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Here’s the program.
Andrew Warner: Hi, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart.
How do you know what product to launch or what feature to create? Well, when I interviewed Dan Martell of Flowtown, he told such a useful story about how he kept failing and failing at product development before he finally figured out the right way to do it. Well, it was so useful that I had to isolate that part of our conversation and make it into its own standalone program, instead of including it with the previous interview. You can consider this Part 2 of that previous interview, but you should also see this as a standalone conversation about how to launch products right.
Dan is an entrepreneur who previously launched and sold his consulting company. You’re about to hear how he came up with his follow-up business, Flowtown, which makes social media powerful. As I said, this is somewhere around halfway through our previous interview. I decided to cut it out and make it into its own standalone program. Let’s jump in and hear it:
Andrew: So then you decide it’s time to do something new. How are you going to find what that ‘new thing would be?
Dan Martell: I had a great mentor, a guy named Ken Nickerson, an awesome, angel investor from Toronto. And I was torn, because I’ve been pretty loyal to my province. I’m proud to be Canadian. If anybody meets me, it’s probably the third word out of my mouth, and that’s how I know a lot of the past guests you’ve had on this show.
I wanted to move, and I said to Ken that I really want to make sure that I do right by this environment that’s been so good to me. And he said, “The best thing you could ever do is to move to San Francisco.” As soon as he gave me that permission, I was done. I packed the bags and showed up here with a suitcase and a mountain bike. I didn’t have a clue. I’d been here one other time for a conference for three days. I didn’t have a friend. I didn’t know anybody. I just knew that I wanted to be around the best of the best and see if any of my ideas would stick.
Andrew: And you were just going to toss out ideas and figure them out? Or did you have a clear vision for what you would do?
Dan: You know, I think I got swayed by what was hot. One of the things I thought was video and mobile. So I thought mobile is going to be big, and video is going to be big. So when people met me, they’d ask me, “What are you going to next?” And I’d say, “Well, I’m looking at video mobile.” And I did that. But then when it came down to it, it was really what my passions were.
Andrew: What was that?
Dan: And my passions were just communicating and collaborating. And how do you do things very simple? I’ve always been really impressed with really simple ideas, companies like 37signals that build these really crisp, focused solutions for a large audience.
Being that I was from a small town, my brother was a home builder. He started his company. He said, “All right. I’ve got to do marketing.” He wanted to do social, and I didn’t know what tool he should use. There is no one tool that you can essentially send somebody to and they’re going to get gratified using social media. So that was what I fell back on, but it took me a year actually to figure that out.
Andrew: I want to talk about what happened in that year. I want to talk about the seven different ideas that you went through. But before we even get into those, Eric Ries (the founder of the lean startup philosophy that many entrepreneurs now use to build their businesses), said that your method, the method you’re about to describe to us or what happened to you, you took the wrong course I think he said. Right?
Dan: Yes. It was Eric and Steve Blank. Steve wrote the book, “The Four Steps to the Epiphany.”
Andrew: I’ve got it right here.
Dan: Yeah. Let’s give a shout-out to Steve. Hardest book to read, ever!
Andrew: Apparently he didn’t write it. Did somebody else just put this stuff together for him?
Dan: No, he wrote it. Well, I don’t know. He said it was his memoirs. Then he realized he was essentially outlining a process, and he extracted it from writing his memoirs. What’s funny is that he’s had Ethan, my co-founder, and I to Berkeley to speak to his MBA class about it. We essentially say, “Here’s seven ways to fail at customer development.”
Andrew: Interesting.
Dan: Conceptually, it sounded right, but in practice it was wrong.
Andrew: So what did you do that caused him to bring you into their class to teach what not to do?
Dan: I always knew, and I think a lot of people in business say that you need to understand your customer. The short version of what I did for a year before Flowtown got traction was that I worked with a lot of startups, understanding how to acquire customers – marketing. That was a part that I just focused on — metrics-based marketing, dashboards, conversions, final optimization. And social being a free channel, we built some really neat tools to do that. Ethan said, “Holy cow, those tools you built are really interesting. It would be great to bring those to a different audience.”
