How to Talk to Customers and Validate Your Business Idea (When Everyone Is Lying to You)

The challenge: Building a profitable business in 6 months with $1,000

Louis: So I know you’ve been talking about your book the Mantes maybe hundreds, thousands of times on podcasts, so I wanted to spin things a bit differently together. Right. So I’ve mentioned in the intro you have a lot of experience when it comes to starting businesses. And it’s interesting because a few times on the podcast I like to ask a very specific question to my guests when I know they have what it takes to start companies because they’ve done it in the past multiple times. So I’ve asked the question that I’m going to ask you to guests including Seth Godin or Rob Walling, that I’m sure you know both. I want to ask you this question as well, which is kind of a challenge and it might be a bit tricky to answer, but I’m sure you will find a way to do that. So imagine for a second that you are an animus person. Nobody knows about Rob Fitzpatrick, you haven’t written a book, so you don’t have a network per se. You just have yourself and your knowledge that you have right now. And imagine I give you the challenge to create a successful company in 6 months or less with just $1000 roughly in the bank and trying to generate maybe 10x that so 10,000 plus in the next 6 months. So based on the experience and expertise you have right now, how would you do it? Step by step, starting with step one.

Choose customers you already understand and have access to

Rob Fitzpatrick: So I think the most overlooked thing is to choose customers that you already understand and who you have access to. And by access to, I mean, you can pick up the phone and start calling them and they will at answer the phone call and answer some of your questions. It takes so much time to break into a customer group that you don’t understand because you’re like, okay, well I’m starting from zero. How do I even get them to take a meeting with me? How do I even have this conversation? There’s so much. My first company, we were trying to break into the advertising industry and it took us two years just to understand enough to get taken seriously. Whereas if it’s a group that you already have some sort of credibility and understanding and expertise with, at least you speak their language. And that makes it really quick even if you don’t actually know the individual people. Step one would be choosing a customer group that I already understand. Then step two would be looking for either potential partners or co founders who already have some of the assets that I would need to build a business. For example, if it was for my customers, if they whatever, maybe I need a retail space. It’s a pain in the ass to go out and get your own retail space and set it up and renovate it. But if you can find someone who’s already got it and who isn’t using it fully, then you can figure out some partnership and save yourself 12 months and 25 grand or whatever. And you can do that both digitally and in the real world. People always try to build everything from scratch themselves. But there’s usually a way, if you’re credible and if you’re thoughtful and if you understand what the partners are scared of. There’s usually some way to partner with people who already have what you need and then you’re able to hit the ground running a lot faster.

Find partners who already have the assets you need

Louis: So let’s go back to step one. First of all, I enjoy the fact that you aren’t very scared of the question I asked you, which is good. It’s a good sign.

Rob Fitzpatrick: I’ve done it before. I’ve been dead broke and like, okay, I have one month’s worth of money. How am I going to pay my rent next month?

Louis: There you go.

Rob Fitzpatrick: Can I start? That’ll pay my bills in 30 days. I’ve been through that a couple times.

Louis: So that’s why you’re talking from experience, which is fantastic. So let’s go back to step one and drill down a bit more. Get close. Basically talk to customers who could be close to you. So let’s take an actual real example from your personal experience. Tell me about a time where you had to do that and what were the type of customers you had to reach out to.

Rob Fitzpatrick: Let me make a comparison so that it’s clearer. In my first company, we went through Y Combinator, we raised VC funding, really good investors, Some of the guys behind Index, good top tier global investors. We had a lot of cash in our bank account and we were trying to break into the ad industry. We were trying to talk to movie studios and music labels and creative agencies and all this. And every meeting I wanted to get, I had to get a warm intro. And that was difficult. Just drilling, figuring out who do I want to talk to, how do I get the intro? Then you go through the whole calendar dance, then you sit down with them and you start asking stupid questions because you don’t even know the basics. They’re like, oh, who is this idiot asking me dumb stuff? And you’ve done all this work to talk to a VP at Sony or something, and now you’ve kind of wasted it because you don’t even know the basics. So then my next company, I was like, okay, well, I’m not going to do that again. That was a huge disadvantage to have to start all that from scratch. So I’d spent a lot of time in academia before I got into Startups. I wanted to be a professor, so I was going through a PhD program. I didn’t finish it because I dropped out to start my business, but I kind of understood that world. I liked hanging out with professors. I knew how they thought. I liked being around universities. I’d done some casual teaching work with a few universities just as a guest lecturer. So I had people I could call. So I was like, okay, well, I want to build something for universities. So all I had to do was literally walk onto universities. You can go to a physical location. At ucl, I would hang out at the professor’s bar. They have a private bar just for PhD students and professors. And I would just post up at bar. And when someone came up to order a beer, I’d be like, hey, weird question, but how do you guys handle blah, blah, blah? And I would just ask them and really quickly. You’re able to talk to people instantly because you kind of have access and you know their language.

