Andrew:	This course is about how to position your company so customers think of you first and buy from you. The course is lead by Sean Glass. He is the founder of this company, of Employ Insight, which builds on demand tools for managers to help them hire the right people and help those people be engaged and succeed in their work. I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy, where proven founders, like Sean, teach. Sean, you know the mentality of this audience. They are thinking, "What's in it for me and what has this guy done with what he's about to teach me? Has he done anything with it?" And you have. 

Sean:	Sure.

Andrew:	What do you answer people who say that? What have you been able to do with positioning?

Sean:	So the first company I founded, which was when I was a sophomore at Yale, is a company called Hire One. We built Hire One over eight years from the three of us with an idea in a dorm room to a company that's been valued at over $1,000,000,000, serves millions of college students and thousands of colleges and universities with its products. A lot of how we got there was being able to create a new market for a product that hadn't existed before. We were able to do that with how we talked about the product, the way we named the product, and the way we introduced a new space into the minds of those students as well as university administrators.

Andrew:	In fact, there was one analyst who was covering Hire One who did what, that really shows how well you guys positioned?

Sean:	Yeah, the funny thing was, right as we were going public and immediately afterwards when the first research reports started coming out, there was a research report that talked about what they called Hire One as a leader in the refund management space. And I read that and, kind of, took a double take because we'd invented that term. I remember sitting around going, 'What are we going to call this thing that we do? We don't just cut checks for universities. We do a lot more than that.' And ultimately we came up with this idea of creating a term which we called refund management, which was payments plus service plus error handling. And to see an analyst saying that Hire One is the leader in this new service space called refund management, showed that we'd been ultimately successful in taking this idea and turning it into a real market.

Andrew:	Absolutely, but you weren't always that good at positioning, right?

Sean:	Right. I think this was one of the things for me; I founded Hire One with two other co-founders. They focused on operations and finance and my focus was marketing and product. With our first potential customer, we got a commitment for an early trial. In the beginning, we were thinking, "Well, we provide campus card banking and debit card solutions." So we were really focused on wanting to help students have easier ways to bank and to use a card off campus for financial transactions. And so, with that first customer, we really got stuck in that model. That was what we were providing to them. That's what they were expecting from us. That was actually, as we learned as we talked to them and other potential customers, that wasn't really where the value for the school was. 

The funny thing was, one of our earliest beta customers ultimately never converted into a full customer because, for them, they never thought about us as the potential solution to payments problems. And where we found the potential for the company was actually in solving the problem of helping move money from the school to the student or from the student or parent to the school. And as we figured that out and started to understand that, that's when we were able to create the business.

Andrew:	OK. By the way, what you said happened to you is what I want to have happen to our audience. The first story not the second one, where not only do you tell people how to think about your business, but you start getting them to use the language that you've invented and to describe the whole industry and everyone else in the language that you created. As a result they end up buying from you and your business ends up growing. In your case, you guys took Hire One public, right?

Sean:	Yeah. It's been public for just over two years and it continues to grow at a pretty fast rate, which I hope will continue as a shareholder still.

Andrew:	All right, we're going to go into these big ideas right now. But before I do, do you happen to know what the market cap is on the business? What's Hire One worth now?

Sean:	I think right now, it's the high 800s. It fluctuates, but it's been as high as, I think, close to $1.3 billion and went public at, I think, just over $550 million. It has done well since the IPO and hopefully has room to grow.

Andrew:	All right so, strong physician and work for you guys, I wanted to work for my audience. These are the big ideas that we're going to cover:	the first one is you, "Guys find the pain. Know your competition and the pain points of your customers." How did you do it?

Sean:	I think I started to touch on this a little bit. As we got our first beta customer, the key is to head out and talk to as many customers as possible. I think, one of my Yale friends, Eric Reese [SP], has really done a great job of evangelizing the idea of customer development. A lot of customer development is that direct interaction, so there are two ways you can do it. If you're a web based business, obviously, you can be interacting with customers through your application collecting data. In an enterprise environment, often it's actually direct face to face customer interaction. 

So for us, we were thought that our buyers were either the campus card officer or the university CFO. And so we tried to get introductions to people with those titles at different colleges and universities and we would sit down and talk to them. We say, 'What are the issues that you see in your office? Here are some of the things we're looking at. Would you have an interest in providing cheaper, easier to use banking and debit card services to your students? If that integrated with your campus ID, would that be interesting? What other financial interactions?' 

The interesting thing was, we would ask this question, "What other financial interactions do you have with your students and where are their potential problems?" and we started having CFOs telling us, "Look, every year, you guys probably don't know about this, but every year we get, schools get hundred of millions, the industry's billions of dollars in financial aid, goes to the schools. The schools take out what's owed to them and the remainders of those funds get paid out to students because often the money excess of tuition. It's also meant to cover books or lodging or transportation." And I said, "We cut checks and we have 10,000 students show up at our office and we have to hand these checks out. If you guys could solve that problem, we would buy that product." Literally, someone told us what the big pain was. And so we started to think about how to solve that.

Andrew:	Let me make sure that I understand what you're saying before you go on to how to solve and then how to explain this. You're saying that you walked in with assuming that they had one need. What was the need that you assumed that your potential customers had?

