How to Use Customer Research to Design and Sell Better Products

The biggest mistakes in product design

Louis: Designing, selling products, I mean, this is kind of the probably one of the biggest problem, the biggest things that folks out there have to do, whether you’re in marketing design, you have to sell it. You have to create something that people care about. From your experience advising folks, startups, owners, entrepreneurs, and working at Leaf campaign and other companies before, what would you say is the biggest mistake people make when it comes to designing products?

Shay Howe: When it comes to designing A product, it’s designing the wrong thing. Like, one of the things I’ve had to learn throughout my career is you can design, you can build anything, but that doesn’t necessarily or inherently mean that you should. And a lot of us skip that step where we really begin to identify and validate the problem we’re digging into. And it’s, it’s easy to do because you know the tool sets, you know how to design, you know how to build. But to go out, to talk to people, to be told your idea is incorrect or to refine it and like, let it take shape is the hard part. And that’s the part we so frequently skip. And that’s. I see that all over the board. I see that from people who are just starting to people who have been doing this 20 years. That’s a critical step. Excuse me, a critical step that’s often missed.

Louis: Okay, so I’m sure we’re going to talk about that and how to do it properly before going into kind of a step by step and going through those steps. What would you say is another mistake? You see folks making this concept, and it could be on the design of it and then on the selling of it, but I suspect it’s part of the same process, right?

Why less is more in design - the power of subtraction

Shay Howe: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I wanted to like, distill that, like distinctly down into design. If I like, strip away like the market and things like that from it, it’s generally over designing thing. And not like, I don’t know, like, where this thing came from, but like the good designers or the best designers, like, know they’re done when there’s nothing else they can take away from the design. Not in the fact that, like, there’s nothing else they can add. Right. A lot of folks start by just like trying to add things and cram in all the different artifacts or things they think someone might need. It is the more experienced designer who’s going to think about, like, what can I take away? Right. How do I really simplify and reduce the problem down to its most basic core? And that’s where you, like, you see a lot of good work done in that scenario.

Louis: I love that. And I tell you why I love that, because I think. I think this advice could be applied to the marketing process as well in general and the innovation process in general, like coming up with new ideas or new solutions to existing problems or how to stand out. It all comes down to, I think as humans, we tend to really like to see what we can add to stuff. There is this very good book Called different by Yongme Moon, if I’m not mistaken. And she talks about this innovation by augmentation, which is simply doing things slightly better, adding more features, slightly cheaper, slightly just. You add stuff. The core example would be those razor from Gillette where it’s like two blades, three blades, four blades. And it’s interesting that looking at what you can remove is kind of a way to shed some light into what matters, right? The more you add stuff, the more clutter, the less what matters is visible, right?

Shay Howe: Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a silly example and probably, like, maybe overused, but if you think about, like, cell phones in, like, the Personal Device Assistants, right? Like back in the day, like, the thought was like, it should be a small computer, right? It should be able to do anything a computer can do. I think it was like the original Palm Pilot was like, no, it needs to basically do like. I think it was four things. It was like need to have access to your. To dos, your notes, your calendar, and your email. Or no, maybe it was not even your email. I think it was just like contacts, right? And everything else. They, like, stripped away from it. They even talked about, like, the individual, I forget his name, running the project, like, walking around with a wooden block the size of what the Palm Pilot would be. And he’d be like, literally, there’s four things it’s got to do. And what you’re proposing doesn’t fit those four things. So we have to get rid of Ballooned, right? They started to add more to it, I think, as years and things evolved. And then Apple comes around and comes out with an iPhone that at the time didn’t even have picture messaging. If you think about that, the multimedia messaging side, it didn’t do what. Where plenty of other phones were well past this at that time. Again, just focusing on the basic core. Like, nail the experience from this and you can iterate and evolve as it goes. Obviously, the iPhone’s far more complicated today, but it was at the core. What’s the real problem we’re trying to solve and how do we, like, compact that into what we’re going to deliver to get off the ground?

Louis: It has interesting ramification in human psychology and how we see choice, right? The paradox of choice. The more choices you have in front of you, the more it’s overwhelming. And also the less of the features you use, the more you feel like you are missing out and you should use the other, the more you feel guilty. So you take a decision on, I’m going to use that for this. And then you realize that you can do plenty of other stuff, but you don’t use it. It actually creates anxiety and makes you feel regret about the choice you made. So that’s super interesting. And that’s exactly as you said. I think I could extrapolate that to the craft of marketing as well. I think the experienced marketers know what to remove, what to focus on, and are not adding fluff for the sake of fluff. And that’s definitely something that I’ve seen so many times over and over.

Shay Howe: It takes a willingness to be bold in that scenario, to actually stand for something. And that’s where you see a lot of marketing go sideways. You’ll read the lead or you’ll read the first paragraph and you’ll be like, I don’t know what you stand for. I have fundamentally invested 30 seconds into this, and I am no more WISER for those 30 seconds.

Louis: Makes me laugh that you say 30 seconds as a huge, very valuable. Right. That makes you think, when you think about it as a designer or a marketer, whoever crafts things for people to make changes in their life, 30 seconds is a long fucking time.