He started Flowtown. I was just an angel investor when I came out here. He knew I had some money. He said, “Give me some money to do this.” And I said no. He said, “Dude, this is going to be big and we should do this.” I’m like, “I don’t know yet.” Like I was still looking at the video and mobile. He cornered me at a bar and he said, “Come one. Let’s do this.” I said, “All right. I’ll give you $3 essentially for every dollar you go raise from friends and family.” He got on a plane and flew to Baltimore and came back four days later with a check for about $15,000.
I was like, “What? Who gave you this?” And he told me that it was some friends from college that had some money in real estate and his dad. His dad’s a great guy. His dad said, “This is cool,” in his Baltimore accent. He goes, “I used to give you an allowance, and now I’m an investor.” I’m just like that’s funny.
So I did that. I gave him some money, and I said, “You don’t understand small businesses, because you’re not one. Go learn about it. Here’s this book called ‘Customer Development’ and let’s do that.” The idea was to launch as a service company by design, work with 15 different customers solving their online marketing needs, identify what things you could build tools that were interesting and differentiated, and prototype them. Then at the end of that 15, or whatever length of time it took you to get the 15 to pay you, we’ll pick the product and launch with it. And that’s what we did. So we built seven prototypes.
Andrew: Seven prototypes based on what your customers wanted. You were going to start off as a service business, kind of like what you did before. And the difference would be this time as soon as you found the right product or maybe you had experimented to find that right product, but as soon as you did, you’d make it into a business. Why is that not the best idea? Why is that not the right way?
Dan: From a customer development point of view, the idea is very simple. Customer development is I have an idea, I write them all out. I then go to the market and say, “Do you have these problems? And here’s how I think you might be solving them. Here’s how you could solve them.” If they say no, then you say, “All right. Next person.” The idea is to find a customer who will believe in what you’ve laid out. What we did is what most people do, which is to ask, “What do you guys have problems with?” “I can solve that,” and just build it. The thing is that we built those seven prototypes to automate what Ethan was selling as a service, and we never showed the tool itself to any customer.
We had this Twitter management tool, and we never showed it to anybody. We had a landing page generation tool and never showed it to anybody. We would do it for them, and they would see the by-product, the output, but we never showed them the tool.
We built this really simple reporting on top of Google Analytics. We built some call tracking tools to track AdWords. It was just everything around social. And then we launched with the landing page. Ethan was like, “I’m going to launch the landing page tool. I think it’s got the most opportunity.” People were sending paid traffic to their website, and it wasn’t built to convert. And on Day One when we launched, we realized that most business owners are not going to sit in front of a screen and customize landing pages. Right? And it was three months later, with 600 registered users, that we had one paying customer, a guy named VK from India.
I remember telling Ethan, “Dude, this is not going to scale. Your conversions are very, very bad!”
Andrew: I’ve got to spend a lot of time on this, because I need to really dig into it. To me, it makes a lot of sense except as what you’re saying instead of building the product and using it yourself and selling the outcome, the service of that product maybe it would make sense to say, “You want this solution? You don’t need to rely on me. I’m going to give you the product, and you give me feedback.” So if you would have just made that little change, everything would have been good and you’d have gotten better feedback on your product and known what to build.
Dan: Yes. And then the other thing is before we even built the product, what I’ve learned today and what we do today is validate the problem. Validate how they’re solving it today, and then offer a solution that could exist. The trick to doing that today is when you ask somebody, say, “I have a friend doing a startup and here’s the problem.”
For instance, social newsletters, the problem is that people know that they should send newsletters. “Do agree with that?” “Yeah, I agree.” They know they should do it. They don’t have time. Yeah, that’s probably one of the problems. Cool. One of the ways they’re solving that is paying somebody. Or like all of these things.
You just get them to agree. They you say, “My friend has an idea.” So it’s always “my friend,” because it’s never you. By doing that, the criticism isn’t against you, so the person’s a lot more honest.
The third part is, “Here’s the solution.” If they get excited and say, “I would definitely use that,” you say great. You don’t sell it. And then you do that a while. You define the product specs before, and then build it. We didn’t do any of that. We never showed it to anybody, so we didn’t realize that our business owners were not going to do these activities that we were doing for them.
Andrew: So that’s the other thing that you would’ve done. You wouldn’t have even built out the product. You would have said, “Who you were going to sell this to? Who do we imagine is going to use this? Let’s go talk to them and say, how are you designing landing pages now, or how are you testing your ideas right now?”
