Andrew: This course is about how to get customers to tell you exactly what
the perfect thing is to build for them, and the course is going to be led
by Jason Evanish, who is the product manager at KISSmetrics, which gives
businesses actionable metrics on their websites. Jason is the guy who calls
up customers and potential customers to help KISSmetrics know exactly what
to build for their customers and what their customers want them to build.

I am Andrew Warner, well, now here it is. I am Andrew Warner, founder of
Mixergy, and I'll help facilitate this session. And actually, let me show
you guys that we're going to be talking about up on the big board. Here's
what's coming up. We're going to talk about who you should go after. Who,
specifically, do you ask when you're going to... when you're looking for
ideas for what to build?

We're also going to talk about what you should be asking them. If you say
just, "What should I build?" You're going to get the wrong answer. There is
a lot more nuance in that, and we're going to go over what you should be
asking. We're going to talk about how to figure out what their top problems
are. The things that you really need to address, and we're going to show
you how to look for patterns, and why you should be looking for patterns.
Then, finally, after you understand everything, we're going to show you and
talk to you about what you should release. What do you do with all this
pain that you're uncovering? All right. Jason, thanks for being here, and
thanks for going over all of this.

Jason: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to share this stuff.

Andrew: So I want to show the audience what is possible, both the good
thing and the bad, and let's start off with the problem that you faced at a
previous company that you worked for, at... let me see if I could bring up
that page. Not that one.

Jason: I was going to say, unless you've got an archived screen shot, I'm
not sure we're actually still on the internet.

Andrew: Well, what do you mean?

Jason: So OneForty to acquire.

Andrew: Oh, yeah. This one.

Jason: There you go. That's it.

Andrew: There it is.

Jason: I remember that site.

Andrew: So what was OneForty?

Jason: So, OneForty was the App store for Twitter. I remember when I
joined. This is back in the beginning in 2010. Laura Fitton started it a
few months before that, and everyone was in a frenzy around Twitter, and
like how awesome it was going to be, and it's the new wave of stuff, the
new wave of technology, and everyone was building Apps on the API, because
it was so easy, and everyone was excited and thought that it was a no-
brainer that there was an App Store. They couldn't believe Twitter.com
hadn't it themselves, so this seemed like a great idea.

Andrew: And so, they said, "We're going to create and App Store, and, of
course, it's going to be brilliant. There is an App Store for the iPhone,
there is an App Store for Android, and for a while there it did do well,
because people wanted to experiment with it. It ultimately had to get shut
down, and the business focused on something different before getting
acquired.

Why if there was all this frenzy, didn't they discover something great?
Shouldn't they have gone with their heart, and said, "Hey, we're passionate
about Twitter." Shouldn't they have looked around and said, "Hey, every one
else is passion about Twitter. We'll just build this thing." Why is that
not the perfect way to build a business?

Jason: Well, the problem was that while people really liked us, and they
did come and visit the site, and check out all our Apps, and like,
sometimes people would write reviews, and everyone else would read the
reviews. The problem was, you know, how often do you have a problem where
you need a Twitter App? It's not an every day thing. It's, in fact,
something maybe you need once a month.

When you come in and you, and you look at like a couple of Apps, and look
at a couple of reviews, and then go away, and try the App, and you're
happy, there isn't really a whole lot of pain you're solving for them.
Because in the end there's probably like, 10 Mashable and other like Social
Media Examiner Blog Posts comparing those same Apps as well. So we were the
best of a bunch of alternatives that solved a very narrow use case, that
didn't really create a pain that would lead to anyone wanting to pay
anything. You couldn't build a business. You could build something cool
that was nice to have, but not something that you could build a business
around.

Andrew: I see, and that's what you were telling me before we started, that
there wasn't a pain. No one was walking around going, "I absolutely need
this App store, or else, I'm in trouble." Right? There wasn't that kind of
a deep pain, versus "You now work for this company, and you wouldn't allow
me to reveal that the number of customers", but we can see here on the
screen the kinds of customers that you guys have at KISSmetrics. Many
people in the audience, here, are using KISSmetrics for analytics. What did
KISSmetrics do to get all this? What were they doing that's different from
the way that your previous company did things, and most companies do things
when they're trying to figure out what to build?

Jason: Well, for one thing, there was a famous bank robber that said the
reason he robbed banks was because that's where the money was and you know,
in a lot of ways every company has an analytics budget. Since the first
.com bubble people wanted to measure the results of how they're really
doing. From the early days Heaton was doing customer develop to understand
where Google Analytics was coming up short, and as you can see by this
customer list, some people seemed to agree with that assessment, and one of
the things that's underrated about the Twitter ecosystem is if you think
back to 2009, 2010 time range there was very little monetization. No one
knew how Twitter was going to make money, and most of the apps were free.
So you couldn't do the Apple App Store model, taking 30%, because 30% of 0
is $0.

Andrew: All right. So you're going to show us some of the process that they
at KISSmetrics taken that you specifically KISSmetrics go through to figure
out what all these great companies are suffering from and what they're
eager for you guys to build, and you got that (?) from customers using a
process you're going to teach us and then you guys went to work to build
solutions for them and of course when people are desperate they're much
more each to buy, much more eager to help out and you're going to walk us
through the process that you took. Alright, let's go back to the big board
here and talk about the very first thing that we need to do. You say we
need to figure out who we need to talk to, who that potential customer is.
So how do we know who specifically we need to talk to?

Jason: So what's great is once you have a developed company like
KISSmetrics you have a lot of sources, but even before then there's a lot
of cool things you can do. I mean, basically the bottom line is you want to
find people who are in your target market. So in our case at KISSmetrics
it's people who work in analytics at companies big and small. So that small
company it's probably one of the founders who's really driving analytics at
the company and as the company gets larger you're talking about the
marketing department and sometimes product guys are the ones you want to
talk to. So, in our case it started out with one future that I think we're
going to use as an example today is the (?) and so what we found from that
was that the sales team was telling us there was a hole in our product that
customers were just begging for certain capabilities that we just didn't
have. So we were able to get the sales guys to say "Hey, who's telling you
that they want these other things we don't have?" So they were able to hand
us those guys and say "Hey, talk to them and figure out what they really
want so we can make them happy".