Shay Howe: That’s being generous.

Louis: Yeah, it’s a long time when you’re bored or when you don’t like what you’re seeing. It could be a very short time when you enjoy the moment. So you gave a great example here of focusing on the core and knowing what you stand for and being bold in that sense. Could you come up with another example to illustrate this point? I have one. If you’re completely lost, I can talk about it a bit, but I’m pretty sure you have some.

Shay Howe: I’m sure I could come up with a few if I can blend ActiveCampaign into the conversation where I currently work. We have a few pretty core values. We hold true to how we think about our customers and where we build. And one of those is we’re the anti all in one. We think like the products that are like, hey, we’re going to be everything and all things to everyone. They’re fundamentally just not that good. And it’s irresponsible to think that you could build your entire business on one platform. Our belief, our ethos, is the idea that you can stack your tools together and you should be able to have your tools actually work together and provide orchestration between how those integrate to one another. So as we go about building certain features and making different decisions, like, for us, we’re not going to do that because we don’t believe we’d be the best at that in the world. Right. And that we’d rather integrate with the tools or companies that are going to do that well versus try and build those features or functionalities ourselves. That’d be like another example of just like you got to kind of know where your core and your heart is. And for us that’s an automation.

Louis: That means that you’ve decided not to build certain features knowing that other, not competitors, but other complements, like products have it and there’s no point building it because it’s not part of the core. Right?

Shay Howe: Yeah, yeah. I mean you just like, you have to measure that out. Right. And understanding like what is it we want to do? What do we uniquely want to solve? Your customers are going to push you. They’re going to have requests, they’re going to try and drive different demands into it. Some will be valid, some won’t. Right. And I think you kind of. You don’t have the ground by which, like you know directly where you want to go. It’s very hard to filter that feedback or get a sense of how do I respond to that. Right. Like, how do I actually ask the next question to follow up to see if that’s really valuable or not.

Louis: I’m going to share an overused example. I know, but that’s. It’s something that I’ve. The detail of it I had never heard before. It’s about Google when they, when they started as a search engine, right? So they were competing against Yahoo at the time that had notoriously a shit ton of links on their homepage. I mean there was everything from weather to news to whatever. I think it’s still the case. So they focus on only the search. And internally they actually had. Someone in particular was really adamant about the number of words on the page. I’ve heard this and they were counting. And as soon as it went over a certain threshold, I’m going to come up with a shitty fucking number. Like 80 words or plus they were like, nope, like we need to remove stuff. So you’ve heard that as well, right?

Shay Howe: Yeah, I mean, and like the words were dozens, right? Like it was like I want to. It was like in the 50s or something. Like it was incredibly low. And like, I think it is. Yeah. There’s not like a, there’s not even like a sentence of text on their, like the homepage.

Louis: Right.

Shay Howe: It’s a few links to where you need to go, but other than that, like it’s just you’re here to search, like get into it.

Louis: And I know obviously when you move past the homepage and then you look at the fucking clutter of ads and they still have simplicity about it. I think they still are true to their ethos and it’s. I know it’s kind of survivorship bias to look back at a fucking multibillion dollar company and trying to look at lessons, but when I think it’s interesting because I don’t know how many companies that would have been able to stand their ground that much for that many years. Obviously now they have so many other products, but like the search, it’s still very close to what it used to be. And the pressure to have added stuff to it should have been immense over years. And yet they stand this. Stood their ground.

Shay Howe: Yeah, I absolutely agree.

Louis: So that’s second mistake. Really interesting. Let’s talk about the third one, if you can think of one. If not, we can move on to how to actually, you know, go through the steps to, to design and sell stuff.

How constraints force better solutions

Shay Howe: Yeah, well, I mean, like, do you want, like, I could give you some constraints, like, even outside, like the digital world, if you will.

Louis: Yes.

Shay Howe: Like, because, I mean, like, I’m actually. I love a good constraint. Like, to me that really helps, like narrow and shape a problem. Right. And it like lays out like, this is the challenge we have to overcome. So I like, like, I’ve heard the story of like, how the shot clock in basketball came to be. Have you ever heard this story by chance? No. Okay. It’s really interesting. I’m going to mess up some of the details. It’s been a while.

Louis: I always do as well.

Shay Howe: Don’t worry. Great. Essentially, like back in the day, there was no shot clock and basketball games were basically boring. Players would just basically move up and down the court at their own speed, their own pace. I think like there was one season, like the NBA championship, the score was like 24 to 18 or something. Right. To put that into comparison today, I think those scores are like above 100. Right. On both sides, more or less. I mean, I don’t exactly know, but a much slower pace game. And so the people watching, the people attending games was essentially like falling. So basically you’re like, all right, we’re probably just going to like cancel and get rid of the NBA. And there was an owner of one of the teams is like, hey, like, that’s not good. Like, I have a lot of my wealth and personal investment in this game. Like, I don’t want to see it go away. So what he did is he sent us like, okay, I’m going to put clocks on each side of the court and I’m just going to have my team scrimmage each other and essentially I’m going to tell them they have 24 seconds per possession, right? So by the time you get the ball inbounds, you have 24 seconds to take a shot and score or turn the ball over to the other team. And as he had his team scrimmaging one another, the game picked up, right? Players are moving up and down the court out of necessity. They had to. He invited some league officials over, other coaches, other owners, everyone kind of got hooked on this. And they, they’re like, all right, like let’s just try it. Like, let’s implement the shot clock as a rule in the NBA. And since like, I think it’s just fundamentally changed and re evolved and imagined the game, but based off a constraint of, hey, like let’s actually shape and focus this a bit further.