Dan: They would’ve told us right away. They’d have said, “I pay this guy, John, to build my landing pages.” And then I would ask John how he does it, and he would show me he uses WordPress or whatever. I would be like, “Oh, so my customer isn’t really the business owner, it’s John.” We were marketing small business, like all this crazy stuff, and we were going after the wrong customer that we didn’t realize would never, ever do it.
Andrew: You know what? Sometimes this happens to me. We’re now 50 minutes into our conversation, and now I hit on something that I would love to spend an hour on. Do you have maybe another 10 minutes from now?
Dan: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew: This is great. I could do a whole interview around this. Okay. So seven products, what I’m also curious about is how do you develop seven products in such a short period of time?
Dan: Each product had a commitment to only build it for five days. It had to be something that we could build in five days.
Andrew: All right.
Dan: First version, let’s say. The call tracking one was awesome. We used Twilio, open API. It was great. We were early on that stuff. They thought it was great, and I really thought that was a lot cooler than the landing page app.
The Twitter tool, Twitter’s API is so easy and simple. And the reality of it was it didn’t have to be pretty, because nobody else saw it. I have screenshots of this stuff, and it’s ugly. It’s just text with white background. There was no visual interface, but it did some cool stuff. A lot of this stuff we called it “ghetto but useful.” It’s ugly, but people like it. Yeah, I would have definitely put it in front of real users, because you never know how people are going to react until they touch it.
Andrew: Okay. At what point did you decide that you were going to be working with Ethan on a day-to-day basis, that this was going to be your co-founded company?
Dan: I got pretty active throughout the customer development process. We launched the landing page app. I thought it was interesting, but it wasn’t something I was willing to stake my name against for another seven years. But when we did the pivot on the social discovery, I thought, wow, this is big. This is huge, this is differentiated. And then I personally did all the stuff that we did wrong. We did customer development. We did exactly what Steve said. We learned. We said, “Steve, we screwed it up.” He said yeah. And I was like, “What should we have done?” And he told us. So we built mocks. We didn’t build any product. We faked it. We built mocks and sold it to people first and got them to pay us $20.
So Ethan went out and got twenty people to give him $20 for the first version, that didn’t exist. The second step was to spend three weeks developing it, and launch what they call today an MVP. But it was a smoke screen. It was give us some e-mails, we’ll do the social discovery, and then we’ll upsell the cost. But if you clicked it, we grabbed the e-mail and there was no payment. So we could never do it, but we just said we would.
We did all the things right. And what’s awesome is that within our first day of launching the final product of that, we got our first monthly subscriber. So something that took us three months in the prior tool, within one day we got our first and we knew we were onto something.
Andrew: Is Ethan a coder also?
Dan: Ethan’s awesome because his background is finance, but he’s geeky. When I met him, he was hacking away on WordPress. He used to do a video show that got syndicated on Revision3.
Andrew: Yes, that’s how I know him.
Dan: It’s “What Should You Know?” The video part is how we got talking, because I was passionate about video and he knew about it because he’s building these videos. And he a global audience using social and that connection. He taught himself how to write Ruby. I told him from day one like, “I don’t want to be writing all the code, and you’ll have to learn it.” So he taught himself. He was pretty good at HTML and CSS, and he got in there and started mucking around. He still does today. But most of the time it’s really horrible, and we usually have to come back in a month because he’s introduced some defect. But yeah, he taught himself how to program.
Andrew: All right. Now, you’re both coders. How hard is it to say to yourselves, “We’re not going to build a product. We’re just going to create a mock-up? We are good at developing stuff.” Ethan taught himself how to do this, that you asked him to. And now you’re saying, “No, we’re just going to build these mock-ups.” Essentially, something that you could do in Balsamiq.
Dan: I don’t think it was hard to convince ourselves to do that, because you’ve got to remember, the pain was still fresh.
Andrew: You had built something that only one person, VK in India, used. That is painful.