Sean:	So, we thought that schools would want to offer more comprehensive financial services to their students, that is checking and debit card services.

Andrew:	Right, OK. So you said, "Hey, we're going to give you this piece of plastic that's going to be like a super debit card because it'll be connected to your school." 

Sean:	Yeah.

Andrew:	And instead, what was the problem that you noticed that they had?

Sean:	And so they told us, "That's great, but really our problem is getting money to students."

Andrew:	Right. And these people were walking in...

Sean:	"We often owe student little bits of money and they way we solve it is with hiring extra staff, having checks stuffed in envelopes. We either mail them out or hand them out. We have all sorts of issues that happen with that. If you could help me solve that problem, I'd be interested in it." That was, kind of, the response we got back.

Andrew:	I see, OK. All right, so you showed us how you figured out the pain that your customers have. What does this have to do with, and we'll get to how our audience can figure out the pay point, but what is finding out your customer's pain point have to do with the big idea that we told people we were going to teach them, which is how to position their product?

Sean:	Sure. So really understanding the pain, right? So we didn't just go, OK. Your pain is just generally you need to get money to students. We tried to understand. So we said, "OK. Well, like, why is this such a headache for you?" And we got, "I have to add staff." We could've left it at that and said, "Oh, you have to add staff. The problem is that you spend more money." But we said, "Well, why do you have to add staff?" And they said, "Well, you know, if we have students come in and collect these checks, then we have these huge lines and that's a big issue." And we said, "Well, why don't you mail them?" And they said, "Well, if we mail them, students change addresses. They change bank accounts. So we have lots of errors in the process. So we'll send a check out to an address that'll come back. We'll have to get a new address. We'll have to send a new check out." 

And then there was, as we dug into it further, we also found that compliance is an important part of this. The schools are required to meet certain compliance regulations around the timing of how fast this money that comes into the school that's owed to the student is paid back to the student. They also have audit requirements. So as we were able to get more and more of these details, we were then able to craft, we were starting from scratch crafting our solution to this, and as we crafted our solution, we were able to craft a solution that wasn't just the payment. So they weren't saying, "We need a way to make these payments." They were saying, "We need a way to manage the process and part of that is making the payment." And so then when we came to looking at positioning, so we looked at what are the ways that schools could do this otherwise? 

And the competition was status quo, which clearly we were being told they were open to changing. Outsource check writing, so banks would take a file of payments and write checks. But that really only solved this minor thing of:	how do you create the check? It didn't solve any of the customer service or audit or compliance issues. Or some schools would use a prepaid debit card. And that's actually still Hire One's number one competition, is companies that sell prepaid debit card solution. That is basically the equivalent of the outsource check writing. 

Andrew:	Because with a prepaid debit card, basically, instead of giving the student a piece of paper...?

Sean:	Instead of mailing a check, you mail a card.

Andrew:	Right, exactly.

Sean:	It's not really any different. So what we realized is that, both in the way we crafted our product and in the way we positioned it, we had to make it clear that what we were offering was different from those other solutions. We weren't an outsource check writing solution. That was when we came up with this term of refund management and because no one had ever heard that term before. So if we called a school and said, "We do refund management." They would go, "Well, I don't know what that is." We were able to then fill in the whole behind that. So refund management is:	its integrated customer service, error handling, compliance, and audit back-up. So now you could talk to a school and say, "We do refund management. Refund management is these things." And then as school start saying, "I want refund management.", the other solutions don't even fit into that bucket. 

Andrew:	I see.

Sean:	So, "I don't want check writing. I want refund management."

Andrew:	I see. So if a competitor walks in and says, "Hey, we can offer you debit cards." You go, "We don't want debit cards. We want refund management. This new thing is what we're looking for." And the reason you knew that refund management was the right phrase to use and to teach your potential customers and to train them to demand, is because you went it, you understood their pain, and you realized that their pain isn't that they just want to handle payments. They're pain is the whole process and that's why we need to understand our customer's pain point; because by understanding what they're pain point is, we can position ourselves as the solution for it and we can do all those other things that we'll teach later on in this session.

Sean:	And a key point there is that you're tying the language that describes your solution to the competitive differentiation. So in naming your product in a certain way, you're able to immediately show how it might be different from something that's not a direct competitor, because it's not the same thing, but it might be a substitute otherwise in the mind of the customer. That's a difficult thing to get right, but if you do get it right, there's a big advantage.

Andrew:	OK. All right, I've got a visual here as part of this section and it's a long one. What is this and what is this...?

Sean:	Actually, so, and honestly this...

Andrew:	I'm going to find a better way to show this in a moment. Uh-huh.

Sean:	This may have changed since we first talked about it, because it's a home page of a start-up I'm invested in called UI, which is a on demand platform for website usability testing. 

Andrew:	Mm-hmm.