Louis: And so that’s a beautiful example because it shows that adding constraints adds value. Right. It’s counter intuitive when you think about it simply. It’s like actually restricting certain parameters like time or whatever height. It could be anything in sports and in other stuff forces you to change behavior and to change things that the rules become, the game become more enjoyable and in general the things can be changed fundamentally. I mean, I’m thinking about, for example, when you look at the webinar environment at the minute or what’s going on with just webinars on online events and virtually submit and stuff like that. You know, pretty much every single one of them are like long sales pitch where everyone talks for a long time with slides that are just boring as fuck. What if you change the rules? Right? And that’s what we’ve done at Hodja where I work, where we decided what if we could change things from long boring salesy virtual summit webinar to five minutes per person only. So what if you add constraint like that and it changed everything because it forced them then to distill everything to one core insight, force them to stop selling their stuff, force them to focus on the value and it added an incredible amount of value for people by reducing the time. So I love that example because that’s one thing that people forget about. Exactly. In this world where you want to add stuff and add more things and do all things for all people, restricting yourself is super interesting. Do you have another example on that?

Shay Howe: Yeah, I mean I could keep going on those.

Louis: Sure.

Shay Howe: So even if I stay off of like the digital landscape for a minute.

Louis: All right.

Shay Howe: So when I Was a kid. If I can share some stories. So at one point, my father was cutting down a tree, and as he’s cutting down the tree with a chainsaw, I remember essentially a chunk of bark or wood, what have you, flew off the blade of the chainsaw, got stuck in his eye, right? Hit his retina. The story ends well, he’s good. Everything is safe and above board. But what was interesting is as part of the recovery for that, doctors put an eye patch on his good eye, and essentially they didn’t want to let his good eye try and overcompensate for his bad eye. So they forced that eye that had the strain on it actually work a little harder to catch up with what would be his good eye. Funny enough, not there long after I ended up breaking my humerus. So that’d be the bone that basically goes from your shoulder to your elbow. Nasty kind of wicked break. After a good three months in a plaster Paris cast, part of my recovery was actually putting my good arm in a sling. When the cast came off, I wore a sling for a little bit. And the doctor, I remember one appointment, he’s like, all right, so we’re going to move the sling to your other arm. I was like, that doesn’t make sense. Yeah. And he’s like, no, Shay, you have, like, you have to use that arm, you got to get stretched. You have to have muscle back in there, otherwise, like, there’s going to be atrophy that, like, you won’t overcome. So again, like, constrained my good arm, so that forced me to use my bad one. I’ve done that in projects with people building something, right. My role in that scenario is usually on the basically design, front end development, and I’ll work with a backend component or, you know, partner of that. I’ve been in scenarios where we’ll flip those roles, like, hey, like, you do the design and I’ll do the data modeling and structuring of these things just to test ourselves, just to say, hey, like, if we actually stripped away what we knew, thus we can’t overcomplicate what we’re about to do, what is the actual outcome? And then if we run on that for just a moment and we come back together to look at each other’s work, it’s going to be just different. And like, if you and I were to work on something, right, like say we switched roles, you looking at the work I’m doing, that is normally the work you do probably is going to open your eyes to some things. Like you haven’t thought about before or that you might believe are overly simplistic, but might just be smart enough to work. And I think vice versa is going to be true as well. Right. You know, you might come up with designs or some developments that. Not the way I probably would have done it, but doesn’t mean that they’re not value or, you know, won’t actually work. Thus I could learn something from them, if that makes sense.

Louis: It does, yeah. It reminds me of this method as well. I’m not going to remember the name of this, but it’s basically brainstorming. A way to brainstorm by a way to ideate by imagining that you are another company with completely different set of values, completely different environment. So let’s say you. You design as if you’re Disney. You design as if you’re Tesla. You design as if you are, I don’t know, a family restaurant in the 50s. It forces you to look at different alternative. And I think it. It’s a really nice way to overcome biases. Right. Which is, I think what’s your. What you’re implying about overcomplicated and stuff like that? Is this. This bias of. Of thinking that everyone knows as much as we do and other stuff like that, right? Yeah.

Shay Howe: Yeah. I think there’s, like. There’s value in one. Just like breaking your habit in that scenario, right. Like giving yourself perhaps a little bit of a constraint. Plus you have to break your habit. And I think, like, fear plays a big part in that. A lot of times we don’t want to do it. We’re just like that. That seems discomforting or disorienting, but it’s when you stretch that I think, like, you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna learn more. Thus, that’s incredibly valuable to do. I don’t like, recommend shying from that any other.

