فصل 4

CHAPTER FOUR

Keeping it casual

We know that zooming prematurely and introducing your idea too early creates biases and can get you stuck on a local maximum. In his original book on Customer Development, 4 Steps to the E.piphany, Steve Blank solves this by recommending 3 separate meetings: the first about the customer and their problem; the second about your solution; and the third to sell a product. By splitting the meetings, you avoid the premature zoom and biasing them with your ideas.

In practice, however, I’ve found it both difficult and inefficient to set them up. The time cost of a 1-hour meeting is more like 4 hours once you factor in the calendar dance, commuting, and reviewing. It’s also a big time commitment to ask from the customer before you’re in a position to show them anything in return.

In the early days, asking for the first conversation was simply impossible for me. I wasn’t credible enough, so nobody wanted to take a meeting just to talk to me about their day. Steve recommends starting with friendly first contacts. Definitely do that if you have them. Thanks to The Mom Test, the fact that they’re friends won’t bias your data, so long as you ask good questions. In my case though, I was entering a new industry with high walls (brand advertising) and no friendly first contacts.

As my credibility built after a couple years in the industry, I found I was now able to get meetings without any real “reason”. The 3-meeting structure was finally viable! But once I started doing it, it felt like a bad use of my time. The most precious resource a startup has is its founders’ time and attention. You have to put yourself where you matter most, and I wasn’t finding early customer meetings to be that place. I wished I could get the learning without all the overhead.

If the solution isn’t a 3-meeting series, then what is it? You may have noticed a trend throughout the conversation examples we’ve seen so far: keeping it casual.

Let’s say I’m trying to build tools to help public speakers get more speaking gigs and I bump into one at a conference. I’m not going to try to set up a meeting. Instead, I’m just going to immediately transition into my most important question: “Hey, I’m curious—how did you end up getting this gig?” As a side bonus, we’re also now having an interesting conversation and I’m far more likely to be remembered and get a meeting later.

When you strip all the formality from the process, you end up with no meetings, no interview questions, and a much easier time. The conversations become so fast and lightweight that you can go to a industry meet-up and leave with a dozen customer conversations under your belt, each of which provided as much value as a formal meeting.

The structure of separate problem/solution/sales conversations is critical for avoiding bias, but it’s important to realise that the first one doesn’t actually need to be a meeting.

Rule of thumb: Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting.

The meeting anti-pattern

The Meeting Anti-Pattern is the tendency to relegate every opportunity for customer conversation into a calendar block.

Beyond being a bad use of your time and setting expectations that you’re going to show them a product, over-reliance on formal meetings can cause us to overlook perfectly good chances for serendipitous learning.

Imagine that you’re in a crowded cafe, tapping away at your keyboard, when your dream boy/girl sits down next to you. They’re wearing a charming hat and give you a friendly nod before cracking open a dog-eared old novel which just totally completes the mood. You slam down a quick espresso to psych yourself up and fumble through some sort of awkward monologue about how they seem like a really nice person and this is kind of weird because you don’t even know each other but maybe they want to go get a coffee sometime? Like, a different coffee? At a different place?

We know this is a silly situation. After all, the purpose of a date is to talk to each other and see if you get along. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, you were already on a date. And then you messed it up by trying to over-formalise it when you could have just chatted a bit and skipped that whole first date completely.

We’re going to pull exactly the same trick on our early customer conversations. We’re going to strip the pomp and circumstance and reduce it from a meeting to a chat. If we do it right, they won’t even know we were talking about our idea.

I was considering a product idea to make office managers more efficient. I played with the possibilities on Friday, figured out the big questions over the weekend, and then went to an industry event on Monday. A handful of office managers were there and without any of them realising we’d “had a meeting”, I’d learned that the big problem was really about debt collection rather than efficiency. I got there by just being interested and chatting with them over a beer: “X seems really annoying, how do you deal with it?” “Is Y as bad as it seems?” “You guys did a great job with Z… Where did you get that from?” Being too formal is a crutch we use to deal with an admittedly ambiguous and awkward situation. Instead of leaving wiggle room for the unexpected, everything becomes a process.