Why getting out of the building is worth the fear

Louis: Yep, that makes total sense. But you’re talking about something that is quite scary. I think for a lot of people. The fact to go out of the building, as I’m not going to remember his name, said get out of the building and actually talk to people. Right? So how would you convince people who like to program stuff in front of their computer and just post things in forums and ask questions in forums in social media, but don’t really tend to go out into the real world and talk to people directly?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Man, I’ve got so many thoughts on this. So I’m a programmer, right? I would much rather be programming, but it sucks a lot to program things that nobody uses. You spend like six months or 12 months pouring your heart and soul into a piece of software and then it has like zero users. You don’t even want to use it yourself. It’s just terrible. It’s heartbreaking. And so once you realize that by talking to people you can build the correct software and by talking to people you can launch the correct marketing campaigns and you can phrase it in the correct way and you can target it correctly, suddenly you’re like, oh, wow, I had two conversations which weren’t all that bad and I just saved $100,000 worth of development time or marketing budget or whatever. And suddenly it gets really exciting because it’s not like some tedious, busy work. It’s like, oh, wow, this is really enabling me. This is a superpower. And being able to do both talking to customers and then also being able to program or talking to customers and also being able to directly turn that into a marketing campaign. There’s so few people who have both sets of skills, and you’re automatically a superhero in both entrepreneurship and in traditional careers. So that’s part of it. It’s like, the payoff is worth it. Another part of it is that people have the wrong thing in their head when they think of talking to customers. They tend to think of when you’re walking down the street and some charity mugger stops you and is like, hey, can I ask you a few questions? It’ll only take a minute. And people hate that. They hate being stopped and interrupted. And so they think, but that’s the only kind of interview they’re familiar with. So they think it’s going to be like that. But that is not it. If you’re doing your customer interviews like that, you are doing them wrong, and you’re wasting the opportunity. Think about it like the way you try to talk to and understand your close friends. You wouldn’t sit down with a close friend who just had a breakup and go, okay, so on a scale of 1 to 5, how upset are you that you just got dumped? On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely are you to have a regrettable rebound? It’s like, people don’t talk to people like that. If you talk to your customers like that, you’re an asshole. And you’re not going to learn very much because you’re treating them like a test subject, not like a human. The way we talk to our friends is we go, wow, you just got dumped. That sucks. Tell me everything. And you kind of want to talk to your customers the same way because ultimately they have a problem, right? The reason they’re using your product is you create joy or you remove pain. You are trying to make their life better. And you’re doing that because you care about their lives and you care about them. And if you can engage with them on that level, it’s like, wow, you’re a professor. You don’t have big enough budgets, you’re asked to do a million things. You’re trying to help your students, and you can’t because of all this bureaucracy. That must suck. Tell me everything. They’re just going to open up to you. People love having that conversation. It’s not like you’re exploiting them or tricking them or making them talk about something they don’t want to talk about. It’s like a human conversation. It’s good stuff. People love doing it. And if you see it that way, it’s nowhere near so scary.

Your personal network is more valuable than you realize

Louis: People love talking about themselves, don’t they?

Rob Fitzpatrick: They do.

Louis: So step one to summarize is really about understanding the type of people you gravitate towards, even if you think it’s normal. I think this is one of the key things I’ve learned is people take for granted the network they currently have and they always try to look beyond it because it’s not sexy enough. The fact that they know all of those people they want to go beyond, as you said, talking to the VP of Sony, VP of Marketing at Sony or whatnot. But your own network has so much value, you don’t realize it. Your uncle who works in this company or your aunt that works in this one, your cousin that you’re close to, your friends. If you create a spreadsheet of all those people that you know, you’ll be probably blown away by the amount of people you know and the amount of introduction you can get. And then as you said, the second thing is you’re probably interested in a lot of topics or at least one topic that is really close to your heart and you feel passionate about. And you might know a lot of people there. You might be part of a community there or a group or social events or whatnot. Those are the people you want to maybe focus on to create your first business or second business, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it helps a lot. It immediately saves you one to two years worth of work. By just beginning with customers you already understand, it makes everything else so much easier. They have to also have money, right? And they have to also have problems. And there’s other criteria, like making a new kind of hacky sack for people who like to play. Hacky sack is not going to be a breakthrough business probably no matter how well you understand them.

Louis: So should it be step two then? Once you know the type of people that you gravitate towards, maybe the step two should be to understand whether they have money, whether they suffer from big problem.

Rob Fitzpatrick: No, I think it’s pretty obvious. It’s self evident as soon as you think about it. You don’t need to even call it a step. It’s just like when you look at your list of potential customers, you can very quickly rank them and you can do some ranking based on it’s not just about their profitability. It’s like do they have problems that cost them money? Would be probably one of my criteria. Another one would be how much do I like spending time with them? Because you’re going to end up spending a lot of time thinking about and being with people like your customers. So if you don’t actually like them, that’s going to suck. Then another one might be, how actually easy are they to access? If you’ve already got a mailing list with 1000 of them on them, then I would consider that a pretty big head start. Those thousand people are really easy for you to access. Or if one of your buddies runs an industry event, or if a company that you’re friends with sponsors an industry event. All of those things give you a big head start in ease of access. For me, it’s like, how much do I like them? How profitable could they be? Or how urgent are their problems? That sort of thing. And how easy is my access?

Louis: Right. So once you have this rough list, and let’s repeat the filters again, I think this is going to be important for listeners to remember. So how easy or an access do you have? How painful is the problem they suffer from? And do they have access to, like, do they have money, basically? And do you like to hang out with them as well?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it’s fun. If you have customers you like, then it’s just like, hey, let’s meet at the bar and talk about your problems. It’s like, all right, that’s not such a painful way to spend an hour.

Louis: It doesn’t feel like customer interviews or customer development. There’s a lot of lingo around this concept of talking to people, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I always try to call them conversations. There’s so much baggage tied up in the word interview. It’s not like that at all. It’s like, hey, you guys are losing money. Tell me about it. That must suck. Maybe I can help. It’s like, you just talk to them.

Louis: So that’s step two, Right? That’s what you mentioned. You go where they hang out and talk to them. Right.