Sean:	So Kyle, the CEO, is doing a great job and actually what they've done is they've clearly delineated the feature benefit pairs. Rates are like:	here's what you're getting by using UI. What I've love to see Kyle do is actually have that one sentence overview that captures what UI is and how it's differentiated from the substitute. So today, people who are doing usability testing, they tend to buy very expensive desktop software and they tend to hire a consultant. And UI lets you do the same thing for a much lower cost, on demand, with a sass model. The other thing they do is they actually have a whole population of users who what to do usability testing, so they're able to actually bring the testers into the process. So I haven't spent a ton of time and Kyle's going to be much better than I am at ultimately framing what that is. He's spending time with the customers and learning what people want. But I think there could be an advantage for them as a company to go from, to bring it back to Hire One, if we'd said, "Hire One is a payments company. Our payment's process does error handling. It does the actual payments. It does compliance. It does customer service." That's a little bit like the way you see UI has things set up now. That's kind of what they're talking about.

If they can come up with a way to wrap those things together, to name that total service that they're providing, they're going to better be able to over time provide differentiation versus other options that are out there.

Andrew:	I see. And then instead of, this is a mambo file, but this I what I'm going to, this is I guess our point, let's zoom out. This is all the different features that they're offering at UI. You're saying, "It's great but if they could come up with one phrase that encompasses all of this, that positions them as the one guys who do whatever that is, then they'll own that space. Their competition won't be able to compete with them because they invented this phrase, and they invented it around the things they understood their customers wanted, and maybe their page would be a lot simpler.

Sean:	And ultimately they're also able to create a new market segment. That is the key thing, right? There may be a competitor that comes along, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. There might be a competitor that comes along and says that they do the same thing, but you've created the space in a potential customer's mind that with Higher One, I'm looking for refund management, and refund management means these things. So as more and more people start looking for that, you're going to get the bulk of that business. 

It helps you separate from things that might be out there in the past that, as an entrepreneur, I hear this from entrepreneurs on the investment side all the time. Who competes with you? No one is exactly like us. But then, as an investor, you'll think of seven things that are kind of like them. This is the way as an entrepreneur you can set yourself outside of that. You can say, there are substitutes, and there are other ways you might accomplish some of the things we do, but the comprehensive package of what we do is called this, and there is no one else that does this.

Andrew:	I see, and that's what we are trying to do here with positioning?

Sean:	Yes.

Andrew:	All right, let's go on to the big board here. There's one other thing that I think we should add on here. You think we need to make it grandma simple? [??] right on the fly. What do you mean by that? What does that mean?

Sean:	I think at a certain level, you've got to be able to describe what you do. Sometimes your grandma might need to be a little technical depending on what you're selling, right? So if you're selling a solution to help people optimize their cloud utility spending, let's say. There's a certain point where technical language comes into it. But at the end of the day you want something that, when you do describe it in one to two sentences, if you're talking to your grandmother she will get a good sense of what you're doing. There are times where I will hear an entrepreneur talk about what they are doing and after three minutes, maybe I'm just dumb, but I'll say I don't understand what you're doing. That description sounds like a lot of technical terms, or worse, a lot of buzzwords that when combined together, it's not clear what you do.

Andrew:	I have a hard time with that as an interviewer on Mixergy. Sometimes, people will tell me really long descriptions of what there company does, and as an interviewer I'm supposed to quickly decide whether for some reason I wasn't paying attention to his answer, or if it's really tough to understand it. So let me take a step back and ask him to really simplify it. You know what, I think I'm going to use that phrase, keep it grandma simple for me. Tell me, in language my grandmother would understand, what you do. So give me an example. How did Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook do this?

Sean:	I don't think Mark gets enough credit for being a great communicator. I remember seeing an early interview with him, I think Facebook had a couple hundred thousand users and he was on CNN. They say, Mark tell us about your great social network. And he responds back along the lines of, "Well, Facebook is a social utility. We're creating a platform to help people enrich the way they interact with their social circle." So, by coining that phrase, and I think Facebook, to some degree, still uses that. They will talk about Facebook as a social utility. While at the time the pundits, the news media, people in the tech community were all talking about social networks. It's a subtle differentiation, but if you look at a lot of Facebook's success, it actually is driven by the fact that it is a utility. It's something that people use to interact more with their friends, and their network. They are able to use it to enhance their lives.

Andrew:	I see. All right people all already know what a utility is, so he used language that even my grandmother would understand if she were still alive. And of course by saying social utility as opposed to social network he was separating himself from all those Myspaces and other sites, and that's what you're saying he's doing?

Sean:	Yes, and it's interesting that you still see people launching things, and they'll call it a social network for X. Maybe they should adopt the idea of being a social utility, and think about what they're doing through those social connections, how they add value.

Andrew:	Or come up with another phrase, and own that instead of being a social network. You say that AOL does this well? You tell me, well or poorly? This is another one, I have to skim this better. I'm going to put the camera back on you while I put it into Skitch [SP], this incredible utility.

Sean:	Well, I think AOL is an interesting company to talk about. They've obviously been in the news recently. You've got a company that was, early on in the evolution of the consumer internet, was really successful. And now, it seems they've kind of lost their way over time. I think, one of the big problems, I mean I have no relation to AOL at all, I have some friends that AOL ventures which functions pretty separately, but they I have a hard time understanding what AOL is about and what they want to be good at. Do they want to be the content company on the internet? I think now they're talking about commerce initiatives. 