Dan: Yeah. You think your tool’s cool? I’m like, “People will sign up, but they will not pay, they won’t come back.” So I did not want that to happen again. Our challenge actually, which is funny because Ethan still laughs at me, is that I was selling in customer development. Instead of validating, which is what you’re supposed to do, I would say to people like, “So do you have this problem?” And they’d go no. I’d go, “Well, think about it. Have you ever wanted to do this?” They’re like, “Well, I didn’t know.” I’m like, “Yeah, you know somebody who has wanted to do it.” Then they’re like, “All right, I agree.” It doesn’t matter if it’s your friend’s idea, I was selling.
That’s the one thing we learned. In customer development, you really have to just be like, “Look. Here’s the problem. Here’s how we think people are solving it today. Here’s how we think somebody could solve it.” Then just ask questions. It’s all qualitative. Then that will help you be very informed in what you build and when you build it. We do that today for new features.
Andrew: What was the new idea that’s now Flowtown today? What was that original germ of an idea?
Dan: It was that people were searching on Google, Twitter, first name, last name. They knew that these people were using social. They wanted to connect with them and find them. You know, they’d get an email from somebody, and they would want to go find out who that person was. They’d want to see if they have a blog. All these tasks of searching — we call it social discovery — we felt that people wanted to do that at the aggregate and with thousands of emails or thousands of look-ups. That was the idea that we launched with.
Andrew: You’re saying, “Andrew, before he does an interview with Dan Martell, will Google Dan Martell and add the word ‘Twitter’ to it, just to see what did he say and who is this guy.”
Dan: Maybe on Twitter, yeah.
Andrew: Which I did.
Dan: Yeah, that’s right.
Andrew: And you’re also saying to yourself, Andrew’s just not doing this for Dan before an interview, he also has a mailing list of thousands of people in Mixergy who want to find out about his new interviews. He probably wants to do the same thing to all of them, somehow. We’re going to help him do that. And why would Andrew want to do that to his whole mailing list?
Dan: The three areas that we focus on is . . . my brother, I just keep going back to him. He builds houses. Construction is so old-school. But he has about 12,000 followers on Twitter, so he gets it. But he still thinks there’s a problem there, and it’s, “Where are my customers?”
I was like, “Hey Peter, you should do social and all this stuff.” He was like, “My customers aren’t on social.” This is before Facebook said we have 500 million users and world domination. You still had to argue that people use Facebook, because most business owners would say, “Well, I don’t use it. The world doesn’t use it.” So that was the first thing we had to validate. That was the problem we were solving. Are your customers on social? And who are they, and what are they doing?
Andrew: And how do you validate that?
Dan: By building the tools to go and take an email address and turn it into a rich social profile.
Andrew: Did you do that in the aggregate or just one?
Dan: Initially we did it at the aggregate level, and now we’re doing it on the individual level.
Andrew: Once you came up with this idea, the first thing you said was, “If I could just show my brother that if he took all of his email addresses in his database, and out would pop up not just their names, but pictures, male/female, interests . . .
Dan: Occupation.
Andrew: . . . then my brother would be blown away.”
Dan: Yeah. I would validate that the social is a channel, and that’s the thing that’s different. Social is a channel that exists for every business, and they need to own it themselves. And we do that.
Andrew: How would he see value in that? How did you imagine he would see value?
Dan: Here’s the funny part. Once we did that, people thought it was cool, and they actually did pay for it. We had a 20 percent conversion to paid, when we did that test with the smoke screen. We sent it to 100 people, and 20 percent of the people were going to pay to process the rest of their list. But everybody asked, “What do I do now?”
Andrew: What did this smoke screen product look like? What was it?
Dan: It was to upload your emails, copy and paste it from your CSV, and click “process.” We would show you the aggregate view, and then we’d upsell the individual view for 5 cents per email.
Andrew: I see. You’d say, on the aggregate, 60 percent of them are male, 40 percent are female, and so on. If you want to know specifically who’s male or female, pay us $20 and we’ll give it to you.
Dan: Absolutely. Top occupations, top influencers, all of that stuff.
Andrew: I see. And the product already did that, except it wouldn’t give you the individuals at that point.
Dan: We didn’t build any of the payment systems. When we smoke screened it, we didn’t do, there was nothing . . .
Andrew: What about in the aggregate? When you said 60 percent are male and 40 percent are female, was that accurate?
Dan: Yeah, that was real.
Andrew: Okay. And how do you pull all that data?