Rob Fitzpatrick: Well, I’m going to resist putting it into steps because I don’t think you can put this stuff into steps. But you get a head start if you already understand and have access to your customers. And then what I mentioned as my second criteria was that, so you need customers you can access, and then you need to create some way to serve them. Right. You need to build the business, build the product. The other half of it, which gives you a big head start, is if you can find business partners who already have some of the stuff that you would otherwise need to build yourself, and if there’s some way to partner or collaborate with them as opposed to starting it all from scratch. Everyone does their own content marketing, and it’s so hard and it takes so long. But I once had a great business. It was doing a million dollars a year within few months, and we ended up having problems, but it was really good for two years. And the way it worked is I just partnered with someone who already had a mailing list of 300,000 people. And I was like, hey, I’ve got a service that I think your mailing list would like. You’ve got a mailing list but no way to monetize, Boom, let’s make a million dollars a year out of thin air. And it was super simple. We were up and running in a matter of weeks. And if you can do that, customers who understand partners, who already have the resources you need, you’re just like, I don’t know. I think based on your original question, which is how do you do it quickly? That would be my answer, right?

Louis: Is it the way you’ve done it? For the second business you mentioned, the one after the ad business?

Rob Fitzpatrick: No. There’s a big bias toward doing everything yourself in that one. We were surfing universities and basically helping them handle the IP transfer when they spun out student businesses. So they have all this research inside the university and it’s a lot of legal overhead and bureaucratic overhead for them to spin it out into external businesses. So we gave them a software suite and a smoother process and all of that, and it was cool. We got a couple thousand student businesses spun out into standalone things. But we ran into some other issues, like the universities didn’t have the budgets to make it scalable for our particular use case. But in that case, we did most of it ourselves. I was writing the software and leading the sales, and then the guy I chose as a co founder was getting his PhD in this domain within. In a top tier university. And so with him on board, he provided the easy access to customers.

Louis: Right. And that makes total sense, as you said, if you want to do it quickly. To repeat, it’s about making sure that you get close to the customers you can have access to, that you have a good knowledge of, that you like to hang out with, that have problems worth solving, that have money to solve those problems, or at least they’re losing money from those problems. And then the second thing is, look at partners. Don’t try to do stuff on your own. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel for everything possible, starting content marketing from scratch or starting Facebook advertising from scratch if you can have people who can help you. Right.

Rob Fitzpatrick: And it’s worth adding that in the end, partnerships tend to be unstable. And in the end, your partners will inevitably screw you over. So you have to be prepared to screw them over faster. So basically what happens in a partnership is you both start making a lot of money, and it’s great for both of you. And then you both realize that the other one is probably going to realize that they could make twice as much money if they cut you out. And so you’re both sort of defensively forced into aggressively cutting each other out. So if you partner with someone who has their own list and you’re providing a service, you have to assume that they’re immediately trying to replicate your service. And so you have to start trying to replicate their list just because it’s really difficult for the partnership to last long term. But it can be a great way to run the first year or two years to get a quick head start.

Louis: Yeah. You get 1 million in revenue after a year, and then you can think of not necessarily partnering up, but investing in your own channels to grow.

Rob Fitzpatrick: Right? Yeah.

Louis: So I’m curious to hear an example from your own life right now based on those two steps, even though you don’t really call them steps, but let’s say you have zero, nothing in your bank account right now, but you still have the knowledge and the network you have. I’m just curious, who would you go after? What type of customers, based on what you just talked about, would you go after straight away?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Well, okay, so if you look at the resources that you have as a person, you’ve basically got your skills. You’ve got the groups of customers that you have insight about, and you’ve got, let’s say, potential partners, both businesses and individuals. So you’ve got people, you know, stuff you can do and potential business partners. One of the skills that I have that’s valuable is teaching. So I’m pretty good with a crowd, both, like designing educational material or running events or acting as an emcee or a host. That’s a skill I bring to the table. The other skills I’ve got is like programming and writing. And so I would basically be like, listing down my skills, and then I’d go, okay, so these are the things I can bring to the table. And if I have other assets, I would list them. I have a blog with a few thousand email subscribers, so cool. That’s an asset. I’ve got various code bases that I’ve half built. Okay, those are assets. I’m like, okay, so these are all my assets and my skills and that stuff. And then I would look at the people I can partner with and go like, okay, what could I bring to them to make use of their assets? And so I would probably start with events, just because events are much more, they’re much quicker cash flow than programming. And also there’s a lot of programmers who are better than me, whereas there’s fewer teachers who are better than me, if that makes sense. Like relative to my competition, I’m a better teacher than I am a programmer. And so that makes sense as the most monetizable skill. So I’d be looking at everyone I know and go like, okay, do they have a community or do they have a list or do they have an asset or do they have an expertise? Which if I wrap an event around it, I can make us both money in a hurry. And I would basically just plow through my entire network going like, okay, who needs an event? And. Or who needs teaching? And work it like that. And then I would look for repeating stuff that repeats. Maybe there’s a bunch of different people who need kind of the same thing. And it’s like, okay, well that’s an opportunity to productize it, either by turning it into an actual literal product or by just hiring and training a delivery team who can then do what I was previously doing myself. And in either case, you’ve got a productized business, whether it’s people or tech driven.

Louis: What do you mean by delivery team exactly?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Oh, so in the case of teaching, it would be like training up a lead teacher and training up an events person and training up events project manager. It’s just like all the people who do the task. This is the same way agencies work. Imagine if you were a freelancer and then you start getting more clients than you can handle. You would start hiring people to do pieces of your job and you would train them up to do one specific piece of what you used to do yourself. And over time you would build up a team underneath you, doing more and more from the simplest tasks upward as you move on to whatever strategy, finding new work, whatever you feel relaxing, whatever’s worthy of your time.