Andrew: I see. So you were talking to people within your client's companies
and the salespeople happened to be telling you "Hey, we've got this big
problem that other people in our company need to address" and that's when
you said "Alright, it's time for me to go sit and understand their problem
so that we can build a solution".

Jason: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, they were coming up with all these different
features that they wanted but in the end we just wanted to get to the root
of the problem that they had so that we could come up with something that
would be good for them.

Andrew: All right, Jason. If somebody in the audience is saying "Let's look
at the different kinds of companies that could be listening to us and the
different stages that everyone who's listening to us could go through".
Let's suppose they're brand new, haven't launched anything, they have this
vision for a product and this vision for a customer. Actually, do they need
a vision for a customer to know who to call or can they start without a
theory about who their potential customer is?

Jason: Well, I don't know. You need to know who you want to talk to, so if
you have this great idea, maybe something you're building for yourself, at
that point you need to say "Alright, what is it about me that makes me a
customer?" and try and find more people like that to talk to.

Andrew: OK. So this idea of who the customer should be is where we start
and then we go and find people like that.

Jason: Yep.

Andrew: All right, then as we develop and maybe we get a few customers, who
do we talk to at that point? Do we talk to our current customers before
building the next thing or do we talk to others within their company or do
we talk to our competitors customers, at that second stage once we started
building a business and have customers, who do we turn to?

Jason: I think all of the above honestly. The more you can diversify, the
better your view on the market and you potential. So, we've done everything
from talking to existing customers to potential customers to people we lost
deals on who went with a competitor because all of those things help you
understand "Hey, you decided not to go with us. What were we missing? What
was wrong?" You know, you can learn a lot from that.

Andrew: Going back to the big board, in this section we said we were going
to talk about who to talk to.

Jason: Yep.

Andrew: And I don't want to leave the audience with the impression that
they need to talk to everyone because that's overwhelming.

Jason: Right.

Andrew: I want to give them some guidance about who they should talk to and
who they shouldn't, so if we're talking to our competitors and talking to
our customers and talking to other people within our customer's business,
who are we not talking to. Who should we say, "Hey look, we're going to
focus, and we can't talk to everyone, so we're going to exclude these other
people.

Jason: So, I guess the way I look at it is your goal is you want to talk to
about eight to ten people who are really interested in your idea. So,
however many people in total that takes, you want to keep going until you
get to about that number because that's usually around the time you can
actually start to draw patterns and learn from what they're saying, to
actually take action.

Andrew: OK.

Jason: So, often you're going to need to try a bunch of different places,
like if you're brand new, I recommend search Twitter for people complaining
about your market, or look for a meet-up group that's a group of those
people. Like, if you're building something for moms, look for mommy
bloggers and look for meet-up groups for young moms and stuff like that. Go
to where they already are and then try and strike up those conversations
and see what you learn.

Andrew: OK. All right. So, for you it was the sales people who were saying,
"Hey, this other group within our company is having a problem. We think you
guys need to fix this problem." Did they say what the problem was?

Jason: They told us basically it was that customers were talking about the
ability to get deeper into the KISSmetrics product. So, they wanted to be
able to ask tougher questions and get really specific on specific analytics
play. Our power portal allows you to dig a lot deeper into our analytics.
You can answer a specific question around, "Oh, hey, I just ran this
campaign. I have an A/B test going on it, and I also sent a bunch of
different ads at it." I want to see if different ads perform well against
that A/B test, so I can see like, did I buy ad words and did they do better
on Test A. And I bought Facebook ads, and they did better on Test B.

Well, in order to do that you actually have a couple different layers that
you have to be able to look at in order to see the answer, and we didn't
have anything in our reporting that let you do that. And so, we wanted to
talk to customers to try and figure out, like, what are all the use cases
like that and what's the real problem we can solve?

Andrew: Maybe, I've got this wrong here, but you said that you were talking
to your sales team or your client's sales team.

Jason: Oh, that was ours. We were talking to our own sales team.

Andrew: I see.

Jason: And what they were hearing from customers when they were trying to
close deals and they were trying to get people to upgrade on our product.

Andrew: Gotcha. OK. And they were saying, "Hey, there's this group of
people who are having a problem on Facebook, and they want to know how well
their Facebook ads are performing. They want to know about their Google
ads. They want more detailed reports. I see, and that's when you said,
"This is the group of people we need to go and talk to and figure out what
their problem is and be really clear about what they're desperate for
before we start building.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, honestly, the sales team is always passing us stuff,
and we just started noticing people had all kinds of questions that weren't
necessarily all about ads or all about A/B testing. It was more just there
was a lot of different ways that people were asking questions that required
a lot of depth and the ability to really slice and dice the data
differently than what we can do right now.

Andrew: OK. Can we take a look at the screen shots you prepared for us now?

Jason: Sure.

Andrew: All right. Let's bring them up here. So, here's the first one that
you've got. Where is that, actually? There we go. I'm bringing up a blank
canvas. What is this?

Jason: So, this is the person search feature on KISSmetrics, and this is
like the Holy Grail for me. I love using this because what I can do is I
can search for any activity that someone did in KISSmetrics because
obviously we use our tool internally, and I can look and see, "Hey, what
users are using features that seem like they line up with what I want to
talk to people about" or "Who are the most active people" because if you
use KISSmetrics a lot you probably like us, which probably means you're
willing to talk to me if I drop you an email. And so, when you run a search
like this, it will return a bunch of names. You pass in identities to
KISSmetrics so that you have an email address or a name tied to it, and
then you can shoot them a message on your own.

And so, that's what I do a lot. That's how I get a lot of the people that I
end up talking to is by using a search like this to see, "Hey, who are the
people that are doing the things that might be interesting to me to talk
to" or "Who is an active user that I haven't talked to in a while." Maybe,
I'll shoot them a message and see if they'll hop on the phone for 15
minutes.