Dan: There are a bunch of different data sources that you can use. We use seven different data sources, and then we built our own in-house tech to make that even better. The thing is that you can do that at the aggregate very simply, but on the individual level it’s a bit harder.
Andrew: Okay. Why is it more difficult to say 60 percent are male than it is to say Andrew Stevenson is male?
Dan: Who that person is? If you think about it, here’s what happens. You’ll have a public profile on Twitter that has more data than you do on Facebook, and maybe your LinkedIn has other stuff. So at the aggregate level, I can make some assumptions. But if I drill down, you have to be more specific. I think it’s a perception thing. If I’m wrong at the aggregate by a few points, it’s not that bad. But if I’m wrong about you being a female, that says a really bad thing about the product.
Andrew: Okay. I see that. So now this sounds like you had this idea and boom, it happened to hit right away. Were there a couple of other variations of this that you were experimenting with that didn’t hit?
Dan: Not really. I think we got lucky. As soon as we built that, the thong that we didn’t expect was for people to say, “What do I do next?” That’s when we started introducing scoping email campaigns — being able to connect your ConstantContact, your iContact, to be able to pull the data in and push it back, and then within those tools, send targeted, scoped emails to everybody who’s only on Facebook or only on Twitter. We’ve evolved a lot. We have a lot more tools now. But that was like the next part of that solution. It’s like, “Now that I know who these people are, what do I do?” And they want to build their fan base. They want to build their Twitter account, build their Facebook fans, and we help them do that.
Andrew: Okay. Let me understand this. First thing is that you do this aggregate. There’s no individual, but you’re showing people what could be done, and they’re showing you that they’re willing to pay for it. Second thing you do is you say, “Okay. iContact is where they probably have all of their email addressees, because that’s an email management tool. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to suck the email addresses out of iContact for them. We’re going to enrich it by figuring out who’s male and who’s female, and then we’re going to push that data back into iContact so if they only want to email out to the men, they can do it. If they only want to email out to the women, they can do that too, and so on.” That was the next version.
Dan: Yeah. People joke that it’s like, “You made my reg forms a lot easier,” because they just need to ask for an email, and we fill in the rest. I see this a lot in the Valley where you have this cool tech, but there’s no product. And that’s kind of how I felt. This is cool, but what do I do with this? We said, “Well, we know that’s the first answer.” The second one is, once I understand where your customers are, the next question we ask, “Who do I talk to, what do I say, and what do I do?” The “what do I do” is essentially that. I have this information. How do I use that to build my Facebook fan page? How do I use that to build my Twitter account?
Andrew: How do I use that to build my Facebook fan page?
Dan: Today, if you upload it, we’ll actually show you the people who are on Facebook, and then also the ones who are not a fan of yours on Facebook. That segmentation is very targeted. You can say, “Hey, I notice you’re on Facebook and you’re not a fan. We’d be humbled if you followed us, and here’s why.”
Andrew: And I would be emailing them.
Dan: Yeah.
Andrew: Because you say, “Look, Andrew, you have 10,000 people on your mailing list. This is the 3,000 people who are not fans of you on Facebook, but they are on Facebook.” Send them just an email saying, “Hey, why aren’t you a fan? Click here to fan me up.”
Dan: So, we’ve even split-tested that message so that we offer the template.
Andrew: Oh, really? So I don’t even have to come up with the perfect language? You’ve got it for me.
Dan: Yeah. First name, comma, message, thank you, the Flowtown team or the whatever team.
Andrew: You see me getting excited here. How did you know this is what’s going to get people excited? How did you come up with the product?
Dan: You talk to them. Really, we asked them. When they said, “What do I do now,” I’d asked them, “What do you want to do?” I was like, “What is the problem that you want to solve?”
Andrew: How did you ask them? How did you even know who to ask?
Dan: We did surveys. That’s one of the customer development processes. We use Hiten’s Survey.io. I’m a big fan of that. We use SurveyMonkey just because we want to create our own filters. The questions in there are so awesome, like, “What’s the greatest benefit you receive from Flowtown?” And we look at that answer. It’s like, okay. You tell me who my customers are, and all that stuff. It’s like, “How can improve Flowtown to better meet your needs?” They tell you.