Louis: So you would start with a simple task, the simplest task, and then move upwards is what you said, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah. When people delegate. I’m still terrible at this and I keep getting screwed by it because I try to delegate too aggressively and then nothing works. But there’s an excellent book called the E Myth Revisited which was written in the 80s and it’s about how to deal with this problem. Basically in a human and process driven business, as opposed to a technology driven business, how do you turn the stuff that you’re doing yourself into a repeatable, simple, foolproof process and then train someone else to do it and gradually build the team beneath you so that even though it’s human driven, it runs very regularly and predictably.

Louis: Yeah, this book is fantastic because it’s really about processes and you basically write down all of the process you have in your head. Right? How do I invite people to do everyone else? Marketers, for example. At the minute I don’t teach anyone, but if I had to, I would probably take a one pager write okay, identify people who have good following. Identify people that a lot of listeners said I should interview. I find a way to get their email address, I send them this email, I follow up with them and reply in two weeks, etc. So systems after systems after system is a good way to outsource the right way, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Exactly. And people always want to delegate the thing that they’re worst at, which I totally understand. But the argument this book makes, which I totally believe having been screwed by making this mistake, is that you can’t delegate it until you’re already able to do it very well yourself. So you kind of work your way through the business getting good at everything. And once you figure something out, then you can process size and delegate it. But people always try to delegate too early and they delegate stuff they don’t understand and then they inevitably get screwed because they can’t manage it and they can’t quality control it.

Louis: One small tip, this is not where I want you to go in this interview, but that’s still very interesting to record video of yourself going through workflows. Let’s say if you want to outsource stuff to a virtual assistant to start with or an admin and stuff that you know how to do, you can record a very quick video from your screen using tools like Wistia has a tool called Soapbox. And instead of having to write things like long paragraphs, just record your workflow on a video. Send that to this person. Most of the time, this person will know exactly what to do. I want to go back to what you said because I asked you the question again about the give me an example from how would you do it again right now? And you talk about something you hadn’t talked before, which is the skills. Right? I don’t find what you’re very good at, and I think that’s something people overlook. So do you have any tips for people to how do you know what you’re good at if you’re struggling to find out what your top strengths Are.

Identifying your core skills and multipliers

Rob Fitzpatrick: I have no idea. Certain skills are obviously monetizable, like interface design and programming, assuming you’re also a decent communicator and understand a little bit about business. All of these skills, though I think it was the Dilbert guy, Scott Adams, who made this observation that any skill on its own is kind of a commodity, but if you can have a combination of two skills, then you start to become a bit rare. So if you can program and write, then you can have a good programming blog and that sort of separates you. Or if you can program and you understand business, then you can be a technical consultant instead of just a commodity programmer. Like, I’ve met marketers who are really good at crunching their numbers and they’re just terrible communicators. So they send reports to their clients which the clients can’t understand. I had a guy who used to pay me £1,000 an hour just to help him understand what his marketing agency was telling him. He was already paying a marketing agency and he could not understand their reports. So he hired me and once a month I would have a beer with him and he’d give me a grand and I would just help him understand the report that his stupid agency has sent. Because they were shit at communications, right? And if they had invested a bit more. This isn’t really answering your question, but maybe it provides a strategy for these marketers that were sending him the report. If they had invested more in communication, that would have acted as a multiplier skill and pushed them up from mid tier pricing into being able to do top tier pricing. But they had the core skill, the marketing, but they didn’t have the enabling skill, the communication and visual design of nice reports. So maybe you can be a bit strategic about that. Be like, okay, I’ve got my core skill. I think probably you’re aware of what your core skill is. What is the best multiplier skill that I could intentionally develop alongside it? Is it design? Is it writing? Is it public speaking? The communication ones are pretty huge, to be honest. People are just terrible at communication and it’s really tragic.

Louis: It is tragic, but it’s good for us, right? So once you know your skills and the multipliers that go with it, and then you naturally went straight away into, okay, I would look at my list, therefore event seems to be a good thing. I look at my list and maybe identify people who might be. Who might need teaching or might need an event or whatnot. So how do you go about translating those? I know my strengths to. I know which type of people I

Rob Fitzpatrick: should contact when I’m starting out a business. My last couple businesses have been mostly B2B sales driven. When I’m starting out, you have a list of potential customers who could go and whether you’re trying to just learn from them or whether you’re trying to sell to them or whatever. What I typically do, and I think I would do the same thing here, is I rank people by friendliness as opposed to ranking them by their profitability or potential. Because I would rather make my mistakes early with the friendly people. They’re a lot more forgiving. You’re allowed to ask much dumber questions when you’re talking to someone friendly. Let’s say that I wanted to run events for people who have large email newsletters. And if I have a friend with 5,000 subscribers and someone I kind of know with 100,000, I would start with the friendly 5,000. Because I’m going to be able to learn a lot in a safe environment from that person without burning my bridge with the big lead. And I can hopefully learn stuff there that’s transferable to the person with the 100,000 person list. So it’s like people are always in a hurry to close the deal, close the partnership, close the sale, close the funding. But you tend to go much faster if at the beginning you’re not trying to close it and you’re just trying to learn. You’re like, okay, I’m not trying to raise investment from you, but I am trying to understand how the investment process works for businesses like mine. Can you explain to me where we’d need to get to and what milestones we’d need to hit? And you can kind of treat these early pitch conversations more like learning conversations by starting with the friendly ones first. So that’s probably what I would do. And then people always try to go like, okay, well, is it the best choice? Well, frankly, that’s a stupid question because you don’t need the best business. You just need a business that is good enough. Like if you have a business making a million dollars a year and you could have been making 5 million a year, then, quite frankly, who cares? Because you’ve still created the financial breathing room that you need to survive whatever crisis you were originally in. And then you can use that as the stepping stone to the much bigger thing that comes next. So you don’t need the optimal choice at first. You just need anything that works sufficiently well, if that makes sense.