It's just unclear, so, I think, even for a large company, having clarity of positioning of what your company is and what it's about is really important. So Facebook, great example:	social utility; that drives what they do. Google:	organizing the world's information; that drives what they do. Now it seems that Google does all sorts of different things, but, I think, as you look back at where they focus their efforts and where they're most successful, it comes down to that organizing the world's information and making it useful.

Andrew:	All right. So, keep it simple. In fact, I'm looking even at the upper right, upper left; excuse me, of their site, near the logo. I was zooming in trying to figure out:	do they have anything on there that maybe we can use that explains how they position it?

Sean:	I think even if you go to about AOL, the language they use to describe the company is, kind of, non-specific corporate bureaucratic who-ha.

Andrew:	I see.

Sean:	Which is sad, because AOL is a great brand and they have a lot of resources. And, I think, there's a lot of opportunity for them to take those assets, package them in a compelling way, and drive a business that could be growing. Content is obviously making quite a bit of a comeback. AOL has a lot of proprietary content. They do have advertising technology. They have relationships. And it's just a matter of:	how do you want to put that together in a way that's unique and positions AOL as something... I think they get stuck in being or wanting to... A lot of the tech companies, I think, at a certain point start looking at; they have a little bit of envy of other large tech companies. So Yahoo wants to be Google or Google is worried and wants to be Facebook. I think, that's sometimes where they loose their moxie a little bit. So coming back and refocusing could be valuable. If I was running AOL, that's what I would do, but I'm not.

Andrew:	Let's do one other one and then I'm going to ask you about that sound in the background and where you are, because I'm sure the people in my audience are looking over your shoulder trying to figure out where you are today.

Sean:	Yeah, sorry about that.

Andrew:	We'll get back to that in a minute, let's do one other big idea here and that's:	you say, "Slug it out." Slug it out with whom?

Sean:	I think that a lot of entrepreneurs are scared of competition. And to some degree, I mean, look; if you can be in a market and you can dominate and be the only player, that's wonderful. Generally, if you're going into a market that's big already or it's growing quickly, you're not going to be the only player. And if you're able to be in a market situation which ideal, which is a new market and having multiple players in the market can actually be beneficial. So if you and a competitor are both using language that is creating this new market, it's something that when either of you are calling potential customers, they've never heard of a product like that before, it's working for both of you. So if you are able to execute better, you'll win the majority of that business. 

What will happen is your competitor will call on someone; they'll go... so say when Hire One was starting to grow there was a Hire Two. And when Hire One would call on a school and the school would get interested in refund management, they would probably do a web search for refund management. They would find Hire Two and then as they were doing a request for proposals or they were deciding which direction they wanted to go, Hire Two would also get an opportunity. And the fact that they're two companies, so they might've said, 'This refund management thing sounds interesting, but I don't know. Maybe it's too ahead of the curve. Maybe it's too new for me.' But the fact that there might be another company might actually speed up the decision making process and help saturate the market faster.

Andrew:	So having a competitor might even make it easier for you to get business because then people aren't trying to figure out; should they use you or not, does it make sense to even consider this category or not. You've moved their decision making process from "Should we do this or not?" to "Should we pay these guys or those guys?" and that's what you're looking for.

Sean:	Right, so in that case, you have a 50% chance and maybe in the other case you have 50% chance too, they either do nothing or they buy you. And maybe you think that's better. But, I think what we find out is that in the first scenario when there's a 50% chance, there might be five people that you're getting a 50% chance at. And the other scenario, there might be two companies looking at zero or one. So you might get two sales, or zero. In the other case you get two and a half. 

Andrew:	These guys did something to you back when you were at Hire One. Do you remember what did they do?

Sean:	Yeah. I still dislike Sallie Mae. So there, an evil company. At a certain point we got called by their core data group wanting to talk about a partnership or an acquisition. And so we signed NDAs with them. We had conversations. And they'll claim oh, there was this business unit that we weren't talking to that decided they wanted to launch a product to compete with you. So anyways, that's what they did. The funny thing is, after we went public. They launched again product to try and compete with us. Almost trying to act as though it was a new product and they were going to kill us because they're Sallie Mae and they're big and it was funny, some of the analysts actually believed them. 

The net of that was that they helped us, and they continued to help Hire One in that way. They go and say, we have a refund management product. Their product's not comparable to Hire One. Hire One has a number of patents also protecting its products. And, they end up introducing schools who may not be looking at the time, to start looking. And then Hire One wins the majority of those deals. 

Andrew:	I see.

Sean:	In the beginning, my reaction was those F'ing bastards. They're one, trying to steal my language. And two, they're going to go out and compete with us after having talked with us after having talked to us under NDA about our products and services. But you know, we quickly started to realize that they were doing us a favor. They were getting more customers to start looking at something in our market, before they may have otherwise.

Andrew:	I see. All right. So they walk in the door, and they can open more doors than you could. And they explain what this process is and people go online and do some research. And they have conversations with their colleagues. And with other schools. And they discover, well Sallie Mae is okay. But there's a way better company to deal with when it comes to refund management, and that's when they find out about Hire One. Sallie Mae opened the door, and you guys closed the sale. That's idea when you're positioning and you've created the category and you own it. It's okay when someone else comes in and uses your language and pretends that they're in your world. 

