Umarbek

The goal is to figure out if they're lying to you. People lie. All the time. They lie to be polite. They lie because they're not thinking hard. They lie because they want to seem smarter than they are. They lie because they're embarrassed.

Bad customer conversations aren't just useless. Worse, they convince you that you're on the right path. They give you a false positive which causes you to over-invest your cash, your time, and your team.

Compliments are the fool's gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless.

Even if they really do like it, that data is still worthless.

With the exception of industry experts who have built very similar businesses, opinions are worthless. You want facts and commitments, not compliments.

The world's most deadly fluff is: "I would definitely buy that."

Folks are wildly optimistic about what they would do in the future. They're always more positive, excited, and willing to pay in the imagined future than they are once it arrives.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.

The first startup I worked at fell for the "I would definitely buy that" trap and subsequently lost about 10 million bucks.

Entrepreneurs are always drowning in ideas. We have too many ideas, not too few.

Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed. When you hear a request, it's your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause.

The memory of being burned by feature requests was still fresh in my mind when they asked if we could add their logo and colours to the reports.

Any strong emotion is worth exploring. Is someone angry? Dig. Embarrassed? Dig. Overjoyed? Dig!

I once overheard a founder interviewing someone at a cafe table next to me. The founder mentioned a problem and the guy responded, "Yeah, that's pretty much the worst part of my day." The founder jotted something down in his notebook, and then moved on to the next question. What!? It's the worst part of his day and you're not going to figure out why? That's insane. You've got to dig.

You shouldn't ask anyone whether your business is a good idea. At least not in those words.

Doing it wrong is worse than doing nothing at all. When you know you're clueless, you tend to be careful. But collecting a fistful of false positives is like convincing a drunk he's sober: not an improvement.

Mom was unable to lie to us because we never talked about our idea.

Talk about their life instead of your idea. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future. Talk less and listen more.

If you've mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings.

Anyone will say your idea is great if you're annoying enough about it.

The more you're talking, the worse you're doing.

You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you're asking in every conversation.

There's more reliable information in a "meh" than a "Wow!" You can't build a business on a lukewarm response.

Hearing a compliment is a warning flag that the person you're talking to is trying to get rid of you.

"Customers" who keep being friendly but aren't ever going to buy are a particularly dangerous source of mixed signals.

There's no such thing as a meeting which just "went well". Every meeting either succeeds or fails.

If you don't know what happens next after a product or sales meeting, the meeting was pointless.

The more they're giving up, the more seriously you can take their kind words.

It's not a real lead until you've given them a concrete chance to reject you.

In early stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is just a side-effect.

There is a significant difference between: "Yeah, that's a problem" and "THAT IS THE WORST PART OF MY LIFE AND I WILL PAY YOU RIGHT NOW TO FIX IT."

If it feels like they're doing you a favour by talking to you, it's probably too formal.

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

The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them.

You aren't allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren't allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

If they haven't looked for ways of solving it already, they're not going to look for (or buy) yours.

People know what their problems are, but they don't know how to solve those problems.

Watching someone do a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are.

The key phrase of "if you could get me more gigs" is basically shifting the burden from the customer to your product.

Good customer segments are a who-where pair. If you don't know where to go to find your customers, keep slicing your segment into smaller pieces until you do.

They weren't having 20 conversations with their customers. They were having one conversation each with 20 different types of customers.

Telling the rest of the team "What I learned" is functionally equivalent to telling them "What you'll do."

Willpower is a finite resource. The way to overcome difficult situations isn't to power through, but rather to change your circumstances to require less willpower.

There's a big gap between textbooks and check books.

Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask.

Some problems don't actually matter.

The first conversation gave us rope to hang ourselves. The second gave us actionable insight.

Even a VC's opinion is probably wrong, so what weight could some random guy's possibly have?

Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking a question which has the potential to completely destroy your currently imagined business. You're searching for the truth, not trying to be right.

Even if you learn everything there is to know about that particular problem, you still haven't got a business.

Successful startups tend to depend on multiple failure points.

