this in his book and he asked
them if if he could use it if he gave them a copy of the book only about half of them said yes
but when he said it's like well you know i'm a professor of marketing but i wanted to come learn
from you because you are an expert in how to influence people a hundred percent of them said
yes and so these tactics of validating what they're saying and basically elevating them to the
position of teacher even if you are the founder of the company even if you have decades of experience
in something it makes them feel complemented it makes them feel like they have something to say
it makes them feel like what they're saying is important which if you are building a company
and this person is representative of the customers that you might have for that company or you or is
a customer of your company it is incredibly valuable to make them feel valuable themselves
yeah and your inter chapter about validation you talk about something i think that is fascinating
which is not only do you use validation and when you don't necessarily agree with what the other
person is saying even if it sounds absurd to you you're not agreeing with them in fact you're going
out of your way not to give any opinions at all you're not saying like that's good or that's bad
you know or like that or i don't like that like you're attempting to become almost inhuman like
this object in the room with them that isn't even capable of having opinions are judgments
it's all of these validating phrases you're like are like i can see why you do it that way michelle
or i can see what you're saying or it sounds like that's frustrating or it makes sense that you
think that none of these are opinions none of these are judgments but they are also profoundly
validating at the same time right why is it important to not have opinions why is it important
to not give judgments so on the flip side of talking about putting them in the position of
teacher it's also very important that they don't start trying to impress you because then they
will start holding things back and they will start trying to craft narrative around why they
do things and make themselves look good and if you were to say yeah i love that idea when they
share a feature request with you they're going to then feel like oh like she thinks my idea is good
like what does she think of my other ideas like if i say something else i want her to think that's
good like you're reminding them of their own insecurities but instead if they request a feature
and you say can you tell me more about how you might use that you're just diving deeper into
what they think how they see things and you're leaving those opinions and the quality of what
they're saying completely to the side it's it's irrelevant you're just looking to understand
their perspective looking through their mental closet and you know asking permission to open
up all of the drawers i love that it's like this idea that if you are someone who's capable of
giving opinions and making judgments then as you said like you trigger something in them to be
like oh this is a person that i need to impress and that's the last thing that you want in a customer
interview you don't want somebody saying things that aren't necessarily true you want somebody
giving you the most accurate possible sort of i guess revelation of their experience and it's
a really hard one for people to learn because socially we are often conditioned to be agreeable
to build rapport with people but in this case it's actually detrimental right and it's hard to go
into customer interviews and like not sort of already know what you want them to say you know
like if you were a new founder you've been working on your baby for you know a while and you go talk
to a customer about it like it's probably kind of scary to know that they might say bad things about
it they might not need what you're building they might not have ever bought something like that
before and so it's easy to sort of gradually subtly coax them into saying good things i don't think
this is true for anything like even if like i don't know let's say you're gonna fight with your
partner and you want to go talk to a therapist right it's easy to like give your therapist a
very biased version of what you're of what the situation is because you want them to agree with
you or if you're interviewing customers it's easy to talk up your product and you know subtly
without saying it explicitly you know put them into a situation or a mood where they feel like
they need to say good things about your product and then you can sort of trick yourself into
walking away from that conversation thinking oh yeah people like what i'm doing i should keep
doing what i'm doing when it really you sort of manipulated them into saying good things
i mean that's a very natural instinct to want to hear positive things about what you're building
and doing especially when you need motivation and you're going on your own that's that's very normal
a customer interview can surface a lot of things about how you're helping someone rarely will it
come in the form of i love you this product is amazing like it's not going to come to you like
a testimonial but it will come to you in hearing wow like this thing they're doing like it took them
like so much time before and now it just took them 15 minutes to get it set up and they don't
even think about it and they're super grateful to me for that like wow like it's really different
but we have to check our own instincts to be praised and feel good about ourselves and you know
it's what you were saying earlier about this isn't just about customer interviews it's about
all of these complicated human emotions and how do we handle them it's important to have empathy
for your customer and it's also important to have empathy for yourself and if you find yourself in
an interview looking for praise and looking for validation rather than evaluating an idea but
evaluating an idea but trying to validate it understanding that your desire to feel good about
what you're doing is completely normal and it's natural and it's okay have empathy for yourself
as well you have another point in this list that you called mirror and summarize their words what