Andrew: How did you get them to take the survey?
Dan: We’ve learned how to get more people to do it. Originally, we just asked them. It was probably a 15 percent conversion for people to fill it out. The new way we do it, to get almost 50-some percent, is to offer them some kind of free incentive. So within our product, we charge 5 cents per email. If you fill out the survey, I think it’s 100 free imports.
Andrew: So just by giving me 100 free imports . . . most people have thousands, like I do. You’re giving them just 100 free imports, and they’re willing to take a survey?
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s really just a one-pager.
Andrew: And that took your conversion rate from what to what?
Dan: From 15 to about 45 percent.
Andrew: From 15, one-five, to 45 percent? That’s huge!
Dan: Yeah. And you can play with that. The idea came from one of our investors, Mitch Kapor, from Lotus Notes. He does a lot of human psychology testing. And he said, “When we offered up an iTunes gift card to fill out our, our conversions went through the roof.” And we said, “We have our version of an iTunes gift card, and we’ll do that.”
Andrew: Wow. Okay. What else do I want to know about this business? What other products do you have? I see now how you came up with two products. How else did you productize it?
Dan: We don’t really talk about road map, because we believe in surprising our customers. I used to be really bad at that, because I’d get excited. I’m like, “Hey, check this out!” But we realized that there was a lot of value in surprising customers. Not surprising them without talking to them, but in the general sense of news release surprises it’s always positive. If you just think of those ideas of: Who should I talk to? What should I say? What should I do? And then the third one, which I think is the big one, is, What’s the impact? How does this make me money? What’s the ROI?
I’ve yet to see a product, and we’re in the space, that really delivers on an ROI. There are a lot of tools that will surface things you should talk to. There are a lot of tools that will let you manage messages over different networks. I don’t really want to compete against that. I just want to tie back social engagement with return on investment. And I have some ideas on how to do that, but I’m not positive. And those are the things that I actually customer develop every week.
Andrew: So what you’re saying is, right now you can say, “Andrew, I can get you more friends on Facebook. Andrew, I can help you segment your iContact information.” What you can’t say to me is, “Andrew, I can make you more money. For every 10 cents that you spend with me, I’ll make you at least 11 cents. Do you want to play?”
Dan: Once you do that, once you are part of the revenue stream, it’s like [makes sound]. So right now it’s kind of a leap of faith.
Andrew: How do you do this? How do you develop these potential products or experiment with them in private, so that when you launch you’re surprising people, but at the same time actively with your customers, so that you know when you launch, this is something that’s going to get them excited and it’s going to work.
Dan: That’s a great question. For us, there’s different ways we can do it. I advise a lot of startups, and some of them do separate domains. They actually really make it look like somebody else’s product. For us, I find it’s just really complicated. We do a customer advisory board, so we’ll actually have a group of people. But the trick about a customer advisory board is don’t let the customer self-select into it. Meaning that if they email you like, “Hey, I love what you’re doing! If you have some way for me to be notified when you do new, cool stuff, let me know.” They’re the wrong person, because they’re the early adopters and they’re in your face. So we actually find people that they represent this type of customer really well. “Do you want to be a customer advisor?” And they’re the ones we test this stuff with. They’re the ones we talk to, survey, and we send them screenshots of stuff. We do a lot of customer development kind of quietly using Craigslist. Put an ad on Craigslist and go, “Are you a small business that’s on Twitter? Click here and fill out the form. I’ll give you $20,”‘ or some kind of gift card.
And then do the problem statement with them. The problem we think is that you do Twitter, but you don’t understand the value of it. “Yes, I agree.” “Great. Here’s how we think you extract perceived value today, doing these things — Twitter, Calendar. And then how you could tie that back to ROI? Here’s our ideas.”
And they might come up with their own. That’s the beauty of doing customer development. They’ll come up with these nuggets, like, “Well, you know, I do these three things.” I’m like, oh wow, I never even thought of putting those things together. Okay, cool. You take Google Analytics, plus this other influence score, plus . . . sometimes they will tell you how to solve the problem, because they’re doing it, especially the ones that want to be progressive about it.