Product risk: Can I build it? Can I grow it? Will they keep using it?

Market risk: Do they want it? Will they pay? Are there enough of them?

Video games are pure product risk.

When you fail to push for advancement, you end up with zombie leads. It's like your startup has been friend-zoned.

By taking an interest in the problems and minutia of their day, you're already being more interesting than 99% of the people they've ever met.

They say that startups don't starve, they drown.

Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone.

Making a so-so product for a bunch of audiences isn't quite the same as making an incredible product for one.

Don't just talk to the most senior or important people you can find. You want to talk to people who are representative of your customers, not ones who sound impressive on your status report.

The advice that you ought to be talking to your customers is well-intentioned, but ultimately a bit unhelpful. It's like the popular kid advising his nerdy friend to "just be cooler."

It only takes 5 minutes to learn whether a problem exists and is important.

The duration of formal B2B meetings is determined more by the arbitrary calendar block than by what you actually want to learn.

While it's rare for someone to tell you precisely what they'll pay you, they'll often show you what it's worth to them.

You're shooting blind until you understand their goals.

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

Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.

People will lie to you if they think it's what you want to hear.

If this company were to fail, why would it have happened? What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?

Sometimes you can just pick up the phone and hack through the knot.

The Pathos Problem: when you expose your ego, people feel they ought to protect you by saying nice things.

That person is a complainer, not a customer.

If you don't know why you're there, it becomes a sales meeting by default.

You aren't trying to minimise your failure rate; you're trying to get a few conversations going.

In terms of mindset, don't go into these discussions looking for customers. It creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power.

Going to a meeting has a lot of overhead for a 10 minute chat.

The most extreme way to bottleneck is to go to the meetings alone and take crappy notes which you don't review with your team.

Once you start talking about your idea, they stop talking about their problems.

People rarely lie about specific stuff that's already happened, regardless of your ego.

The classic error in response to a lukewarm signal is to "up your game" and pitch them until they say something nice.

Most people have lots of problems which they don't actually care enough about to fix, but which they'll happily tell you the details of if you ask them.

It's tempting to obsess over the most interesting of several failure points and ignore the others.

If you've got heavy product risk, then you're not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations alone.

Just like compliments aren't data when you're trying to learn about a problem, they also aren't progress when you're trying to validate a product.

The worst meetings are the wishy-washy ones that you leave with neither rejection nor advancement. You are in no-man's-land.

Hard pitching gives binary feedback: you either nailed it or you didn't.

I never consider rejection to be a real failure. But not asking certainly is.

Whenever you see the deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close. They are the rare, precious fan who will get you through the hard times and turn into your first sale.

It's pretty weird that anybody buys anything from young startups.

Some founders react with hostility to the whole idea. I think it's actually the desire for speed, where speed is measured by building features instead of by de-risking and validating the business.

Don't spend a week prepping for meetings; spend an hour and then go talk to people. Anything more is stalling.

Don't spend months doing full-time customer conversations before beginning to move on a product. Spend a week, maybe two.

If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first.

Eternity will forgive our earthly blunders.

You're trying to do something difficult. You're never going to be perfect, but it always helps to be better.

Pains and obstacles carry a lot more weight when someone is embarrassed or angry about them.

Once you've taken the leap, you confirm that it's correct (and refine it) through Commitment & Advancement.

You needn't be planning and theorising all day about this stuff. Use it to quickly get to a specific, best-possible customer so you can go grab a few of them and move the business forward.

You can broaden your segment back out later.

Beyond hard hustle, you should also stay open to serendipity.

If it's not a formal meeting, you don't need to make excuses about why you're there or even mention that you're starting a business. Just have a good conversation.

Beyond saving you vast sums of time and frustration, bringing people to you also makes them take you more seriously and want to help you more.

You can sometimes poach killer advisors from your early customer conversations.

Confidence is domain-specific.

You can't outsource or hire someone to do customer learning. Until you've got a working business model and a repeatable sales or marketing process, the founders need to be in the meetings themselves.