Louis: It makes total sense. I think people tend to be paralyzed with the fact that they don’t have all the data to make a decision. Always this case of, oh, we need a bit more data to take this decision, we need a bit more data to know that. And they are paralyzed to the point where they don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Instead of settling for good enough, knowing that they will never have all the answers. It’s just better to just do something, even if it’s shit the first time, because the second time you do it better and better and better.

Rob Fitzpatrick: And this depends a bit on how much work is involved in trying to. So for example, even though I’m a programmer, you notice that if it comes to making quick money, none of my choices involve programming, even though I’ve got that skill. And that skill is valuable just because to even try something when you’re programming, it’s going to take you at least a few weeks and probably more like a few months. And that makes your mistakes quite expensive, relatively speaking. Whereas if you’re looking at a joint venture thing or if you’re looking at something that’s sales driven or conversation driven or events, the cost of failure is an email or a meeting in the worst case. And so when that’s the case, it’s so cheap to try stuff because it just takes a conversation. And then you can be a lot more aggressive about your willingness to make mistakes because they’re so cheap programming makes your mistakes more expensive. Same deal with retail. If you’re opening a cafe, that’s so scary because if you’re wrong once, you’re going to go bankrupt, you need everything to be perfect. Whereas if you can find some kind of business where you can do it conversations first, then your mistakes are very, very cheap.

Louis: And it’s likely that there will be ways for you to break down this initial idea into something way less risky. So to take your example of, let’s say a cafe that you want to open up, maybe you should invest in those small stands that you can just wheel around the city, whatever, and get permit from the city council. Or maybe you can just monitor the traffic that the specific street gets and just start very, very small to validate some of the assumptions you have. And so that removes the risk. But I very much like the way you classify that. So I’ll try to summarize back and think back to what you said. So identify your core skills, identify your multipliers. Rank the people you know by type of friendliness, identify the ones who are related to the business you’d like to create, the ones that you enjoy spending Time with the ones that mostly have a pain point. And then try to run a business. Try to start something with mistakes that won’t cost you a lot of money or time, which is kind of the same thing, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah. One way to think about it at the beginning is you could think about it as like, I need to create a gig, or I need to create a project which generates money, obviously, if you need money. But it’s like sometimes business, we create a lot of mental overhead once we start thinking of something as a business instead of as a project or a gig or an opportunity or a deal or whatever.

Louis: Yeah. Dedarmatizing the world of business, because, as you said, doesn’t have to be a business. It can just be something small that just gets pinned up into something much bigger. That’s what happened with this podcast. It was never supposed to be a podcast. Just started with one interview on Skype, and then I ended up doing a bit more, and then I started to record them, and then here we are after 100 interviews. It was pretty good. Okay, so I think I’ve squeezed enough knowledge of you into this first step of the question. I think with this knowledge, people listening will understand how they can really generate revenue quite quickly by using their skills, the network they currently have, and being smart about the people they choose to work with, and also the type of ideas they should pursue. So thanks for going through this exercise with me, Rob. That was quite insightful. And I think I’d like to just go to the second topic of today, which is very related, and we talked about it already, which is this concept of asking for feedback and the concept of your book. Right. So let’s say you’re on the example you took before. Let’s say you want to create a business, a product for professors and PhD students and whatnot. And you talked about the scenario where you would go where they hang out and just talk to them. So maybe can you talk about the wrong way? And you already touched on that a bit, but can we talk about the wrong way to talk to those people in the first place?

The wrong way to ask for customer feedback

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So there’s a couple mistakes. I guess the two I’ll mention. One is beginning with the pitch is a huge mistake, and the other one’s being too formal. So if I come to you and I go, hey, thank you so much for taking the time to meet me. I’m working on this incredible idea. It’s like, like, new software. It does this and this and it’s real time, and it’s big data and blah, blah, blah. What do you think? What you’re going to say is like, wow, it sounds really cool. It’s so innovative. Let me know when it launches. I’ve kind of backed you into this rhetorical corner where you’re forced to just say something nice, and that’s kind of all you can say. Very few people are going to go, like, after you’ve pitched, they’re going to go like, well, honestly, I just don’t care at all about that problem. People just don’t respond that way. And so when you open with the pitch, you kind of shut down useful feedback. Instead, what you’re meant to do is be like, you want to ask people how they’re already solving it and why they’re doing it that way. So you wouldn’t say, hey, I’m reinventing, spinning out student businesses. It’s going to be incredible. It’s got all these great features. Instead, you would say, hey, listen, you guys spin out student businesses sometimes. And they’d go, yeah. And you go, can you talk me through that process? How does it work? What goes wrong? What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened? Why do you do it that way? Have you looked into other ways of doing it? Have you ever tried doing it with software? Oh, that sounds. You never need to mention your own idea. You just need to try to better understand what they’re already doing and why. Does that make sense as a distinction?