Andrew: I see. So, basically you're looking at your site and seeing who's
using the area that you're interested in. They're probably going to be the
right people to talk to about the problem, and they're also going to be the
right people to talk to about how you plan to solve it.

Jason: Exactly. In this case, the power port, we knew you had to have
massive amounts of data to want to be able to do this kind of depth of
reporting. So, I look for users who have really, really big data sets and
have users of our product, and that seemed to be... That was my theory on
who will be the best group to talk to.

Andrew: OK. And then, here's another thing that you guys utilized.

Jason: Yes. So, that is the feedback box, and that's like our awesome, not-
so- secret secret anymore, because we just blogged about it. But this is
the Feedbox that you find on every single page on KISSmetrics, and what's
awesome is, is when you put information in there and you write a sentence
to us about how we can make this page better for you, if you have any
feedback it doesn't interrupt you from what you're doing on the site.

Like, you hit submit, and you can go right back to whatever work you're on.
Meanwhile, because it's a custom thing we built ourselves, I'll get an
email from feedback@kissmetrics.com which has what your username is, what
browser you were on, what computer you're using, and what page you were on
our site when you filled it out. So I have all this great, rich information
on the user, plus their feedback. And so I can tie that all together to
learn exactly what somebody is looking for with the lowest possible
friction for them. And so, in this case I was able to look for people who
were complaining, or asking for, ways to get deeper access to their data.

Andrew: All right. If you didn't have all these customers, I want to go
back to someone who doesn't have all these customers. You start off by
saying "Who needs this? Who is probably going to have this problem that I
have" and then you go hunt for them. Where would you hunt for them if not
in your own customer logs?

Jason: So the beauty of the Social Networking Revolution is that there are
tons of options. You just have to think "Where does someone like my
customer hang out? Whether it's personally or professionally." I mentioned
earlier, you can search Twitter for people complaining about the market
you're in, or complaining about your competitor. You can also look for meet-
 up groups that are for the group of people that you want to talk to.

You can go to Linked -In Groups. They are an awesome source if you've got a
B2B idea. On the consumer side, then, there's everything from searching
Pinterest for people who make pin boards with things like what you're
working on. Like, use all these social graphs, and you know, there is also
old-school. You can look for Yahoo Groups, because believe it or not,
they're still heavily used. Google Groups, and then, of course, there is
nothing better than your personal network. So, if you have a friend whose
friend is a great fit for what you think works, get an input to them. Those
people are much more likely to reply to the email, and so you can take
advantage of the fact that your social graph will help you have a higher
success rate, because you're not going have 100% success rate if you reach
out to them.

Andrew: Speaking of, one more thing and then we've got to move on to what
questions we ask them and how we make all this useful. You had this issue a
while back when you started doing this where you were worried about the
number of people who were responding to you when you reached out and said,
"Hey, can I interview you?" What was the percent that you were getting?

Jason: Twenty percent.

Andrew: And then you called up Heaton Shaw, who you now work for now at
KISSmetrics. Back then he was your mentor, and what did he say about this
20% that you were getting?

Jason: He told me it was great, which really surprised me. I thought I was
doing terrible. I was all upset with myself. I was like, "Can I not write
an email?" But it turns out, that whenever it's cold and it has nothing to
do with your company, like you're just reaching out to someone blindly,
you're going to get about a 10-20% response rate, which means for every one
or two people you talk to you're going to need to message ten, so realize
the volume game you're playing, and if it's through your company, like
you're emailing a user, I generally find you can get a 30-40% response
rate.

Andrew: I see, but you don't get a 100%. I would have expected if it was
customers that you would get a 100%, and you don't even get... What did you
say? 20% would be good if you just reach out to strangers on Linked-In who
are having a problem that you think you can solve. Even though you are
addressing a problem that they are complaining about, maybe on Twitter, A
passion that they've got that they're getting together with for a meet-up
group, 20% is still, where you probably will end up, if you're lucky.

Jason: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just, essentially the challenge of, you
know, people are busy, or not everyone is checking their Linked-In
messages. There's just a million reasons why they might not respond to you.
You just have to think about your own personal environment. You don't
respond to every email you get, either.

Andrew: No. Yeah. A lot of people want me to give them feedback on their
sites, and I'd love to do it for everyone, but you're right. As much as I
think I do, I don't. I can't say "yes" to everyone, and my job is to try to
say "yes" to everyone. All right. Back to the big board. So, now we know
who we're going talk to, how we're going reach out to them, how likely they
are to say "yes". The next big idea is, get your list of questions, so and
these are the questions you are going to use to validate if there is a
business. So, you have them present-written, Jason? You don't just make
them up on the fly?

Jason: Yeah. That is one of the quickest ways to waste you time getting
outside building, as Steve Blank [SP] would say. I think you absolutely
have to have a script. You don't have to follow it to T, but you need to
know the key points and the key questions you want to hit on, because you
waste the opportunity to learn from a customer when you don't ask them the
right questions.

Andrew: All right, can I show your questions here? I've got them on my
screen.

Jason: Absolutely.

Andrew: Yeah, we can show them to audience. So let's bring it up here. Let
me clear this out here. Here. I was eager to show you that I got the
screenshot of your last company that I embedded it into my program here. So
every time I bring up a brand new screenshot we have that.

Jason: You know what? It's like seeing an old friend. I haven't seen that
site in a while.

Andrew: It was a really well-designed site. It was functional and it was
beautiful. I can never say that you guys had to change because I couldn't
find anything on the site or it didn't make sense. It was a really well-
done site. Alright, so this though is your script.

Jason: Yes.

Andrew: Let me see if I can raid a few things off of your script here and
we can give this to the audience afterwards right?

Jason: Yes.

Andrew: Great. So here's some of your questions. You have people questions
like "Who uses the people feature? What do they use it for?" You have
questions about the problem: "What do you hate about the people feature?
What's working? Why? Are you hitting the wall on the KISSmetrics'
capabilities?" They have questions under solutions: "(?) patterns matching,
pitch solutions". Oh I see. This is a note to yourself about what to ask
and you want to ask for any (?), so break this down for us. Tell me what
we're looking at here because as I read this I get a sense of where you're
going but I don't fully understand.