Symptoms of formality:

“So, first off, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I just have a few questions for you and then I’ll let you get back to your day…” “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much would you say you…”

Learning from customers doesn’t mean you have to be wearing a suit and drinking boardroom coffee. Asking the right questions is fast and touches on topics people find quite interesting. You can talk anywhere and save yourself the formal meetings until you have something concrete to show.

At their best, these conversations are a pleasure for both parties. You’re probably the first person in a long time to be truly interested in the petty annoyances of their day.

Rule of thumb: If it feels like they’re doing you a favour by talking to you, it’s probably too formal.

How long are meetings?

Early conversations are very fast. The chats grow longer as you move from the early broad questions (“Is this a real problem?”) toward more specific product and industry issues (“Which other software do we have to integrate with to close the sale?”).

It only takes 5 minutes to learn whether a problem exists and is important. Learning how someone currently achieves a certain goal or solves a problem is also quick.

Soon you’ll find yourself asking questions which are answered with long stories explaining their workflow, how they spend their time, or what else they’ve tried. You can usually get what you came for in 10-15 minutes, but people love telling stories about themselves, so you can keep this conversation going indefinitely if it’s valuable for you and interesting for them.

At the longer extreme, learning the details of an industry takes an hour or more. Thankfully, those are easier conversations to manage since the other person (usually some sort of industry expert) can go into a monologue once you point them in the right direction.

The duration of formal B2B meetings (the kind you schedule) is determined more by the arbitrary calendar block than by what you actually want to learn. Of course, you’ve liable to burn 15 minutes just to get a cup of tea and say hello.

Once you have a product and the meetings take on a more sales-oriented feel, you’ll want to start carving out clear blocks of 30+ minutes. You might lose 5 minutes due to miscellaneous tardiness, spend 5 minutes saying hello, 5 minutes asking questions to understand their goals/problems/budget, 10 minutes to show/describe the product, and the last 5 minutes figuring out next steps and advancement. That’s your half hour.

The potential speed of the early conversations one of the big reasons I like keeping it casual and skipping the meeting. Scheduling and going to a meeting has a lot of overhead for a 10 minute chat. Even explaining that you’re starting a company and would love to ask a couple questions can take 5 or 10 minutes. You’ll make progress a lot faster if you’re able to leave your idea out of it for as long as possible.

Putting it together

Even within a more formal meeting, you still might want to keep it casual if you’re hoping to get non-biased feedback.

I once had a product idea to help busy investors to manage their dealflow. I knew they got hundreds of applications per month and figured it must be a spreadsheet nightmare. I lined up a couple meetings to ask about the industry. I showed up to the first meeting and, while making smalltalk, said something like “I was thinking, you guys must get a ton of leads, right?” The guy laughed and said, yeah, it was crazy. “How in the world do you deal with all of that?” He sort of shrugged and pointed at a cluster of about a dozen sticky notes on the wall.

Each held a name and a phone number. “Our analysts kill most of them before they ever reach us, and then we throw out a bunch more. We only end up with about 10 apiece that are serious contenders. We just call every couple weeks to see how it’s going.” Well that doesn’t sound so bad, I said. “Yeah, it works pretty well,” he replied. “Anyway, what did you want to talk about?” They don’t have the problem. That’s successful learning. We disproved our idea before the guy even realised we were talking about it. It took 5 minutes, avoided biases, and didn’t feed us any bad data in the form of compliments, fluff, or ideas. Instead, we got concrete facts about our customers which are directly relevant to our core business questions.

Of course, it took me a 2-hour commute to get to those 5 minutes. It can’t be perfect every time.

In the aforementioned case, we proved ourselves wrong. Sometimes, however, it goes in the opposite direction and everything we learn from customers makes us even more excited. In that case, we stand atop all that we’ve learned and take the visionary leap of coming up with a specific product and business to make our customers’ lives better. And then we ask them to commit to it.

Rule of thumb: Give as little information as possible about your idea while still nudging the discussion in a useful direction.