Louis: Makes total sense, yes. And that’s something that happens quite a lot, especially during startup events. I used to go to those a few years ago in the good old days. And it’s insane that, yes, this is the only thing you hear. It’s a pitch. And then people try to either sell it to you directly or try to understand whether you have feedback on the idea. And as you said, you’re just cornered into it. Instead. The way I like to talk about it as well is to act like a journalist, to be just very curious about everything. A bit like we’re doing in this podcast. I’m not satisfied when you just give me an answer. I want to dig into it. So if you tell me me if I would interview you or understand or try to be the business for you, let’s say you run events all the time. I would ask you, how do you run events and how and why and why and why? I just make you talk, right, for an hour. And then I have everything I need without ever talking about a product that I have.

Rob Fitzpatrick: And sometimes it only takes five minutes. People can be very clear. Sometimes you put them onto a topic they really care about. And they’re like, oh, that is the worst part of my day. And it’s like, oh, tell me me more. Why do you do it like that? And they’re just boom, boom, boom. And it comes out really quickly. So you often don’t even need the hour calendar block. You just need a couple minutes to chat with people. Although this does require planning what you’re trying to learn in advance. So what I like to do is once a week I always plan, what are the three big things I’m trying to learn from any customers I happen to chat to this particular week. It could be things like, oh, I would love to know what they googled for last time they tried to have this problem, which I can then feed into my ad campaign. Or it might be like, oh, I’d love to know why they aren’t already using my competitors. What has caused them to not purchase that product? So I’d kind of decide on my learning objectives ahead of time. And then when you meet people, you can go, hey, weird question, but why aren’t you using this product? And they’ll just tell you right then, because it’s about their life. They won’t lie to you. Where people lie to you is when you ask them for opinions about your product. So don’t do that.

What you should actually be trying to learn from customers

Louis: From the example you just gave, I never thought of this one before. The first question about asking, what did they search for in Google? And you can reuse that for ad campaigns. It’s a very unscalable way to scale stuff, which is interesting. So from your experience then, what are the type of learnings you’d recommend listeners to focus on?

Rob Fitzpatrick: So at the very beginning, you want to try to get to where you have a good mental model of what they are already doing and why. So, for example, let’s say they’re still using an Excel spreadsheet and telephone calls and post it notes. That’s like their system. Well, okay, and you think like, this is a common entrepreneur trap. They go, oh wow, they’re still using Excel and post it notes. Like they need software. And so you build a bunch of software and then they don’t want it. And like, why? Well, because they like their Excel and their post it notes. They’re comfortable with that. It works for them. So you have to understand not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it that way. Why haven’t they already upgraded to fancy software? Maybe there’s some interesting constraint that you need to know about so that’s my number one learning goal is what are they already doing and why? What’s their decision making process? And you should kind of be able to talk through it. You’ve got a good mental model of your customer’s world. And then after that it probably moves into the more money focused stuff like what’s their buying criteria, their decision making, their budgets. It’s different with consumers because consumers will do a lot more impulse buys. So it’s like, okay, I don’t know. The biggest one though is what are they already doing and why? If you’ve got that, you’ve got 95% of what matters.

Louis: It sounds like it’s even better if you can actually ask them to show you how they actually do stuff instead of just describing it. Right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it’s not always possible. It depends on what you’re trying to help them with. So if you were trying to improve the way people deal with email, then yeah, by all means, watch them do email. You’re going to learn a ton. But there’s lots of problems where that’s just not practical. And there’s also cases it’s worth pointing out, like let’s say you’re building Uber or you’re making the Segway or you’re making a video game. These types of products do not solve explicit problems. Everyone could still get a taxi before Uber came out, so there was no explicit problem. And like, video games are a classic example. You can’t go to someone and go, hey, do you like having fun? There’s just nothing to learn from that conversation. So in those cases where there’s no clear problem, you have to build an actual prototype much sooner and just put it into people’s hands. And then you kind of use conversations afterwards to understand what they did and didn’t like. Whereas if the problem’s explicit and well defined, then you can learn everything just from talking to people even before the product exists.

Louis: Is the fact that when you can’t really identify a problem, is it more from a B2C perspective rather than a B2B?

Rob Fitzpatrick: You think it’s both. There’s things like, let’s say you can save someone 6% on operational expenses. That’s not an explicit problem. They’re not like, we desperately need to save 6% on operational expenses, but if you can go to them, it’s nice to have, but if it’s easy enough for them to install and use and it doesn’t massively change their workflow, then they’re like, hell yeah. So that’s like a B2B. Nice to have. Whereas for consumers, yeah, a ton of stuff is nice to have and much more like impulse buy or they don’t need it, but they like it. And that’s harder to learn from conversations. But that’s where stuff like all the marketing experiment, like running fake adword campaigns and all of that stuff really comes into the forefront when it’s these nice to haves for consumers.

Louis: Let’s talk about that a bit more then. Let’s say you understand that the problem is not that obvious, but you have a hunch, you have a gut feeling that your idea, your prototype, could be useful. So you said one thing. First of all, build a prototype quite quickly and put that in the hands of potential people and just see how they react. Right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Events are another example. Like, you kind of can’t really test an event. You just have to start selling tickets and see if people buy them. And so that’s like your prototype. It’s like, all right, I have it. Screw it, it’s an event. And if you sell enough tickets, then you build it afterwards. And the same is true. Yeah, for video games. For most consumer phone apps, there’s a huge swath of things where you kind of need something to sell or to pitch before you can get anywhere.