Louis: I’m asking you a lot of examples, but they are very interesting. So I’m asking more any other example of ways to break through the habits and do things differently that you’ve tried instead of just switching roles. Have you tried any other thing to add constraints?

Shay Howe: Yeah, I mean, on the constraint side, a lot think about, be it style guides or design guidelines, using one of those to work on a project to basically say, all right, here are my components or here are the areas like that I need to. I’ll say abide by. And that might be a strong word, but, you know, if my font sizes, colors, if the grid, the structure of things are already determined for me, like, awesome. How do I play within that like how do I actually remove away the work of thinking through visually what does this look like and allowing me to go deeper into understanding, okay, what’s the real problem I’m trying to solve? Who has that problem? When do they have it? How are they solving that problem today? Is there any value in me even solving this? Is there new technology that allows me to create a better experience for them? Or am I just wasting my time to try and solve this problem to start with? I think you can get to the heart of what that is a bit closer and bit faster.

Louis: Nice. I think we’ve covered a lot of grounds there. The first mistake you mentioned was designing something that wasn’t even helpful in the first place, basically doing something that wasn’t needed. Let’s go through a step by step. I know, as I said at the start, you advise folks who are creating, selling products whether they are very experienced or new. And let’s imagine that you are mentoring me or someone else through this process. Let’s imagine they have something already to show because usually that’s what happens. Right? They have modern idea, they have some MVP in place or whatnot. What do you look at first? What question do you ask? What do you like to get into?

What makes a real problem worth solving

Shay Howe: Yeah, I am really trying to understand what problem they’re trying to solve and seeing how well they can unpack and articulate that. Best case scenario, they’re solving a problem they’ve had or experienced themselves. Right. That’s, you know, a lot of people talk about like that founder, market fit. That’s kind of what like you’d be looking for in some of those scenarios. It’s not always true. Right. Like sometimes people just have innately good ideas. It’s really starting to understand like how have you validated it? Like what, what is the momentum you have behind that? And I’m asking those questions like twofold. One is like, get me up to speed, like let me actually understand the problem you’re trying to solve and you know where you’re going with it. But also I’m trying to understand, have you done that work? Like have you checked that box yourself to begin with? Because if you haven’t, like we might have a problem right there. Right. I’m trying to get a sense of what that problem is and then it’s, you know, digging into, okay, well how are you going about that? What is that actually starting to look like? What is the product? What’s the interactions there? How are you bringing about to life to solve that problem?

Louis: It does, I’m going to ask you a very basic question, but I think it sounds basic, but I think it goes deeper because I know everyone talks about it, whether it’s marketing in entrepreneurship in general, in design, it’s about this problem. Do your users have this problem? And whatnot. But what does it actually mean? How do you define when someone summarizes that problem to you and tell that to you? How do you know whether it’s a good problem definition or whether it’s, like, not really a problem, not really painful at the core? What is a problem?

Shay Howe: Oh, that’s a big. Not a basic question. That’s a really big question. You’re trying to understand, is that really a problem or is that a perceived problem? And then is there a market behind that that has, you know, attention or value to wanting that problem to be addressed? How you peel back the layers of that is tricky. The questions I’m not going to ask, right? And this, this, even if I’m not advising, if I’m building something myself, like, I’m not going to ask people how much they’d pay for something. I’m not going to ask people, you know, would you. Would you buy a product that did this? Or do you think this is a good idea? Like, you’re setting yourself up to, like, have a difference between what customers say and what they actually mean in those scenarios. Right. So it’s actually trying to pick behind what would be any broad ideas, any generalities, any fluff, any hypotheticals, any. Honestly, even compliments they’re getting on their work, that, to me, is all bad data.

Louis: Okay.

Shay Howe: Don’t need that.

Louis: So just to summarize that, a problem is not a set of compliments that you receive or a set of assumptions you have or a set of things that people tell you that they could potentially do in the future. All right, so that’s not that.

Shay Howe: Yeah.

Louis: What else is it?

Shay Howe: Not the. Like, someone giving you an idea. Right? So if I’m presenting something to you, you being like, oh, hey, like, what. What if you tried this? Or what if this did X or Y? Those could be good ideas. But again, like, if you don’t know the heart or core of the problem you’re trying to solve, like, that’s going to lead you astray, that’s going to take you on this long path that eventually you’re going to be deep in the woods and not really know how you got there. Right. And, like, without that footing, what does it mean? I’m out here, I have ideas, but I don’t know what they’re Grounded to. I don’t know how to actually bring those to market or where attraction to those could be a problem in that

Louis: sense would be what is the thing that is preventing a certain portion or a certain set of people to go where they want to go. And it’s not a location most of the time it’s mostly like the job that they want to be done. Like the thing that they have in mind that they want to achieve. What is the main thing that prevents them to do so. And so that could be most of the time people think about it in terms of function, in terms of actual things that prevents them. But a lot of time it’s actually psychological. It’s in fact a job to be done is psychological in nature. It happens in your head.

Shay Howe: Right.

Louis: So it could be anything from, you know, I want more control in my life, I want more self esteem, I want to feel better, I want to have a better body, I want to have more money. That’s so a problem. I mean, I’m just trying to define it.

Shay Howe: Yeah.