Jason: So, yeah. I know what you mean. We've got to put some meat on the
bones.

Andrew: Thanks.

Jason: So, basically my philosophy with the way I approach customer
development is to follow these steps of people, problems and solutions. So,
you want to learn about the person first, and there's a lot of reasons for
that. It's kind of the dirty little secret that I think most people don't
know about customer development because you want to learn as much as you
can about this person so that when we go back and say "Andrew loved this
product and this idea and Jason loved this product and idea but they both
have the same job titles at the same sized company, what's the difference?"
you're going to be really glad you asked these tougher questions to try to
find out what separated the groups of people that didn't care about your
idea and the ones that really loved it. So this comes from spending time in
the people section learning as many things as you can.

So in the case of KISSmetrics, I'm asking things about "What's their job
title? What industry are they in? What plan are they on?" because that
gives us an idea of how big a site they are. "How long have they been a
customer?" That also tells us if they were more of an early-adopter or a
late-adopter and by learning all these things then about the person, asking
them questions, you also warm them up which is a really cool little kind of
psychological trick where Andrew you were talking to me this morning before
we even started this interview and the whole reason was to get us used to
talking to each other a little bit, and I find that you can get a lot
juicier questions to your later questions if you start off asking them some
softball ones where they just talk about "Tell me about a day in your life.
What's your job responsibilities?" Learning all these little things about
their job that seem perfectly harmless not only tells you key things you're
going to figure out that's the difference that's like "Oh, Andrew's more of
a content marketer and Jason's more of a search engine marketing kind of
guy". You learn the differences between people as you get conversational
with them and then when you ask the really deep questions about the day-to-
day stuff and their budget they're much less guarded.

Andrew: I see. How do you organize the answers to all these questions? I
could understand if you just had a straight up question like "What's your
job title?", boom, you write it down and you have a clear answer, but once
you start getting into things like "What's your day-to-day like?" how do
you organize it all?

Jason: So for me, and I found out that maybe this is a rarity, I'm actually
able to take notes while I talk to someone, so I can just sit there and
Skype with someone, not that different than what we're doing right now
Andrew, and I can type away at my computer at the same time and take notes
on what they're saying. For those that can't do that, I know plenty of
people who tape record everything that they do in an interview and so by
tape recording they can go back over it later and you can use dictation
services or all kinds of things so you have those detailed notes and you
can review them later.

Andrew: OK. All right. So let's go back then and see what the next set of
questions was. The first one was about people "You want to get to know the
person. What's your job? What's your typical day like". Then you say
problems.

Jason: Yeah. So the example I kind of gave your here is actually my most
recent questions and so they were focused on learning about a new feature
we're working on, but when you're starting out early on what you really
want to do is ask people about what their biggest problems are in their day-
to-day in the space you're working in. So, you know "What are your biggest
problems as a marketer today? What are the things that hold you up?"

The whole goal is you want people to talk about problems without you
prompting them. So you don't want to say, hey Andrew, do you have a problem
with creating content? You don't ask that specific question. Instead, your
goal is to say, hey, Andrew, what are your biggest problems you have as a
marketer? And they're going to then hopefully talk about what their top two
or three problems are. And your goal is that, you know, you're onto
something whenever the problem you think they had is mentioned in that top
three. If it's not, you can still prompt them and ask them, but they're
less likely to have a burning desire for your product if you're not one of
their top problems that they'd love to solve.

Andrew: I see. And then if they don't have that burning problem, what do
you do? I know you continue, but does that mean then that you need to find
a different person or a different potential problem?

Jason: Well, once you go through and you're asking them questions around
what their problems are, and they don't mention yours, what you can do is
ask them then finally, say OK, I heard these. What about this? Is this
actually a problem for you? And you bring up what your problems that you
think about, that you solve, and you can listen and see if it fits for
them. And so that'll help, but in the end, not everyone you talk to is
going to be a customer, and like I mentioned earlier, you need to talk to
eight to ten people who are customers. And so you can expect that of those
eight to 10 you talk to that work out, you're going to probably have
anywhere from two to ten more people who didn't work out. It all depends on
both how lucky you get and how targeted you were. If you already really
knew your market, it's very possible that you could go ten for ten, because
you just knew exactly who to talk to. If you're still learning your market
to figure it out, that's why learning about the person in the beginning's
so important, because you're going to want to do an autopsy afterward and
figure out why was this interview a dud, and the one before was awesome.
And you're going to want to compare the two.

Andrew: By the way, let me see if I can show this. You say, people?

Jason: Yeah. I might've just written over it.

Andrew: Say people, problems, and solutions, but this people here in your
questions is not the same as this people here. It's just that this feature,
this happens to be one of your features, right?

Jason: Correct. Yes. Sorry. I forgot that, that might be confusing. We have
a feature for people, which actually you saw earlier, I use to find
customers. That's totally different. So I was asking them for feedback on
the feature, and you notice those are all open-ended questions, which give
you room to have the user not be led by you. Because you don't want to lead
the witness, so to speak.

Andrew: I see. All right. But bottom line, what I'm trying to do is figure
out who they have, what are their problems around this topic that I'm
trying to address, and I'm looking to see will they tell me that the
problem that I think they have is really the problem they have? And if they
don't tell me, then it might mean that they're either the wrong person or
I've just misidentified the problem.

Jason: Correct. So that's the next thing, though. By being open ended on
the problem questions, you may actually find a better business to go after
when you get to the end, because everyone kept naming this same problem.
That wasn't where you started, but man, if everybody says it's their top
problem, you might want to do something about it.

Andrew: What's the risk of pushing people to tell you what you want them to
tell you, you know? That you have this idea, if we have this idea of, say,
Mixergy for our course, and we call up potential customers, and we say, so
what are your problems, and they tell us, and we think, you know what, they
didn't say that they had this one problem that we have in mind. They must
just not be aware of their problem. We should prod them. Or we should say,
well. Is that much of a risk when you're having these conversations where
you try to basically get people to say what you want them to say?