Andrew: I didn’t get to ask you about how you got Dan and Brian as investors. I didn’t get to ask you about how Steve Blank even had you in the class. There’s so much else that I wanted to talk to you about, but at least I got to cover two big points here in this interview. One, how you launched that first company and sold it, and what you did afterwards. And the second thing, very important to me, and as you can see, I’m fascinated by this, how you created this product that, no kidding, people are really excited about. And now I see. Seven different attempts, lots of different attempts that are sub-attempts to those, and here you are today with a process that actually works so well that you can keep using it to come up with new products within Flowtown.
Dan: Andrew, the one thing I’ll say is that in today’s world, I think it’s not can you build it, but should you build it. The thing I try to teach people is that learning is your killer app. If you can get really good at talking to your customers and understanding them, especially in a market like social media that changes, if you could be fastest at learning, implementing, and deploying, that’s a really strong competitive advantage.
Andrew: By the way, if you’re seeing me get excited, and the audience is too, this is why I do these interviews — to have good conversations like this. I sometimes deal with bad technology, conversations that don’t exactly go in the direction that they’re supposed to, and I put up with all of that. And all of the e-mails that come back with hate when I ask people how much they sold their company for. I put up with all of that to have conversations like this. This is fascinating. So who else can I interview who does this well? Who understands the question should you build it, not can you build it?
Dan: You know what’s funny? You’ve already talked to Sean Ellis, which I’d say he’s great on the marketing stuff. Eric Reis, Dave McClure — you haven’t had Dave yet, have you?
Andrew: Dave keeps saying, “I’ll do the interview.” But I can’t get the guy to even be on ground long enough to do the interview. Maybe Steve Blank?
Dan: Steve definitely has been pretty good about getting on. The other entrepreneurs? You’ve already talked to them. So, like Hiten. I’m not sure if you’ve had Drew at Dropbox on.
Andrew: No, good point.
Dan: Yes, I would say Drew. You’ve had Farb recently. I think Farb does it really well. Honestly, you have had a lot of the people I would have recommended. The thing I love about Eric is that his methodology — and I don’t think he makes this clear enough — is that you don’t have to do it all. You just have to do pieces of it and continue to want to do the others.
If you start off by just building a customer advisory board, and you don’t have any of the technical stuff he talks about, like the cluster immune system or the continuous deployments, that’s step one, right? There’s this circle called the lean startup of different ideas. Just pick two or three, and every week make a commitment to doing them. That’s what we did. We didn’t have certain testing frameworks in place until eight months into it. But we were still doing the parts that I think are most valuable, which is learning from your customers.
Andrew: How can people go and try out Flowtown? I think until they see the results come out, it all just seems like Andrew’s getting excited because there’s a brand new technology out there, not because this is really useful stuff. So how can they test it?
Dan: It’s a freemium product. You can go to Flowtown.com and click the “sign up for free.” Sign up, it takes like 30 seconds. We integrate with so many email providers or easily upload emails. You can connect your Gmail just to kind of play with it. And you’ll get there.
Andrew: So if I connect my Gmail, you’ll go through my whole contact list and you’ll say, “Andrew, here’s who you’re talking to.”
Dan: Absolutely.
Andrew: And they’ll be blown away if they do that.
Dan: We knew we needed to get you gratification. And some people said, “I’ve got Gmail, click it, show me.” We do that, and yeah, it’s free.
Andrew: And if they say it’s “meh,” they can email me and say, “Meh, Andrew, it doesn’t work, and you let us down by being too excited again about something that you shouldn’t have been.” But if, as I think that they will be, they’re excited about it and they want to say something to you, what’s a good way for them to connect with you?
Dan: The funny part, much like Dave McClure, Twitter, so @danmartell (two l’s in Martell), is the best way. I check it throughout the day, and I respond. E-mail dan@flowtown.com, if you have ideas for the product or you have questions about the specifics that I talked about. I treat it like TiVO. Usually Sundays I crank down and do my follow-ups. So give me some time on that. But email and Twitter are probably the best ways.
Andrew: All right. D-A-N-M-A-R-T-E-L-L, I’m saying it again just to make sure that the transcribers get that. And they always get it right, but I like to make sure. Dan, thanks for doing this interview. I love it!
Dan: Hey, thanks a lot, Andrew.
Andrew: Great to meet you.
Dan: Have a great day.
Andrew: Bye.
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