Louis: In my own definition would be, yeah, this thing that prevents you from, from going wherever you want to go and you’re actively looking at overactive, passing through it or solving it. If you’re not, if it’s just a, a small nuisance, you don’t have a job to be done. You just have a job. You think about it, but you don’t want to do anything about it.

Shay Howe: Yeah, I think something to note too is I’ll talk to people a lot. I’d be like, there are actually very few new problems in the world. Most problems we’ve already encountered. I think the big difference is technology is now enabling us to solve these problems in different manners and to create better experiences. Uber’s not a revolutionary idea, Right. Actually on the surface a bad idea. You’ve been told your entire life, don’t talk to strangers and don’t get in cars with strangers. Or excuse me, don’t talk to strangers on the Internet and don’t get in cars with strangers. Uber’s entire hypothesis is like, well, you could use the Internet to get a stranger to come pick you up and take you somewhere. Right on the surface is such a bad idea, but it’s solving that existing problem of hailing a cab is a pain in the bones. You never really know what it’s going to cost you if you get stuck in traffic. If we could change that using technology and at a moment where, oh, everyone starts to have cell phones, all those cell phones generally have GPS is a perfect Market cross of saying, hey, there’s a good product fit, There’s a good market fit here. Let’s dig into that for a minute. Right? Let’s run some hypotheses and tests to see will this actually work. Right. It’s not a new problem. It’s an existing problem, but solved in a different way, using technology to create a better customer experience.

Louis: So a good problem is not a new problem, as you said. It’s something that is an existing problem that you can solve differently. A problem is not an idea that someone else told you or some future states answer that, tell you, I’m going to do this or whatnot. And it’s also something that, I mean, to be successful, to be able to solve it, something that people are actively looking to solve. And I know it’s. I mean, I know it might sound obvious, but it’s actually something that you see a lot. It’s like, it’s actually not big enough. Not big enough constraints that makes me think about it day and night. Or like, I actually want to actively do something about it. It’s a small thing. Like, I mean, I’m wearing slippers at the minute. Right. And they’re not the most comfortable. Yeah. I wish I had better sleepers, but I’m not gonna go out of my way to buy new ones, you know? So it is a problem that my sleepers are not super comfortable, but I could care way more. Yeah.

Shay Howe: Yeah. It’s not reaching a threshold of, like, I actually need or want to change this. And sometimes those problems, like, that’s where, like, the questions will matter. How you dig into it matter, because, like, what your answer to that might be, I just need a more comfortable slipper. Right. But maybe it’s just a nice pair of socks. Right. Or maybe it’s not a slipper, it’s a sandal. It’s something else. It’s hard to tell.

Louis: When you work with folks and you want to decide whether it’s a nice problem to solve, what do you advise them to do? Like you said, you want to make sure they do the work. What is the work?

How to talk to customers without leading them

Shay Howe: Yeah, honestly, it’s getting out and talking to some people. Right? Like, doing the. The research behind it. I am like, I don’t know. I get. I get, like, you. You want to talk about the things that, like, frustrate you in marketing. One of the things that frustrates me and, like, some of the triggers I have is when people are like, I am data driven. I did a bunch of research. I have all this data it proves X, Y and Z. I’m like, that doesn’t prove anything. Like, I can go get data to support pretty much any argument, right? The data doesn’t tell you why. Right? Like, very specifically, like, if you’re in, like, the quantitative side of data is not telling you why something is what you think it might be. And you have to go out and talk to some people and really fill in, like, what is the qualitative side of this argument. And if someone hasn’t done that, massive red flag, despite how attuned to the problem they might be or how they think it’s being perceived. You don’t like your slippers. Doesn’t mean that I’m not wearing the same pair and don’t love them. Just don’t know, right? If we keep this analogy going, you got to go out and talk to some folks. Hey, do you not like those slippers too? Right? Like, like, you know, how do you, how do you feel about them? What would make them better? Right, like, like dig into that a bit further.

Louis: So what are the. You already mentioned a few, but if you had to pick one question that is probably the most important to ask potential customers, where would it be?

Shay Howe: I honestly, like, there isn’t a question that’s going to sound weird, but it has to be a conversation like, like the research you do, you can’t. If you go in there with like, I think you can have a checklist of things like you’re trying to learn. Rarely do I go in with like a checklist of questions I’m going to ask. Because what I want to do is like, find a conversation and kind of let them get to the problem I’m trying to solve, but let it be an organic flow, right? I want it to be a very casual conversation that, where we get into the heart of talking about something to where eventually I’m getting the answers I need. But they, I never had to ask specifically the question at hand, right? So if we were to like role play this for a second, say I’m building, I don’t know, like a calendar software competitor calendly or something that, like, I’m not going to be like, hey, what calendar do you use? Are you a Google Calendar Outlook? Like, what’s your calendar look like these days? Right? Like, I’m probably going to be like, start with like a basic, like, how’s work going? Right? And it’s just like, oh, works good, you know, highs and lows. We’re in a pandemic. Like, it’s busy. Like, oh, has Your schedule changed, like working from home versus being in the office. Like, how’s the average day changed? Right. Like, I’m gonna start to unpack the conversation and like, let us get to it, but let it flow a bit further than just being like, okay, how long is your average meeting? Right. Like 30 minutes. Next question. Right. Like, it’s gotta be more of that conversation, if that makes sense.