Louis: Talk to me about the commitments side of things. So I know it’s difficult, first of all, to get to talk to someone once, and then how do you talk to this person again? Let’s say now that your prototype has been built and now that your product or service is a bit more defined, building this relationship and asking for commitments, making sure that people reply to your emails and all of that, how do you deal with this?

Testing commitments: Time, reputation, and money

Rob Fitzpatrick: Well, so part of it is, I think, the whole. Okay, so the idea of commitments is that if you pitch a product to someone, it’s very hard to figure out whether they’re a customer or whether they’re just saying nice things about it because they want to be polite. Your challenge is like, okay, how do I distinguish between these two groups of people? Because I want to ignore the feedback that’s just compliments, and I want to obsess over the feedback that’s from real potential customers. Traditionally, the way this works or the way I think about it is you ask them for something that they will only give you if they’re serious, which is usually their time, their reputation, or their money. If I say, hey, Louis, I’m making this incredible software for podcasters, it’s going to make your life easy. It cleans up your audio it does automated marketing. It’s be to going great. And you’re like, wow, that sounds so innovative. That’s really cool. Okay, so I’m now at the problem point, right? I’m like, okay, well he said it’s really cool, but does that mean it’s a compliment or it’s a commit? Like what is it? So all I have to do is ask you for something that you’ll only give me if you’re serious. So I say, listen, it’s not ready yet, but we’re going to be starting our beta in a few months. If you want to put down a €10 deposit now, I’ll make sure that you get a first access spot into the beta. You know it’s going to be a limited group, like, what do you think? Do you want in? And if you actually really care, you’re going to be like, hell yeah. This is an important tool for me. Like I absolutely want to try it. And I’m not trying to trick you. I’m not sure it’s not like some neuro linguistic whatever. I’m not like tricking you or trying to get your money if you don’t want to give it to me. Rather I’m just giving you a clear opportunity to do this small commitment to show me whether or not you’re serious. In a B2B context, the main one is introduction. So if someone will introduce you to their boss, it’s a sign that they’re really serious and you can treat them like a customer. Whereas if you go like you’re talking to them, they’re like, oh, I love this, this is incredible, I really want it. You go, oh, well listen, who else would need to sign off on this for you guys to be able to buy it? If they go, oh, you need to talk to my boss, the legal team, the tech team, it’s like, oh, well, will you make that introduction? I’d love to talk to your boss. If they go, oh no, I really can’t. All right, well they’re not that serious, or you’re not good enough yet. But you can figure that out with a couple follow up questions. But just by asking for introduction. Because they might say, yeah, absolutely, do you have 10 minutes now we can go talk to him right now. You’re like, okay, great, this guy’s really serious. There’s no money changing hands. But the fact that they’ve put their reputation on the line by making that intro, you can treat them like a customer.

Louis: So time, reputation and money, those are

Rob Fitzpatrick: the three big ones there’s some others. Basically anything someone wouldn’t give you unless they’re serious. So if someone tells you about their budgets, that’s also a kind of secret information that they’ll only give you if they’re serious. So there’s a few edge cases like that.

Louis: Yeah, especially in B2B, the budget that the marketing team has. I realized afterwards, as soon as you mentioned that this isn’t something we would disclose until. Yes, we are very interested in talking to people. Understanding how much we have is a good question to ask as well. You are going so fast through every single topic. I wanted to talk to you about that. I’m struggling to find questions. No, I’m not struggling. I have plenty of stuff. But I’m curious. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about how to start a business the right way, how we do it again, how to ask for feedback properly, how to decide whether someone is worth talking to or interested in their stuff. I’m just curious, is there one thing a pet peeve of you or something that you really hate or you really love talking about that we haven’t covered so far? Yeah.

Think of entrepreneurship as a career of stepping stones

Rob Fitzpatrick: I mean, if you’re thinking about entrepreneurship somewhere in your career, right? Like maybe you’re just doing a marketing job now, but you’d like to run your own business someday, or maybe you’re already doing your own startup, you’re working on it on the side, whatever. So what I would encourage you is like a mindset shift. I’ve noticed. I did this myself and everyone does it. Like when you’re in your first company or when you haven’t started a company yet, you think you’re only going to get one chance. It’s this one shot mentality. Oh, it’s my only company, so I have to make it work and it has to be perfect and it has to change the world. We put all these extra demands on ourselves because we think it’s going to be our only one. But if you can change your mindset, and this is hard to do, but it’s very powerful if you can pull it off, if you can change your mindset to think of entrepreneurship as a career where you’re going to be able to start multiple companies, maybe you go back to a job, maybe you try freelancing, maybe you start another business, whatever, everything changes. Because your first business doesn’t need to change the world. Your first business can just sort out your finances, or your first business can build some important skills, or your first business can create your network by giving you a chance to Work with a lot of great people, then you can think of your entrepreneurial career as a series of stepping stones where it’s not necessarily like my one big business, it’s everything. It’s like, oh well, I did this project and I gained. Remember we talked about our resources, our skills, our communities, our insight, all these resources that you bring to the table. With each stepping stone, with each stepping stone business, your pool of resources is getting bigger, which makes the next stepping stone can be even grander, even loftier businesses that would be really hard for you to start right now. After you’ve taken a couple of these stepping stone businesses, suddenly they’re super easy because you’ve already got all the resources, you know the people, you have the skills. So if you can think about it a little bit longer term like that and don’t worry about how do I make a billion dollar unicorn for my first business, rather be like how do I make anything that’s profitable profitable, that’s within my reach. And then once you’ve done that, you go, okay, well what next? And you keep going and you’ll get much further than you imagined you could have.