Jason: Yeah. I mean, you definitely don't want to try and force people to
say it, because the thing is that after you talk to your customer,
especially in your early days, eventually you're going to start building
something. And then once you build it, you're going to probably try and
sell it. And if the very first thing your doing is talking to people and
trying to get them to say something is interesting to them or that they
want that they really don't, it's only going to be all the more miserable
and hard to then sell them or anyone else your product later on. So you
have to realize that getting 15 minutes of someone's time to talk to them
is ten times easier than getting them to buy something you make. So if
you're struggling in that 15 minutes to get them to say they have that
problem, it's going to be even harder to sell it later. So you're basically
setting yourself up for trouble.

Andrew: All right. And so we talked about the first two sections, which is
people and problems. The last category of questions that you have is around
solutions. What kind of questions do you ask there?

Jason: Ideally, they're going to have said that one of their top three
problems is a problem that you think you can solve for them. And so what
you then do is you can introduce your solution that you've created. That
may be mock-ups of a potential new feature or what your product would look
like. It can also be that you have a demo that you can show them. Or it can
just be loosely talking to them about it. One of my favorite questions is
if you could wave a magic wand, what would the solution to your problem be?
And when you do that, people start imagining what's the perfect solution
for them. It gets them out of this horrible mechanism that customers always
have a problem with. I do it, and people ask me, is that...

They start trying to create the feature in their head that your product
should have, and you don't want them to do that. But when you ask them to
wave a magic wand, they think about the perfect solution. They don't think
about what they think is possible, and you can learn a lot from that. And
so, the whole point of the solution section is now you know what their
problems are, now you know who this person is. Let's talk about if the
solution you have fits or what the solution they need might look like. So,
you keep hearing that first problem over and over again from everyone.

Well, ask them would something like this solve your problem, and you can
give them an example or try to describe it to them and see if it fits, and
that will help you figure out what to develop for them.

Andrew: So, sticking to this one issue that you are addressing, who are the
people, what are their problems, and what are the solutions that you heard
as you're having these conversations? What are the people you talked to?
What are the problems they told you? What are the solutions that they
wanted through the magic wand?

Jason: Yeah. I'm sorry. What's the question?

Andrew: So, I'm saying, can you fill this in with some real life
information, like who are the people you talked to about this one issue
that you're addressing, that you started off the program telling us about?
What are the problems you heard about through those conversations, and what
are the solutions that people wished for?

Jason: So, like I said in the beginning, the sales team came to us with
this group of people that wanted to do more with our product than what we
currently could do.

Andrew: Who are they?

Jason: So, that was the group we were talking to. What we found the pattern
was is that you had these guys, I call them data jockeys. They're people
who love to live in Excel spreadsheets. And so, we found those were the
ones with the biggest problems because they wanted to just go crazy with
their data. They just wanted to get a deep [??] in it and just filter
through. They're the people who love looking for the needle in the
haystack, for the perfect answer to their analytics questions. And so,
those are the people we found. The problem they had was that our reporting
was great for all the high level stuff, for generating reports they could
share with the rest of their team in getting more people in the company
data driven.

What we weren't able to do for them was allow them to dive deep and answer
specific questions. And so, we found that their biggest burning problem
was, "You have all of my data. I can't get at all of it to answer these
tough questions." And so, what I ended up doing then was talking to them
and trying to understand, "Well, OK, so you have these problems. What kind
of problems are you trying to solve, like what are the questions? So, I
mentioned that example earlier where you run an A/B test on a landing page,
and you send two different kinds of ads towards those landing pages. Well,
based on our current product, we were only able to let you look at the
results of the A/B test or the results of the ad campaign, and they wanted
to see both at the same time which may show that one ad campaign did better
on a set of landing pages than an ad campaign coming from Facebook might
have.

Andrew: I see.

Jason: And so, we started collecting these use cases, and that allowed us
to start to see how this product might need to shape out in order to solve
their problems. And also, by learning these guys were comfortable in Excel
spreadsheet, we learned that, well, the output doesn't need to be a pretty
visualization like a lot of the gorgeous stuff that's been designed here at
KISSmetrics in our general reporting. We knew we didn't need a
visualization necessarily because these guys were going to be comfortable
working in an Excel environment where you just have a slew of rows and
columns.

Andrew: Ah, I see. Couldn't you then in this case say to these people,
"What should we build to give you the data that you're looking for?" Why
couldn't you say that? It seems like these people would be the perfect ones
to ask that kind of question.

Jason: There are times where people make MVPs which is like the Lean
Startup Methodology kind of phrase for a minimum viable product. It's
something someone hacks together to be an initial solution. Sometimes,
people have done that, and we can take a look at what they've done to try
to do a basic solution. We have a data export feature at KISSmetrics, and
so some people were using that to build their own custom query system to
build this themselves outside of our product. In general, you want to be
careful asking customers exactly what feature they want just because they
don't have the vision and the understanding and the capabilities of your
product, so they might suggest things that actually don't fully solve their
problem. They just think that that's the best that you could probably do
for them.

Andrew: I see. OK. All right. Wow. These guys are actually exporting and
doing all kinds of crazy analysis on the data for you so you got a sense of
what they were working for, what would solve their problems.

Jason: Yeah. And when you're starting out, you may actually find that there
are people who, they don't have a product like KISSmetrics that they're
pulling data from to do this. They may just be doing it on their own. I
know like, for instance, there were a lot of things I did at OneForty when
I was in charge of metrics and stuff that I was doing manually to keep
track of things that now there's really cool products that do them instead.
So if you find a potential customer you're talking to is doing something
manually, always ask to see what it looks like because whatever they're
doing manually, they probably are wasting hours of their day on and will be
very, very happy to pay you to make it go away and just do it quickly and
have a solution in front of them.

Andrew: All right. Let's go back to the big board here. There it is. It
[??] for a second. Next step is set up your meeting with prospects. So you
email the bunch of prospects that you got intros from the sales team for.
What happened there?