Louis: It does. And I think that’s the mistake that folks make when. Because they’re not so confident about it and the. They have the fear of talking to people and it is a difficult thing to do at the start. Right. So it takes a bit of experience to know that. Yeah, you need to treat it like a genuine, normal conversation. Very much. Like you wouldn’t meet someone at a bar and just getting straight away into very intense question. You would. Unlike what I do on the podcast. You actually are nice. You should be nice. And you should ask more questions at the start. But yes, you talk about the wider context and then you start to peel off the layers until you get to something interesting. But you don’t want to also ask too many, like, leading questions that make them answer in a way that you want to answer that you want them to answer, which is like, you know, about the calendar alternative, you know, asking them, do you use anything like, you know, calendly or anything like that? And they might say, yeah, so what don’t you like about them? And all the negative, you know, trying to get to the. No, it’s more like from. Yeah, I mean, I’ll probably ask them something like from 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with it? And if they say something below 8 or 9, I would ask why? If it’s above that, I would probably ask, okay, so what is the score? Tell me how you use it. And trying to unpack it until they might mention something that they don’t like. But if they don’t, then you can’t force it. Right. So you need to be careful of that. Right. Any other advice on talking to people?

Getting commitment - the real test of customer pain

Shay Howe: Yeah, in those conversations, I’ll try and get some level of commitment from them. Again, what people say and what people do can be inherently different. So let it be a conversation. Kind of like, let that go for a minute. Towards the end, I’m going to try and wrap it into a commitment from them. Right. To actually. Okay, I think I learned what I need to learn from this. But there is a final test to this, and that’s to see, like, how. How strong are you? Do you feel that pain? Like, what Would you go through in those loops to actually have a solution to it? The commitment doesn’t need to be. All right, would you buy this? You know, the commitment can be like, that’s interesting. Let me. I want to dig into this a little bit more. Like, can we talk next week? Like, can I, you know, could I send you an invite for an hour next week to dig a bit deeper into this? I want to. I want to show you, like, some things I’m working on. Right? Like, commitment could be. Do you know anyone else solving this problem? Like, could you get me contacted to them as well? Right, you can start to, like, spread that out a little bit for new companies like those become your early adopters then too. Right. Like, you start to build that network as it goes. But trying to, like, push for some type of commitment is going to, you know, really try and tell you, like, you might have a great conversation. Like, hey, can you, you know, could you refer me to anyone else that has this problem? They’d be like, no, I don’t know anyone.

Louis: Okay, well, I don’t have any friends.

Shay Howe: Yeah.

Louis: So there are three types, right? It’s time, money, or reputation. If you can’t get either of the three, you’re basically fucked. So time, can they give more time to you in the future? And money, can they. Are they willing to spend money right now, like, actual cash? And reputation, which is also a good one. Like, can you intro me to people if they’re like, not? So that means that they don’t want to put their reputation in jeopardy by recommending something that they think is shit.

Shay Howe: Yeah, yeah. They might just be leading you on our conversation to be nice. They don’t want to be controversial or kind of dig into making you feel bad about it. Yeah, you’re exactly right.

Louis: Especially like, when you talk to Americans. Be very careful with this.

Shay Howe: Oh, shoot.

Louis: French people, they are fine. French people will tell you shit. Russians in particular. Apparently, the more you go to the Eastern Europe side, the more. The more they’re going to tell you exactly what they think. It’s true. I mean, I’m making massive generalities, but it tends to happen.

Shay Howe: Tends to happen.

Louis: Okay, so you talk to. You talk to them. You understand whether there’s a problem worth solving or not. You make sure that they talk to people. What’s next?

Testing hypotheses quickly with minimal viable experiments

Shay Howe: I mean, then. Then it’s like rolling your sleeves up, right? How do you put that in action? Right? You got. You have a pretty good hypothesis. You probably have some good research behind it. Hopefully it’s refined a bit of that idea, right? Like again, if it’s not a new problem and we’re going to solve it in a different way, how do we, how do we test that? How do we like, narrow that down into the smallest or sizableest theory, if you will. So an example of this, I like, I have a little side project around, like leadership coaching and one on ones. My hypothesis was as a manager, it’s hard to switch gears. Say I’m going into a one on one meeting. I just came out of this strategy session, so now I have to switch gears and basically be like, okay, like I’m going to have a conversation around how someone feels and what’s going on. Would that be easier if there were questions to help prompt that conversation and get it started and would managers pay for that? So even before building out like platform where people could log in and submit their answers and dig in, here’s a landing page that said, hey, are you willing to pay $9 a month to get five questions emailed to you every month or, excuse me, every week? Right? And you just ask those questions to your team at your leisure and whatever meetings you have. But the thought being, there’s value in the question. Take two hours to build, right? To test, and then how do we get that into market? So it’s kind of like getting back to the basics of lean, if you will, like, all right, how do we really size that down and test it and how do I do that in a way that I can learn if this is going to work this week or not or if I have a

Louis: different problem this week? So that’s the time frame we’re talking about, right? It’s not about just overly thinking about it and whatnot. Okay, so let’s talk about that a bit then testing that within a week, like gaining results, knowing whether there’s something tangible there, a problem to solve. So what would be your. Seems like your advice is making sure that you describe the problem in a simple way and you put something out there and you show it to people. Right? But the question you’ve asked there, like you said, would you be willing to pay €9 or $9? Is basically the question that you shouldn’t ask, that you said we shouldn’t ask a few minutes ago, right?