Sean:	Yeah. And it's, I would say it's okay when you're in the sort of new market scenario. I mean, I think if you're product is an add-on to something that's out there already, it can be challenging. Because the company that already owns the distribution, is able to add that feature and immediately distribute it to people. So you want to be careful. I mean you can't assume that because you named a cool new feature in a unique way, that you have this sort of competitive positioning that's helpful. But if it's actually a full product and it's a new market where most people consider buying a whole product. It's not adding a feature to something they previously had. Then you get this benefit of when someone else comes into the market saying that they do the same thing. Then people are making that buying decision. They don't just go, oh well it's easier to just add this onto Sallie Mae because let's just flip this switch. They go, this is a new product that I'm buying, do I want to choose Sally May, do I want to choose Hire One? They both said they have refund management. And then, they evaluate the solutions head to head. In which case usually, the start-up often wind. Because start-ups move faster. They tend to be more innovative. Their technology tends to be built on kind of newer underlying technologies. 

Andrew:	Right.

Sean:	So, it's a good place to be as a start-up. 

Andrew:	All right. Before we move on to this next one, to spying. Where are you? Usually when I talk to people, they are in an office they try to duplicate my background where possible. You're not in an office today, where are you? 

Sean:	One of the things I did as we were lucky enough that Hire one was successful is, I bought a vacation house down in Key West, Florida. So, I try to spend some time down here. So that's where I am today.

Andrew:	I see.

Sean:	Don't worry tomorrow, I'm flying to Maryland, and Saturday I fly to Silicon Valley. I feel like I spend more time on an airplane than down here. But, at least I have a little bit of time to work. When it's 80 degrees down here in January, and 40 or 50 in DC. It's a good place to be. 

Andrew:	Yeah, I was going to say, I'm in DC and I've been cooped up in this office all day, I thought boy it's nice out, it's that nice out there today? And I discovered, no, you're not anywhere near DC. 

Sean:	Well, you've got to come down and visit here. One of the things I try to do is actually get you know, entrepreneurs and friends down here for vacation. It's actually a fun place to get to know people better. So, the people I get to know in the tech industry. You kind of get to know people in a kind of shallow way. Something that's been important to me over time has been to build real relationships with people. And so, "Hey, look, if you're coming to Florida, come down to Key West for a couple of days." Go out on the water, play a round of golf. 

You actually get to know people really well, and that's ultimately where you figure out if you do want to do business together over time. 

Andrew:	First of all, thanks for the invitation. Yes, I'm in. And two, are you getting to meet, to connect with and really get. . . Oh, what am I doing? I'm trying to figure out, are you hobnobbing now with a higher class of entrepreneur, a higher class of person, now that you've done so well?

Sean:	Yeah, I don't know. I kind of don't like that idea. 

Andrew:	I don't either. I'm trying to come up with a way to class up what I was meaning. 

Sean:	I'm not sure if they're a higher or lower class of. . . I mean, when you've been lucky enough to have success, it gives you some weight when you meet other people who are successful.

The way I think of it is that everyone's kind of poised for that success. One of the guys I've known since his sophomore year at Yale is Ben Silverman, who founded Pinterest. Biggest investing mistake of my life was passing when he was raising his seed around and we talked about it. 

I've known that Ben was going to be a great entrepreneur since then. He won the business playing competition with a pretty cool idea back then and it was kind of a matter of time, right? But look how fast it's happened. I mean, Pinterest was going along and they were trying to figure things out. They got it and they went from to kind of interesting to behind Facebook and Twitter, in terms of another social utility or picture sharing. 

Andrew:	Yeah.

Sean:	I actually don't think of it that way. It's cool to hang out with Aaron at Living Social, who is founder and CTO, but it's just as cool to talk to the entrepreneurs just starting out. They're putting together their team. They're scrapping together a little bit of money. I'm kind of egalitarian, maybe, in that way. I just like meeting interesting people who work hard. 

Andrew:	I know what you mean. That is the thing about this space. Anyone out of nowhere could suddenly be the guy. 

Sean:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	I've seen it happen via (?). 

Sean:	In the legal and banking world there's this like, "Oh, that's this big banker, or this big lawyer, or this big venture capitalist." Entrepreneurs are scrappy and hardworking. I remember meeting Jay Walker who founded Priceline. The thing that stuck with me afterwards was that Jay had been really successful with Priceline. I think at the time he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He then went to being not worth hundreds of millions, back to hundreds of millions, but he talked about it. He'd started 11 companies. Priceline was the third successful one out of 11. 

So, that's the way it is with entrepreneurs. It's not like people have the Golden Touch. You work hard. The business I'm running now we're doing some things really well. We had some great early momentum. We also have a lot of things we're trying to figure out. It's a ton of hard work. It can be really stressful, but it's also fun and invigorating. We believe in what we're doing and think there's a big opportunity. 

Andrew:	All right. Anta[SP], there it is by the way, Employee Insight. On to the big board. The next big idea is you want to spy on the response you get. You want to listen to your market feedback to see how you're interpreted. Can you give me an example of that, just to help me understand what you mean by it? 