Louis: Amen to that. I mean, I don’t know if I consider myself to be an entrepreneur. Maybe I am, but definitely I started full time job, my first full time job as a marketer a few years ago. I left to create my first business and agency that failed because I burned out. But I learned so much and as you said, also created a big network. Now I have a full time job that I very much love and decide projects on the side. And I know that the second or third business I would create, if I ever create one, would be much, much better than the first one because all of those elements.

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah. And you can think this way about your skills as well. It’s easy to look at you look at me and you go, oh well he’s got a blog and he can program and he can talk and like okay, but a few years ago I couldn’t. And so whatever your skill set is now, if you think about what are the multiplier skills that I would love to have that it seems unfair that people have and I don’t was like, great, start building that. And then when you are ready to start your business in a few years, you’ll already have that unfair advantage. It’s like you can’t just turn these things on right now. Oh, and similarly, this will be my last piece of unsolicited life advice. But co founders are really, really important and no one Pays enough attention to who they work with. And people spend a lot of time dating because they want to make sure they marry the right person. And so they go on dates and they break up and they go through this whole process because they want their husband or wife to be the correct person. And then when they’re starting a company, they’re just like anyone else. Want to start a company, okay, you seem good and they go for it, but that’s crazy. And the dating equivalent of finding a co founder is working on side projects together. So let’s say that you’re a marketer and you’ve got a buddy who’s a programmer or a buddy who’s a salesperson or a designer, whatever, and you think that someday they might make a good potential co founder. Well, carve out a weekend and be like, okay, I bring marketing to the table. You bring your skill. What can we do in a weekend that would be fun and you might learn by the end of the weekend. That’s like a date. That’s the equivalent of a date, but for co founders instead of relationships, you’re like, wow, you’re terrible. We hate each other. We should never do that again. And that’s a great result. And you want to make those discoveries before you start the company rather than after you start the company. And it also gives you this chance to hone your skills, and it also builds a portfolio, which is useful whether you go the entrepreneurial route or the career route. So there’s so many wonderful side effects to working on side projects with interesting people.

Louis: Yeah. Thanks for sharing this as well. It’s quite interesting. I decided to go on my own for the first business because I couldn’t find the right person. I think it was a good choice in insight because I could have really chosen the wrong people. And I know a lot of people are still doing this mistake. So it’s a great analogy. I ask three questions through every single of my. To every guest on the podcast, Rob. So the first one is, what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, or 50 years?

Rob Fitzpatrick: I’m not sure. There’s a lot of talk about the kind of data and programming stuff, which is certainly useful. I would have to say, though, being able to write coherently in a way which is understandable for people without your skills. If you can write in a way that the average uninformed small business owner can understand quickly. Exactly. Without the jargon, without all your acronyms and stuff, that’s going to 10x your billing power as a marketer. So that would be my number one is plain language communication of difficult topics. And you can practice it. It’s something learnable.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a good one. What are the top three resources you’d recommend our listeners today to check out? Could be a book, podcast, event, anything.

Rob Fitzpatrick: My book is the Mom Test, which is good for having these one on one customer conversations and learning from them. But apart from that, for the biggest one was meeting up with a group of other people who were working on the same types of problems that I was and meeting with them once a week or once every two weeks and just swapping notes about what we were trying, what was working, what wasn’t working. I think you can apply this to any interesting skill as well as to entrepreneurship in general. So if you’re really struggling to figure out whatever, say some new Instagram advertising system or whatever, if you can meet up with people who are also working on either just new ad systems in general or on that one in particular and just swap notes and case studies and what you tried and look at each other’s analytics dashboards. I think that learning from our peers in this kind of structured, intentional way is really, really undervalued. People always get a beer with their peers, but they’re not really swapping what they’ve learned. So I would set that up. I did that for years in London where once a week I would meet up with six people and we would just swap our notes and it was so, so valuable.

Louis: Yeah, so that’s one definitely incredible resource. And the first one was the book. So what would be your last one?

Rob Fitzpatrick: I don’t know. I mean, so much stuff’s just a waste of time. I don’t know, go read a good fiction book or something. I don’t know. We spent, I don’t know, I’m like trying to pull myself away from all the learning. I spent so many years so deep in it and it’s like all of my waking hours were about, I must learn, I must engage with the community and all of that. That. And so recent years it’s been like, I learned how to sail and I bought a sailboat and I spent a lot of time writing and I learned to play ukulele. And I think that that stuff’s a good counterbalance as well. It’s easy to get a bit too obsessed with our skill or our career. And it’s like you forget about the rest of life and doing the other living stuff. It’ll make you better at your job as well. It just makes you a better human and then you get naturally better at your career as a side effect.

Louis: So just do other shit, right?

Rob Fitzpatrick: Yeah, do fun stuff. And some of the fun stuff that takes a bit of effort, not just Netflix.

Louis: Rob, you’ve been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much. I love talking to guests like you who are able to just get the question very fast and are able to deliver so many insights in every minute. So I think listeners have enjoyed this one quite a lot. So where can listeners connect with you and learn more from you?

Rob Fitzpatrick: RobFitz.com is sort of like it has links and email addresses and whatever to everything else. So robfitz.com and the links to my blog and then momtestbook.com if you want to pick up a copy of the book, it’s like 10 bucks for the ebook. So it’s not going to break your bank and it’ll certainly make your customer conversations more valuable and more effective.

Louis: Well, once again, Rob, thanks so much.

Rob Fitzpatrick: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. It. Sam foreign.

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