Shay Howe: Yes and no. Right. What I’m not going to do is ask you how much you’re going to pay for something. Like, I can generally start to understand what, like where there’s a value in it. Like, I have taken that conversation a step further from not asking you what you would pay like, I’m more so trying to understand is this even a problem you have? Right? And once I validate that, then I can actually test, like a price against it. $9.

Louis: So how do you validate if there is a problem?

Shay Howe: Sorry, say it again.

Louis: How do you validate that? How do you validate that there is a problem when you test it? How do you test that?

Shay Howe: Well, so it’s. It’s going back to those conversations.

Louis: Okay, okay, okay.

Shay Howe: Yeah, yeah. Like, okay, through that, I’m identifying. Okay, I think through this actually will work. I’m putting a price on it, like in that scenario of going live based off a number of, like, other market research, if you will, just like, okay, are there similar tools? Where are they priced at? Going to the core of it, right? Like, if you really know what you’re doing or like, what you stand for in this scenario, you’re probably thinking, like, hey, I’m. I’m building a tool specifically for managers. It’s not an HR platform. It’s not, you know, this conglomerate thing. So, like, what is a price point that an individual would feel comfortable paying for if they could or could not expense it based off, like, the relativity of, like, what they’re getting? Like, the value of it? What, what, like, what could that be estimated at? Like, you’re kind of putting a flag out. The next question you could be going into is, like, okay, say no one bought that. Like, say, like that didn’t work. Then I think you have to peel that back and say, like, okay, well, was the price too high? Maybe, did I have the wrong audience? Maybe, like, you have to start to experiment from there if that first take doesn’t work, right? So my first test there would not be changing the price, actually, because if you get that wrong, you’re leaving a lot of value on the table. My first take there would be like, well, let’s go try a different audience, right? Like, if I built that product and put it on product hunt and didn’t get anywhere, okay, let me go see if I can find a community or a forum to go get more feedback from and share it there and see if I can actually, like, spark up a bit more dialogue around what people are thinking about this. I would try and expand the reach of it before I go in and change the price.

Louis: So remind me what the three steps of the lean Methodology are. It’s ideation, test, fucking improve or something like that.

Shay Howe: Is it? I’m googling it. Identify, plan, execute, review. I don’t know.

Louis: Build, measure, learn.

Shay Howe: There you go. There you go.

Louis: All right, so learn was the first step that can describe you. Learn from you, interview customers and whatnot, build. So you turn this into some sort of product and then measure, did it work? What can we learn? It’s simple, but it’s actually not right. It’s simple to explain, but to nail that and to have the maturity and the experience to know that you need to go through this cycle as fast as possible. And it works for anything, whether it’s marketing, design, entrepreneurship. Like, when you have that in mind, when you have to absolutely force yourself to do something as quick as possible, it’s. It changes a lot, right?

Shortcuts to faster validation and learning

Shay Howe: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to take a long time either. Right? Like, you can. You can speed these things up. One company I was mentoring was doing a fitness app. They’re trying to see if you, like, if you’re a personal trainer, you know, would you want that over your phone? And they were hanging up signs around, trying to get people to kind of like peel off a number, download the app. I was just like, have you just hung outside a gym and just talked to people coming in and out? Speed up the process. Find a way to short circuit this, get a little bit more creative around it. You can do that again, I put that in times of days, not weeks, months, years, to really work through those.

Louis: So what are the shortcuts that you tend to advise? So one of them is getting closer to the ideal audience without getting out of the building the cliche, but it’s true, actually, trying to find folks who fit your audience. What other shortcuts have you seen? Have you advised folks to take to get faster?

Shay Howe: It can all vary, right? Like how you find an audience, how you go out and talk to people. There’s plenty of ways to do that. It kind of depends on the problem you’re solving, but it’s usually trying to identify, where do those people hang out? Where are they naturally going? Who is your. Who do you estimate to be your target demographic? Where can you find them? It’s an easy way to just tackle into that the other side. Again, dig into potential constraints elsewhere. Rather than going out and building your own website to try these things. Maybe all you need is a landing page and maybe unbounce or Instapage or something like that will allow you to get off the ground so you can test it. Maybe you can go to SurveyMonkey and run a survey to an already existing audience rather than trying to build your own to then survey. Like there’s a lot of different ways you could probably short circuit things if you, if you just think about it for, for a moment. We’re, we’re smart people, we’re, we’re, you know, humans, like we, we have a tendency to overcomplicate, like make things overly complex. Strip that away for a minute. Right. Like the best solutions are often pretty obvious and very simple. So I think like for me, like when I, when I have a tendency or I feel myself like moving or pushing things a bit too far, I’ll slow down and be like, hold on, there’s gotta be an easier answer to this. How do I reduce some variables to this conversation? How do I make this more approachable?