Jason: So the sales team was easy. Since these people are already talking
to us about these problems, they basically said 'Our Product Manager would
like to talk to you to see if this is something that we can build'. And
that's like pretty much the coolest thing people can hear from the sales
guys is that, you know, man, the product people want to hear from you on
what you want. Like that generally gets people really excited

Andrew: I see. They think you're like them being heard. They feel a
connection to KISSmetrics, this company that's been building this product
for them.

Jason: Yes. It's ownership. It's a point of pride. Man, I could influence
the product? That sounds awesome. I know in other companies that I've
gotten emails, I love getting to getting to talk to their product people or
whoever is working on it to give them feedback because you feel like wow, I
can influence what this is going to be like? Man, those late nights when I'
screaming at the computer, they can actually hear me. The thing is though,
that wasn't the only way that I was reaching out to people and so there was
only a certain number of people sales can introduce me to, which was going
to have rave results. So I also did some cold emailing and so I know
Andrew, I think you have a screen shot of kind of an example of an email I
sent out to people.

Andrew: Yes. This is one of the emails, the actual email that you sent out
to someone.

Jason: Yes. So this is for that other people report that we wanted to use
to get feedback on. You can change very little of this and repurpose it for
your own good. So for me, our subject line was 'Feedback on the KISSmetrics
people report'. I find generally if I put a question there, if you have an
existing product mention your product because then they realize that it's
somebody reaching out in regards to what you're doing. You're just going to
try and make it not sound like a survey because most people hate doing
surveys but they're happy to talk to you.

And so what I usually do is, you can see I open up by introducing who I am
and so by merely saying I'm the Product Manager, they know they're talking
to somebody they can influence. And they're going to be able to have an
impact on the conversation and what's going to happen at the company
because of who I am.

And so I pointed out I noticed they're a heavy user. Like I said before,
we're looking for people that have big accounts and we're heavy users of
our product. So telling them that shows them that you took the time to do a
little research on them and now you're interested to talk to them. And so I
said 'Hey. We're looking to improve that feature so I'd love your help in
learning what you love and hate about it so we can make it even better for
you'.

So I'm trying to make it sound like we're going to do them a favor if they
do me a small favor. I know, one of my other mentors back in Boston, a guy
named John Pendergrass, he thought me that ask for help. People actually in
general are very giving and very helpful. You just have to kind of tap into
that psyche of help your fellow man or woman. And so he always encouraged
me to put the word help in my emails because that generally makes people
realize that you're not trying to sell them anything. You're just trying to
learn from them and so I always try to ask people 'Help me learn about you'
and that generally gets a better response from people.

Andrew: I see.

Jason: And so that's the first paragraph. The second paragraph is just,
assume they are going to talk to you. Don't say "Oh, if you have time let's
talk". No. Say "Let me know what time works for you and I'm happy to talk
to you then". This is I'm not being obnoxious here but I am being forceful
saying of course you're going to talk to me. And I use this great service
called Tongle which will show my calendar in real time so if I sent out a
batch of like 25 of these and people start booking times, I don't have this
awkward thing where I'm trying to say "Well. I'm available from 2 to 5 on
this day and 3 to 6 this day. But someone just replied and wanted that 3
o'clock time." It saves all that scheduling issues and so this keeps it a
clean short email, which makes people think that probably the conversation
can be clean and short as well.

Andrew: All right. Let's bring us back up here and adjust your camera.
Let's make sure that we got. OK. All right. Anything else that we need to
know about how to solicit people for meetings or is that basically it?

Jason: I think that the best thing is again focus on being about help, not
sales so never make it sound like you're making a sales pitch, or sound
anything like a sales pitch. Try to make it sound genuine. The more it
sounds like you're sending it to one individual person, the better your
results will be. If you make it sound like a form note, people will
recognize it as a form note, get annoyed, and be less likely to respond.

Andrew: How much of your day, by the way, or your week, is spent making
calls like this?

Jason: Sending out these emails, you mean?

Andrew: I mean following up and actually meeting people.

Jason: I'd say before [??] got me some help sending out these messages, it
was about 10% of my time sending messages to people trying to set up more
calls. I would say the calls themselves is probably 30-40% of my time.

Andrew: OK. And the rest? The other 60% of your week? What is that?

Jason: It's doing things like reviewing what happened in those interviews,
going over it with other teammates, and all kinds of other product
responsibilities that I have at KISSmetrics, which are things like talking
about what we're actually building right now to make sure that everything I
learned a couple weeks ago is actually getting conveyed to our design team,
or making sure that the negotiations with engineering go well. It's always
a trade-off of this thing I really, really want, and this thing that will
be nice to have, and does engineering have time for the 'nice to have', and
making sure we actually build what is most important.

Andrew: What do you say to an entrepreneur who's got a smaller team, maybe
a lot of them are outsourced, who says, 'I don't have as much time to make
these phone calls. Of course KISSmetrics can do it, because they've got
Jason. They can hire someone full time to do it.' Can entrepreneurs do
this, do it well, and not have it take up 30-40% of their week?

Jason: Early on you certainly can. One of the things is that I spend this
much time on it because we have such a big product now. We've got five or
six different reports. That's a lot of things to talk about, and to talk to
people about. When you're starting out and you just have one feature,
honestly, the biggest thing that's going to be your bottleneck is how fast
engineering can build whatever you want. While you're waiting for
engineering to finish building version 1.0, you might as well go talk to
customers. In the early history of KISSmetrics, actually, while they were
busy building version one of KISSmetrics, they created Kiss Insights,
because they had time on their hands, and so they went and talked to
customers, found another column, and created Kiss Insights.

Andrew: I see.

Jason: I would say you can't afford not to make time, because when you only
have probably one engineer, maybe it's your Tech co-founder, you better
make sure that one thing you spend all this time frantically building is
what people want. The only way that's going to happen is if you make time
to talk to people.

Andrew: Back to the big board. Next thing you say is, "During a customer
development interview, start with people." Is this what you mentioned
earlier as I was going through your questions?

Jason: Yeah. What I like to do is, I like to do a lot of research on people
beforehand. What's great is things like Reportive make your work
ridiculously easy. Once you have an email address, Reportive will just pop
up details.