does that mean in the context of a customer research interview so that's to rephrase what
they have just said again you know without any opinions and there are two different ways of
mirroring and summarizing and basically what this does is it prompts someone to keep talking
but is not actually a question so for example so before before we started recording you started
talking to me about how you're buying furniture for your apartment and you you but you just bought
a chair so i could ask you how did you decide to buy that chair or i could say oh so you just
bought that chair right even after i just told you that i bought the chair you just kind of correct
and then i tell me what i told you back to you that you just bought the chair and then you and
then you'd probably be like yeah so they're my friend like they're kind of you know like right
it's a way to prompt elaboration but is less threatening than a question going back to that
whole thing theme of being as harmless as possible yeah super interesting because i think sometimes
in conversation it's it's easy to feel like especially if you're like you know almost
successfully polite that you need to shut up and that like okay i said the thing i answered
that question that's all i'm going to say and if you sort of repeat back to me what i said
then like you're giving me permission to just go on and elaborate and tell you much more about
whatever it is i was talking about and the other way to do this is to summarize what they said
wrong so for example let's say that you told me that you bought an end table last week and
you bought a chair today and if i was trying to elicit elaboration what i could do is prompt you
to correct me and then elaborate on top of that so i could say oh so you bought a chair last week
and then you bought an end table today same tone of voice same way but then you would say no it
was actually the chair that i bought today because last week i bought the end table because i was at
the store and they were having a sale and like and then you start going into it because you're
correcting me and giving me more details so i understand right right that's super smart and
all these things i mean validation mirroring and summarizing you've got another one on here we're
just asking for clarification even when you don't need it seem to be like methods of just getting
the person to not only feel safe but to get them to just keep talking and giving you more and more
details why do you need so many details why does it matter that they keep talking and sharing more
and more about their experience with you because it's important you understand the problem from
their perspective we always have a sense of a problem from our own perspective but if we want
to build something that solves a problem for somebody else and it's it's also intuitive for
them and solves the problem in the way that they would understand and that they can interact with
it and they're able to implement it we need to fully understand their perspective even when
you think something is obvious and just and i see this time and time again with you cody aware
i'm like okay i'm pretty sure i know why they need this but let me just ask anyway and then i ask
and then i'm like oh that was not at all what i was thinking i'm so glad i asked that i mean so
the more you you do that and you ask people things that that feel to you like dumb questions like
again i feel like we're socially conditioned to not ask dumb questions and we're so afraid of that
we're so afraid of the shame that comes with someone saying well that was a dumb question
but you need to ask those questions to clarify even when you think you understand because it's
often such a valuable doorway to learning new things and new avenues of the problem that you
didn't even realize was there and i think this is like this is the big shift that people go through
when they're learning how to interview from in the very beginning of feeling scared that they're
going to say the wrong thing and threaten that their idea may be incomplete or wrong to then
realizing that they will discover things and then going into them and being excited for finding out
when they're wrong and excited to discover some new angle and perspective on this that they didn't
know before and i experienced this myself when i learned how to interview and it's it's so amazing
to watch people go through that transformation who i have helped start interviewing as well and
they just go from kind of scared and nervous to being like oh my gosh i can't wait to tell you
what i learned very cool you've got a couple items in this list that are things not to do
they say don't explain anything yeah you say don't negate the person in any way what does it
what does it mean to to not explain things so this often comes up when you're interviewing someone
and let's say you are doing a screen share interview with them maybe they're testing a
prototype or they're testing a landing page you have and and they say oh why is this button over
here or this doesn't work even though it's working as you had built it there's a very natural
tendency especially as the person who built something to say oh well what i meant there
was actually that you should do this and like this is how it's intended and like this is what i was
thinking when i was doing it and you start explaining it and then you're like and actually
if you just click on this thing and then you go over there then you'll be able to get to it
you can't do it because you're at the whole point is to understand how they experience it and if
you start talking about what you intended or what you think how it should work then you're turning
the interview on yourself and you're not understanding okay why is it that they expected
that button to be somewhere else and why is it that they missed that menu item like how can i
understand where they expected those things to be like is it possible that the process you're
solving you're solving it in a different order than they expected or like there's something
going on there and so you can't start explaining yourself which again is this very natural
inclination to defend yourself when you feel like someone is is saying that you built something