Sean:	Yeah. I'll give you a great example with what we're doing with Employee Insight. It's different than what you and I talked about previously. We've had this idea which we want to build tools to help managers get the right person into the job and then help that person succeed over time. 

Really, it's about talent acquisition and management, but the tools are focused on things to help the manager. We built a hiring product. Our first product helps a manager make a better decision about who they'd want to hire based on gathering data about the position you're hiring for and gathering data about the people who are applying and showing how those two datasets intersect, where the match is. This is on a dimension that predicts engagement. We've been talking to a lot of different potential customers about this product. We've signed up the New York Stock Exchange as a large initial customer. What happens is that when we go talk to. . . 

We might get an intro to a COO of, let's say, a growing technology company. We go talk to them. We show them the demo. They go, "This is awesome! Here, talk to HR," because HR owns the hiring process. 

Then when we're demoing our product and showing it to HR, it's not actually something that's. . . It's beneficial for HR in that in can give them a great to help their managers succeed in selecting the right candidate and doing better interviewing. Those are the things that our product enables. But, it's not reducing the amount of work that HR has to do, it's not a process efficiency tool, it's not like a benefits administration package, or an application tracking system. That's a piece of software; there's a company Twilio that was just sold for a large amount of money. Twilio is an application tracking system. If you're a recruiter, you need to track the various people in your pipeline; you need an applicant tracking system. 

So, what we've learned over the last couple months of interacting with real potential customers is about our product positioning. We were initially really focused on being, "Hey, we're an HR technology company and we built this cool HR technology," and what we're realizing is, we're not HR technology. We don't build something that helps the recruiter or the global head of HR or someone else there; the benefit does not accrue to them of implementing our product across the organization unless they care about helping their managers. If they're really focused on increasing engagement and helping their managers to be better mangers, or reducing retention, then this can be a tool they can bring into their organization, but the users and the beneficiaries of the service are actually the mangers and the employees. 

And so we've gotten that feedback through those direct interactions and starting to understand that. And so we're starting to change both our positioning in terms of the way we talk about the product as well as actually both the manner in which we're selling and pricing structures and such.

Andrew:	Let me make sure I'm understanding this:	you positioned yourself how before?

Sean:	HR Technology.

Andrew:	HR Technology. Then you went into the marketplace you looked at your customers, you talked to them, and you wanted to see how they were using the phrase "HR technologies" and what it made them do. And what it made them do was pass you on to someone else who was-

Sean:	Essentially, we got HR making a buy/no buy decision because we're calling ourselves HR technology.

Andrew:	Right. You were watching how they were interacting with it, it wasn't the right move, and instead you switch to...

Sean:	We've had some success with that, we have customers, but what we realized is that we would get a stronger response from the actual managers who would use the product. So we're switching to, I think we're almost making it along the lines of social utility. We're almost building a management utility. It's a way to collect data about potential employees or current employees or the work you're going to have them do and use that to make better hiring decisions...

Andrew:	I see.

Sean:	...better manage the people who currently work for you, do better task assignment, better performance reviews, etc. But it's really a tool for that person doing the hiring decision to the day to day management of a team.

Andrew:	Gotcha, OK. So that's the big take-away that you want us to have:	that we're not going to nail that phrase as soon as we come up with it. It's not going to be the perfect phrase.

Sean:	I'm still searching for the right one, with [??], so any ideas, people can send them my way.

Andrew:	But once we come up with one that we think works, that seems to hit all the right notes, take it out, talk to people using that phrase, see how people talk to you about that phrase, see how they interact with it among themselves and then you'll know whether to adjust it or keep it.

Sean:	Yup. 

Andrew:	How long did it take you at Hire One to come up with that phrase that you told us about earlier "Refund Management," which seems like, two words, how tough could that be? How long did it take you to come up with that?

Sean:	The brainstorming session to come up with it was probably half a day, but the process to get there was probably two and a half years, I would say.

Andrew:	Because, you come up with an idea before, you test it, it doesn't really work, you test another one, it sends you in a different direction... I see.

Sean:	And also having those discussions with customers, potential customers, trying to understand, so until we had conceived what the product would be, and then you go talk to potential customers, you get someone who buys it, and then as they're using it...Often you'll sell something to someone and they'll get something out of it that isn't what you thought they would get out of it. And actually the interesting thing with employee insight now is that this kind of switching of thinking from providing a tool to HR to providing a tool to managers that HR may support actually has come from the HR leadership at the NY Stock Exchange. 

As we've interacted with them and rolled out the product there, a lot of the feedback we get from them is how useful the product is for their managers. Not how useful it is for the recruiter or for the director of HR or global head of HR. They find it useful in that they believe that their job is to work with the line managers in that organization to help them succeed and help the employees succeed. And so, we thought, "OK we're going to help you with a tool that on the hiring side helps you hire for fit. You're going to hire more engaged employees, that's what our product can do for you." 

Andrew:	Yup.

Sean:	And they said "We believe that. We're excited about that, but what we're really excited about is to be able to bring something to our manager to help them have more confidence in their hiring decisions, to improve their interviewing skills, etc." 