Andrew: Reportive is that plug-in for Gmail that tells you who you're
emailing with. Once you type in an email address it starts giving you all
their social network info.

Jason: Right. Honestly, the social graph is fantastic for finding out the
background of people. I live specifically on LinkedIn a ton, because if you
go to LinkedIn, you find out what is their current role at their company,
and what are there past roles. That gives you a lot of background of who
they are. You can also then see if they have a blog or a Twitter account.
You can see what they Tweet about. When I talked about [??] Jockeys being
important for the power report, there's a hash tag on Twitter called hash
tag Measure, and that's where some of the most hardcore analytics people
hang out on Twitter. They Tweet using that hash tag. People who tweet on
the Measure has tag were more likely to turn out to be people who wanted
our power report.

You can do this homework before you even talk to the person to learn all
these basics, which means when you get on the interview and you have that
precious time of maybe 15 or 20 minutes, or if you're lucky, 30 minutes, to
talk to someone, you're not doing 101 questions with them. You're not just
saying, 'Oh, what's your name? What's your role in your company?' If you
can finance these questions in the five minutes before your interview, you
can spend that five minutes in the actual interview probing deeper around
things like, 'What is the actual role like? What do you do day to day? I
saw you Tweet about Measure. Are you really hardcore in this stuff? Do you
like surfing my sequel queries?' You can ask better questions because you
got answers yourself to the higher level stuff.

Andrew: We weren't sure who's LinkedIn to pull, or maybe you asked us to
get this, so we got mine.

Jason: Yeah.

Andrew: Actually, I'm glad that we did this instead of one of your
customers, because something stands out for me. The Argentina on there,
which is where I lived up until recently. If you saw something personal
about the person who you're talking to, would you bring that up in
conversation? Would you spend a little bit of time asking them about how
Argentina is or if they happen to like baseball, if they saw the game last
night? How much personal stuff would you talk about?

Jason: Honestly, I don't do a whole lot. I do, if people are international,
I definitely bring that up a little bit, because it is always interesting
to get the international perspective on things.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Jason: I often make jokes about what time is it over there? I was talking
to someone from Israel yesterday and they're like nine or ten hours ahead
of us, so it always gets kind of messy in my head when I have an 8:00 a.m.
call and it's 6:00 p.m. where they are.

Andrew: Right.

Jason: So, I end up making a little bit of small talk on that sort of
stuff, but in general I guess I don't as much. But I think that's also
because I'm working on a B2B product. If I was doing consumer, I definitely
would be much more interested in talking about that sort of stuff.

Andrew: I see.

Jason: You're definitely right though. That's the kind of gems you want to
look for when you look at someone's profile, is what's that little thing
that makes them a little different that might be welded to the conversation
or it might not be.

But you want to note it because - oh, it turns out international users are
more interested in this, or South American users are more interested, or
whatever. You never know what the pattern might be, so knowing things like
that can actually be really valuable, and it is worth asking a little bit
about it to make sure, "Oh, Andrew, you're not in Argentina anymore? Okay,
that's actually good to know."

Andrew: I see. Later on we're going to talk about how to find patterns. But
I'm wondering if, as you're having these phone calls, do you start looking
for patterns or does that interfere with your data collection because
you're going to start to force patterns where they don't belong?

Jason: I will a little bit. Like, if I have a couple of interviews in a day
and by the third interview I'm hearing the same things, I'll definitely
bring them up and try to follow the same flow I did earlier. But in
general, unless somebody really clicks where I'm like, "Man, I've heard
that somewhere before," I try not to because I just find that...

I'm already taking notes while we're talking and I'm trying to follow
script, but then also kind of ask a few side questions that come to mind
based on those initial sets of questions. There's just not room to think
about another thing, so I generally avoid trying to do too much of that
just because it gets me off my train of thought.

But then, as soon as I finish the interview, one of the things I like to do
is kind of look for those patterns. That way, next time I know to look for
them, but I've done all the heavy thinking on the side.

Andrew: I see. All right, let's go back to the big board. So, basically
we're breaking down the three things that you look for in your
conversation. We just talked about people. The next big set of questions
that you have is problems, and then we're going to talk about uncovering
their top three problems. That's what you're trying to do in your phone
call?

Jason: OK.

Andrew: Is that right?

Jason: Yes.

Andrew: OK. So, how do you do that?

Jason: Yeah. So, basically once you've got them warmed up and you feel like
you've learned as much as you can about this person you're talking to and
what their day-to-day is like, now it's time to find out their problems.
So, whatever market you're in, basically your goal is to talk about their
top problems. So, I just straight up asked them, "What are your top three
problems that you're facing with analytics for you and your company?"
Whatever your market is, you can just insert that after "what are you're
top three problems". Actually, I'm amazed at how well it works because
people immediately, they pause and they think for a second, and they go,
"Hmm. One, this. Definitely got to be this. Two, it's this. Three, it's
that." It's amazing how quickly people can prioritize in their head.

The beauty of that is, by not really prompting them or leading them along
the way to your problems you want them to say, it really ends up being very
natural, where it's like, "Well, what are the things that are my biggest
pain in the butts at work everyday? Well, what are the biggest things that
stink at home when I'm trying to get the grocery list together?" Whatever
it is, you get them in that environment and they start to think about it,
and things just naturally boil up. As those things boil up, they tell you
that. You can learn a lot from them because it is really their most
pressing problems.

Because in the end, what you're learning here is what you're going to sell
later, and selling can be anything from, "Well, that's when I go to Google
and I search for this solution then," or, "I search for an answer to this
problem." You want them to say these problems because those problems are
what they're going to eventually seek out solutions for and you want to be
that solution.

Andrew: OK, so today if you're going to be researching an idea for creating
a site that offered a directory of Twitter apps, a third part of your call
would include a question like, "What are your top three problems in finding
Twitter apps"? Or would it be more general than that? "What are your top
three problems with Twitter?"

