مقدمه

Introduction

Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere but is fragile. With each blow from your shovel, you get closer to the truth, but you’re also liable to smash that truth into a million little pieces if you use too blunt of a learning instrument. I see a lot of teams using a bulldozer in a crate of dynamite for their excavation. They are in one way or another, forcing people to say something nice about their business. They use heavy-handed questions like, do you think it’s a good idea, and in doing so, they shatter their prize.

At the other end of the spectrum, some boundaries are being too gentle, using a toothbrush to unearth the city, flinching away from digging deep and finding out whether anything of value is actually burried down there in their business idea. We want to find the truth of how to make our business succeed. We need to dig for it and dig deep, but every question we ask carries the very real possibility of biasing the person we’re talking to, and rendering the whole exercise pointless. It happens more than you’d ever imagine. The truth is our goal and questions are our tools but we must learn to wield them. It’s delicate work and well worth learning. There’s treasure below.

Talking to customers is hard

We know we ought to talk to customers. Many of us even do talk to customers. But we still end up building stuff nobody buys. Isn’t that exactly what talking to people is meant to prevent?

It turns out almost all of us are doing it wrong. I’ve made these mistakes myself and seen them happen a hundred times over with other founders. Despite the recent explosion of startup knowledge, the process of figuring out what customers want too often unfolds as it did at my first company, Habit.

We were building social advertising tech and I was distraught. We’d spent 3 years working our hearts out. We’d nearly run out of investor money and it didn’t look like we’d be getting more. We’d relocated internationally to be closer to our market and had survived a co-founder being deported. I’d been talking to customers full-time for months. And then, after innumerable days of slog and an exhausted team, I learned I’d been doing it wrong. I may as well not have bothered.

The advice that you ought to be talking to your customers is well-intentioned, but ultimately a bit unhelpful. It’s like the popular kid advising his nerdy friend to “just be cooler.” They forget to mention that it’s hard.

These conversations take time, are easy to screw up and go wrong in a nefarious way. Bad customer conversations aren’t just useless. Worse, they convince you that you’re on the right path. They give you a false positive which causes you to over-invest your cash, your time, and your team. Even when you’re not actively screwing something up, those pesky customers seem hellbent on lying to you.

This book is a practical how-to. The approach and tools within are gathered from a wide range of communities including Customer Development, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, User Experience, traditional sales and more. It’s based on working with a bunch of founders and from my experiences both failing and succeeding at customer learning, as well as from the support of innumerable peers and mentors.

It’s a casual approach to conversation, based on chipping away the formality and awkwardness of talking to people and taking responsibility for asking good questions.

Why another book on talking and selling?

Does your shelf really need another book on selling and talking? And does it need one written by me in particular?

Well… yes. Yes it does.

Here’s why:

Firstly, I’m a techie, not a sales guy. I’m introverted and naturally bad in meetings. Every other sales book I’ve read is written by and for folks who are already pretty good at dealing with people. They know the unspoken rules of the meeting. I fumbled through from scratch. You know that line, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you”? People have actually said that to me (and I believed them). With much help from peers and advisors, I eventually started figuring it out and we closed deals with companies like Sony and MTV. But I learned that there’s a big gap between textbooks and check books.

Secondly, before we can start doing things correctly, we need to understand how we’re doing them wrong. Through my own projects and my work with new founders, I’ve built up an exhaustive list of how it can go wrong. Throughout the book, I’ll try to help you figure out where you might be messing stuff up in unnoticed ways.

Finally, this is a practical handbook, not a theoretical tome. For example, how do you find people to talk to and set up the meetings? How do you take notes while still being polite and paying attention? It’s all in here.

I can’t teach you how to make your business huge. That’s up to you. But I can give you the tools to talk to customers, navigate the noise, and learn what they really want. The saddest thing that can happen to a startup is for nobody to care when it disappears. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.

A note on scope & terminology

This book isn’t a summary or description or re-interpretation of the process of Customer Development. That’s a bigger concept and something Steve Blank has covered comprehensively in 4 Steps to the E.piphany and The Startup Owner’s Manual.

This book is specifically about how to properly talk to customers and learn from them. Talking is one of the big aspects of Customer Development, but shouldn’t be confused with the whole process. To keep the distinction clear, I’m going to refer to chatting with people as “customer conversation” (lowercase) instead of “Customer Development” (uppercase).

For the most part, I’m assuming you already agree that talking to customers is a good idea. I’m not trying to convince you again, so this book is more “how” than “why”.

Let’s get involved.