Andrew:	All right. So let's see where we are right now before we move on to the next one. Before we go to the next idea, I want to go through the ones that we already covered. First thing that we're looking for is that pain point. What is it that's frustrating them? We're going to use that to position ourselves as a solution. 

Then, once we find the pain, we want to keep our solution for it simple, so that anyone could understand what it is. Refund management makes sense. It's two words and it's easy to understand. Then, if someone comes into our space, once we've come up with that phrase, it's OK to slug it out because we own it. We are the guys who are good at it. 

Sometimes having them out in the marketplace just means that they're going to open up doors for you or it means that you're going to have someone to compare yourself against and come across looking better. Then we spy on response. We keep wanting to listen to see how people are using this phrase. Are they using it properly? 

I've seen people A/B test it to see if it's getting them the conversions they're looking for. I see you, I'm spying on you by the way. I saw you nodding at that. That is a powerful way to do it. 

Sean:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	Now, we've found that phase, time to program what people say. What you've said about that is, at this point with this tactic, we're providing case studies, and making sure that our evangelists use the vocabulary that we created, this common vocabulary. 

Sean:	Yeah. That's really important. 

Andrew:	Can you give me an example? 

Sean:	That's really, really important. What we were able to do at Hire One, you've got to have customers who love what you're doing. Right? Then, the important thing is that they're going to have opportunities to talk about your product and service to the marketplace. It might be a user. It might be an association meeting that they get invited to speak at. It might just be with their other colleagues. It might be they produce a case study that you put online. 

The key thing there is in your marketing organization, to know that you have specific ways you want your customers talking about your product. Your customers will love you, and they're going to be willing to talk about your product using that language, as long as you're consistent about trying to coach them into it. 

So, hey we'd love for you to talk about the success you've had. For instance, with Hire One, there's an annual meeting called the National Association of College and University Business Officers. They have requests for proposals for speakers. Our early customers were leaders within that University Business Officer community, and they liked getting up and talking about innovative things they've done on their campus. So they would say to us, hey I'm going to apply to talk about Hire One at the next annual meeting. 

We'd go, that's awesome, we really appreciate that. As you're putting it together can we take a look at it, because we have certain ways we like to talk about what we want to do and we'd love if you could talk about it in the same way so that people aren't confused when they hear what you're talking about and then... 

Andrew:	I see. 

Sean:	...we talk to them. Something like that, and people are very amenable to it. You're not writing the presentation for the client. I mean certain clients might say, hey I'd love some help with graphic design or certain phrasing, but you're saying, look it's really important if you talk about it. 

So if a school is going to talk and the business officer is going to give a discussion titled, How We Fixed Our Payments Problem, we might say, hey a great title might be, How Refund Management Has Solved My Payments Problem. 

Andrew:	I see. 

Sean:	That's a useful suggestion, and you'd rarely get someone who goes, no I really don't want to call it that. 

Andrew:	[laughing] What most people would do, what I would do, is I would say thank you for going and speaking. Let me know if you need anything. Do you need any images? Do my logo image in whatever format you'd like. Now what you're saying if you have a vocabulary...

Sean:	The interesting thing is most of the time in these sorts of conferences, you don't actually get the opportunity to have your logo. So often it's, you can talk about something you did but we won't let you talk about the specific vendor. This is, again, the advantage of having a phrase that's tied to your company, because the customer evangelist can go up there and say, how we solved our payments problem with refund management. They say, we looked, we chose a vendor, we can't tell you who. If you want, talk to me afterwards and I'll tell you who. Here's what we did. Here's what refund management was for us. Here's the results we had, etc. 

Never say Hire One's name, but anyone who goes, oh this is interesting. I want to add refund management, Google's refund management and they find Hire One.

Andrew:	You know what? Let me do that right now. 

Sean:	I hope you still find Hire One. 

Andrew:	We'll find out. 

Sean:	I haven't worked there for a while. 

Andrew:	So I come from a conference, I've heard about this refund management. Yeah, there it is. Higher One is the first result, hence, so that's what I end up looking at. That's pretty cool, huh? 

Sean:	Yeah. 

Andrew:	Can people see that? Do I need to zoom in on that? Let me zoom in just in case. There it is, refund management. Hire One is number one right there. I also have a note here to talk about Sales Force under this topic? And specifically, what am I looking for here?

Sean:	Sales Force has, under customers, see how they have a whole section? This is really interesting. On their homepage, one of their headers is customers. You click on it, and it basically takes you to something that is all customer success stories.

Andrew:	I see.

Sean:	It's just really well done.

Andrew:	Okay, and you're saying we need to do the same thing. Let our customers evangelize on our behalf, and have them use the phrase and positioning that we've created for ourselves. 

Sean:	Yes.

Andrew:	All right.

Sean:	Yes, Sales Force does a really good job of this out of large successful enterprise companies. When I first found this, I thought this is a great model. If I were still at Hire One I would copy this to a large degree. I think they do a great job. 

Andrew:	All right. The final big idea, the final tactic, is measure. Measure our success by seeing if the industry is using our language to sell the product. That is how we're measuring success. Are people using the language we've created for them?