Louis: So there’s this principle called, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. You probably have Occam’s razor, probably not pronouncing it properly, ocams, okms or whatever. Occam. And basically it’s the fact that the simplest hypothesis over more complex ones will likely win because complex one have more points of failures and that works for everything. Like it’s the law of nature. And evolution shows you that there’s a lot of very, very simple yet effective stuff going out, going around and it’s a very nice way to think about stuff like yes, the more complex your thing is, the more points of failure there are to be. So start small.

Shay Howe: Yeah, no, I really like that. I had a manager years back used to say process is a suboptimal solution to another problem. We’re always trying to layer in process but it’s like what’s the real problem? Why is that coming and being defined and can we actually solve the root of it versus continuing to add process? Because then we’re going to need processes around our processes.

Louis: I think that comes from humans lack of control and feeling that they need to be in control. I think as soon as you let, let control go to someone else like your audience to take the decision for you, that’s when it becomes nerve wracking because you don’t have control anymore. It’s in people’s hands. So you want to keep it as much as possible close to you to feel like you’re in control. I used to do that at the start of my career. I used to fucking hold ideas and plan them and never do anything because yeah, it felt good to be in control of my own ideas and never putting them out. It sounded, you know, in my eye they were perfect.

Shay Howe: Yep, yep. And then like that scales too across Teams. Right. Like being able to let go of some of your own ideas in favor to test others. I think, like, it’s, shoot. Where did the disagree and commit come from? I feel like Jeff Bezos has talked a lot about it at Amazon, but I don’t think it originated with him. Yeah, the thought that you and I could so adamantly disagree on something, but we don’t let the disagreement draw a line between us and, like, put us into paralysis that eventually one of us is like, no, all right, cool. You know what? I don’t agree with what you’re saying whatsoever, but I’m going to get behind it 110%. I’m going to give it everything I have. Much like it was my own idea. We’re going to find out, and we’re going to do that in a way that allows us to work faster, not sit here and continue to argue and debate this to death.

Louis: So it’s been attributed to Andrew Grove at Intel.

Shay Howe: There you go.

Louis: And then Amazon added it in 2010 as one of their value. Have a backbone, disagree and commit.

Shay Howe: Yeah.

Louis: Nice. Okay, well, on that note, I think I want to thank you, Shea, for your time, for going through all of those questions. I’m just going to ask you one last question before I let you go. What are the top three resources you recommend listeners right now? It could be anything from books to podcasts to software to events, whatever.

Shay Howe: Yeah. I do two things. Like, I’m a very kinesthetic learner. I learn by doing, frankly. I can sit in a classroom and you can lecture me. I really understand when I start to, like, put my hands on it. So that’s what I’m always advocating for others, albeit, I know they might be different learning styles, but to me, there’s no better way to learn than experience. Right. So where you’re getting that on the job.

Louis: Great.

Shay Howe: Where you can’t build a side project, right. Like, you know, do something in those extra hours, if you can, you can afford to do so. On the books front, I love to read as well. Very adamantly reading. So, you know, if you’re. If you’re on the. The research end and you’re digging in as, like a founder or early stage, there’s a book called the Mom Test. Kind of a horrible name, but a great book. It’s about how to talk to customers, how to actually, like, have those types of conversations. And the idea that it’s not just a question that’s going to unlock it, it really is a sequence of things, of getting to know them. And their problem and where the value for you might be. I’d also dig into Traction. Traction is another good book. Traction. Like how any. I think it’s how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth or something. But have you read it by Ch?

Louis: Yeah, yeah. It’s the 19 channels, right?

Shay Howe: Yeah, yep, exactly. I think that’s a good like idea kicker. I loved obviously. Awesome by April Dunford. Like from a copywriting standpoint, I think it’s really smart. More mature brands and you’re growing. Like there’s a book called How Brands Grow. Like what Marketers don’t know. I think it was by Brian Sharp. Yeah, it’s awesome you have a copy. It’s nice. The Sharp book.

Louis: I agree. I love it. Marketing science is a. Which is always nice. Well, Shay, once again, thanks so so much. A lot of great examples, a lot of great insight. I think everyone got a lot of value out of this episode for sure. So thank you so much.

Shay Howe: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to come on to share and have a conversation. So thank you.

Louis: And that’s it for another episode of Everyone Hates Marketers dot com. Thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily news newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Out Daily. I send very short, hopefully interesting, surprising, shocking, entertaining content to help you Stand the Out. It’s ateveryonehates marketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just gonna read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Juma said, your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Mark, who just subscribed couple days before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna said, I just realized this morning that my email habit is now two 1. Skim through the list. 2. Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice. 4. Quickly skim yours. Amy. He said, Also loving the new content is coming from you. It feels really lovely. Kendall said, I like your writing a lot. It really resonates. There’s so much bullshit out there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I fucking love this email button? Brilliant. I hope you subscribe. You’ll be joining more than 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other side.