that's bad right like that is supernatural to feel that way but you have to check that feeling
and say okay how can i understand why they think that way what did they expect to happen and then
with also not negating them again you're building this environment of making them feel safe making
them feel like the teacher removing your own opinions from this and if you tell them that
something they think is wrong they are going to shut down right away yeah that makes perfect
sense and it's so inaccurate to be kind of coaching a person and explaining them through
the process of using your product or how they go about their day because you're not there when
they're doing this stuff you know somebody goes to your website like they're not going to have you
over their shoulder teaching them how to use it and so you're totally right it's completely
i think it just gives you the wrong idea if you're injecting yourself too much into the interview
and there's a place for onboarding calls there there's a place for customer support the interview
is not it so these are all tactics for basically how to conduct yourself when having an interview
how to be empathetic there's also the question of like what are you even trying to learn in the
interview you know why are you talking to customers and like what do you hope to get out of this
because even if you get them talking even if you are validating and you're not interrupting and
you're not explaining things and you're mirror mirroring their words what is it that you're even
listening for and how do you take that information back and like make better decisions as a founder
and i realize this is like a tremendous question this is basically what your whole book is about
but what are the sort of broad strokes that we can leave listeners with so that they
they have an edge in their customer interviews going forward and they can like find your book
and find out the rest of the story after that so you can use these tactics to steer the conversation
in a direction that is useful for you that helps you understand you know what might be valuable
to someone or what might a usable product look like to them in the case of doing a screen share
interview you're not just letting them talk about anything forever right if i you know
two of the questions i was saying to you earlier about buying furniture if i had actually been
wanting to interview you about sound dampening paneling and why you bought the paneling that
you did it would be pretty irrelevant to ask you about chairs and to let you keep talking about
chairs even though i personally love chairs and so all of these tactics help you guide the
conversation toward that direction that you need it to go in so you can understand what do i need
to build what do i need to do to get more customers to come why do people stick around what like what
should my marketing say about what the best customer is for my product how do i stop churn
and how do i see if people can use the thing that i build like those are the core problems
that the book helps you solve and all of those tactics help you pull out information that is
relevant to those problems that you are having and so you're not just letting them talk about
any old thing you're getting them to talk about the topics that are relevant to you in a way that
makes them feel like they are steering the conversation which in turn makes them feel
open with you which allows you to understand their process from their perspective and what might
cause them to switch products or what might make them stay with a product or why they cancelled
something very cool well listen i think it's an excellent book i think there's plenty of reason
to to read it i think the cool thing about books like this is there's always going to be some set
of subset of people who aren't sure they should talk to customers and they're not sold on that
and they're going to do things the wrong way and there's always going to be some subset of people
who are completely sold that they should be doing this and they just need like the definitive guide
to do it well and i think your book is the definitive guides doing it well and these
tactics about empathetic conversations are applicable to pretty much any conversations
even outside of talking to customers so i hope people read the book um we didn't get as much
time to go into your code your story of geocoding as much as i would love to maybe in a future
episode but you've done a lot i mean you've been a founder you've written a book you've interviewed
thousands and thousands of customers yourself what would your parting advice be for nd hackers
who are just getting started what's one thing you'd want them to take away from your learnings
and your journey that might help them on theirs don't be afraid to be wrong i would say and and
follow what you are passionate about i think people are afraid of being wrong they're they're
afraid that maybe they built the wrong product or they're solving something that people don't care
about or that other that this isn't going to sort of make their dream come true about you know being
financially dependent or whatnot you don't have to stake it all on one thing in the beginning and
it's okay to be wrong it's okay to change directions it's okay to pivot it's okay to make
changes it's okay for other people to introduce ideas to you but keep following that thing that
you're passionate about whatever it is and be open to what other people are saying but let
yourself be wrong it's okay don't be afraid to be wrong michelle hansen thanks so much for coming
on the nd hackers podcast thank you so much for having me where can people go to find your book
deploy empathy and where they where can they go to find other things working on online as well
so deploy empathy the the print version is available from amazon uh you can find other
versions available from the book's website deployempathy.com you can also sign up for the deploy
empathy newsletter there um you can also you can still see all of the rough drafts because i wrote
the book in public as a newsletter you can see them all there you can also find me on twitter
at mjw hansen and of course i have my my own uh weekly podcast that i co-host with
colleen stettler called software social all right thanks again michelle