Sean:	Yes. A really interesting case study there, in an area people like to joke about, is daily deals. The idea of a daily deal has grown to where there are literally websites that are daily deal media. They are news about the daily deal industry.

Andrew:	Yes, I hear you. This is daily deal media, again this is way too big. Here, let me shrink this up. What we did is, you gave us a list of sites that you wanted to talk about, we grabbed screen shots of them, and I should have asked for screen shots like this instead of the full page. See now I can zoom in. This is daily deal media, and they are using the phrase daily deal which means what?

Sean:	I think consumers think of daily deal as I get something in my email every day with special deals that are low cost. Groupon and Living Social being the primary examples. That's something where this kind of naming of what it is has helped any of the companies in this space. But again, it's an example of who does it help the most? Well it helped the ones who were there first, that kind of created it. Groupon and Living Social.

Andrew:	As opposed to group buying, which is a little confusing, or coupons. Daily deal is the way they have trained people to think about the space. You guys had that happen to you at Higher One right?

Sean:	Yes. I think over time, bringing it back, the ultimate acknowledgement of that success is Wall Street analysts starting to talk about the marketplace and the terms that you created.

Andrew:	So you start seeing reports that aren't necessarily about you, but do include your language because you've trained them to think the way you wanted them to think.

Sean:	Right.

Andrew:	All right. So there they are, the big ideas. I'm going to bring it right back to this. We want to find that pain. We want to keep it so simple that even our grandmother can understand. It's okay to have a competitor in there, you want to slug it out with them. You want to spy on the response to see how people are using and thinking about this phrase that you've created for them, and this positioning that you've created for them. You want to program what people say about you. If people are going to go speak at a conference, don't just let them use whatever phrase comes to mind. If you can, ask them to use the phrase, and the positioning that you've created. Finally, the way to measure success here is to see if, and how other people are using the positioning that you've created for yourself. All right, anything else that I missed in here?

Sean:	No, that's it. This is something that is hard to do, but when you do it right it creates a big advantage for the company. It's something I spend time on with most of my Angel investments on actually trying to think these things through. I tend to bring it up a lot. Maybe some of the CEOs and investors are like, Sean give it a break, we'll figure that out eventually. But for the ones who get it right, it does provide an advantage.

Andrew:	Yes, what's the advantage? Let's be extremely clear about what people get if they go through everything that we've just taught them, because you've just gave them a lot to do. Especially when you're saying that the hit idea that you came up with at Hire One took you half a day, a lot more time than people are willing to commit too. And even fewer people willing to commit to the two and a half years that it takes to go through all the iterations to get to that half day insight that changes everything for them. But if they do all that work, what's in it for them? What are the advantages?

Sean:	One, you're the leader in a marketplace you've created. So, if you have a new and growing market, you're seen as the leader because the language leads back to you. That gives you a competitive advantage in that, even your competitors start adopting your language. Anyone who's looking to buy that solution is going to find you. You're also able to reinforce your positioning with your customers over time by getting them to use your language.

So, it's about the mindset that it's a new market and that this is a product that someone needs versus a feature or an addition to something that was already there, better than sort of solution so it helps you be a new market product rather than a better than. It gives you a competitive advantage versus anyone who's following on your heels because you've actually, I mean, you set the rules of the game, in a sense and so that gives you an advantage.

And then it's self, there's a bit of a kind of pseudo-network effect in that over time, the more people who use that language, the stronger that competitive position it puts you in and you're able to disperse that and competitors are coming in second, kind of have to use your language, to some degree. 

They can try to create something else but you've already created the [??] for people to look for a certain name solution.

Andrew:	Makes me feel like with Mixergy. I shouldn't keep saying I'm an interviewer because when you say you're an interviewer, people keep thinking "Oh, yeah. Like Larry King" or "Oh, yeah" like whoever is it they think of and then suddenly I'm the poor version of the guy who they think so highly of that that's who popped into their minds, as opposed to coming up with my own language and then if anyone else comes online and does what I'm doing it's, they're the cheap imitation of Andrew.

Sean:	Yeah, I mean, I think you're kind of the, I don't know, I don't know. I won't have a great answer. I need half a day.

I mean, you could be that anywhere interviewer, right? I mean, the big difference is you've got me, I'm here in Key West and we're having this conversation. You could be having a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg tomorrow and, you know, who's in Palo Alto, with a Chinese entrepreneur in Hong Kong and you bring those together effortlessly and make them available to a broader audience.

So if you can capture something that describes that, then that's what you are.

Andrew:	That's what I need to work on. It does take some time.

All right. I'll come up with a few ideas and we'll see how they work. I'll test them out in the interviews and people won't even know that I'm using them but we'll see what their response is to it.

Sean:	Really good idea.

Andrew:	Sean Glass, thank you for doing this course with me. The site, if anyone wants to go and check it out and keep an eye on how the positioning of his company is coming along... 

Sean:	It's going to change soon.

Andrew:	It's going to change soon. EZmployeeinsight.com looks like this today and when you get to it, it might look different. It might have a different explanation of what it does.

Thank you for doing this program and thank you all for being a part of it and for watching it and I'm looking forward to your emails about how you're using what you learned here today. Bye.