Jason: Yeah. Sometimes I go even higher. I say, "What are your top three
problems in social media. Because at OneForty, I ended up talking to a lot
of social media managers and marketers at different companies. They had
many responsibilities outside of just Twitter. It was interesting to learn.
If you ask just what your biggest problems are in Twitter, you'll find out
what those are, but if only 10% of their time is spent on Twitter, that's
important to know. The more I learned how to do this at OneForty, the more
I would zoom out, because I wanted to know, 'Are you spending all your time
on Facebook or Twitter? Are you spending more time on Foursquare now?' Now
I would have been asking them about Pinterest too, because you want to know
about how much mindshare your product has in a person's day.

Andrew: I see. So, if I started out by asking something as specific as,
'What are your top three problems with Twitter apps?', or even a little
more general, like, 'What are your top three problems with Twitter?', I
would completely miss out on someone who would say, 'Hey, you know what?
I'm over Twitter. I have a problem with Pinterest. I don't know how to...',
and then they start telling me all of the things they don't know how to do
and leading me to a potential solution with Pinterest that's much bigger
than Twitter.

Jason: Yeah. You end up wanting to have a balance of that, because people
can totally go off on diatribes on things that are completely unrelated to
what you were actually looking for. You want to rope them in and keep them
on your subject. Basically, you're going to need to do some trial and error
on if you want to go with the 30,000 foot view, the 1,000 foot view, or the
10 foot view, to get people to talk about your space. If you were talking
to someone in operations, you probably want to specifically say, "What are
your top problems in procurement?" if you want them to talk about
procurement problems. At the same time, you should probably do a little bit
of your homework after you ask that and say, "How much of your time do you
spend on procurement," or, "How much time do you spend on Twitter as a
social media manager?" That way you're hedging your bet against the fact
that this may not be a big burning problem. It's just their biggest problem
in your specific market. You want to hedge your bets both ways. You have to
probe around that sort of stuff to make sure that those problems are big
problems for them, and not just problems in that narrow space that you ask
them about.

Andrew: By the way, as we're talking, I'm remembering how I first heard
about you, and how we connected. It's Laura, the founder of OneForty, who
in her interview said, "You know what? It was time for us to move to a
different product from OneForty. It's Jason who helped us figure out what
to do." You went out and made phone calls to potential customers. You
understood them. You got inside their head. You came up with a collection
of potential great businesses, and you narrowed it down to one business
that you guys eventually launched, and that's what got bought. Is that the
way it happened, basically? Do I understand it right from my interview?

Jason: It's the romantic fairy tale version, I guess.

Andrew: Really? Give me the reality.

Jason: There was more to it. That was a nine month journey where a lot of
different things happened along the way, but yeah, in a lot of ways it was.
Basically, it was September 2010, and we kind of realized, "Man, we have a
lot of users." OneForty had over 100,000 people sign up from Twitter to use
our site, and log-in and write reviews. We still couldn't find a business
for a lot of reasons we talked about earlier. We had to have the
intellectual honesty that traffic kept going up, but that was a vanity
metric. It wasn't actually telling us how the business was doing.

What was telling us how the business was doing was, we were only making a
couple hundred bucks a month off of affiliate fees, and so we knew we had
to try something different. We ended up looking at a bunch of different
market options and saying, "All right, well, how are we going to make a
decision here? We need to get some data." We used this interview process to
go talk to people. We looked at having a more B to D focus, which is where
OneForty ended up heading to build the social app that would help you
manage all your other social apps. We looked at, "Could we be an app store
for other APIs?" We looked at internationalization. "Could we just be
really big in Japan? Would that solve all of our problems?"

Andrew: When you had these theories, it was this set of questioning and
this process that helped you figure out whether there was a real problem
there that you guys could address, or if it was just an idea that was
exciting for you internally?

Jason: Yeah. Basically we used this line of questioning. Laura used her
awesome network to get us into a lot of really cool companies to talk to,
and then we did some of our own outreach. Laura would sit in on some of the
calls. Otherwise, there was a lot of debriefing that I would sit down and
try to explain to her what happened. I take copious amounts of notes. I
summarize my notes, and then I share my key take-aways with the whole team.
There were all these layers of information we tried to share, so everyone
knew what was going on.

Andrew: I think the part where you're saying it's the 'romantic version' of
the story is that maybe there was an implication in the way that I
expressed it that as soon as you discovered this great idea, 'bam.' There
was a world of businesses who beat a path to your door, and said, "Can we
buy you out?" It wasn't exactly like that. You found a business that had a
problem. You had a buyout afterwards, but it wasn't necessarily because
that solution was crazy in demand by acquirers. Am I guessing right?

Jason: Yeah. I mean, honestly, the search for the new business kind of went
on the entire fall, and that was just a painful process because we were
waiting to get this information and make a decision. Once we made a
decision, it was kind of a long arduous journey to get to the point where
they actually were building that other product that would be interesting to
HubSpot.

Andrew: OK. HubSpot, who acquired you?

Jason: Yeah.

Andrew: I don't mean to imply that this solution ends up leading to a
billion dollar buyout overnight. I know that there were other issues going
on at OneForty at the time. Laura talked about it in her interview.

Jason: Okay.

Andrew: I'll leave it to her to express it. Yeah, she was extremely open
about what it was. But she also said that you were fantastic at coming up
with this whole process. At having these phones calls, at figuring out
where the real business was, and as a result Heaton Shah snapped you up as
soon as he had the opportunity for KISSmetrics. Because I know that they're
really heavily into this process.

Jason: Yeah. Well, that was the thing. It was like you said earlier, Heaton
was my mentor so I guess he kind of got a first-person view of it all. But
the bottom line was, we're trying to make an intelligent decision with what
to do with the business, and you have to go out and get the information.
The last thing you want, the thing that rips start-ups apart is whenever
opinions roll. Because how do you decide if my opinion or your opinion
matters most? You can't. At best, you get the HIPPO syndrome, the highest
paid person in the organization makes the decision, and that just leads to
resentment and a lot of awkward conversations.

Andrew: In smaller companies, it ends up being, "Where am I most
passionate?" Then I start to believe that the world was really there.

Jason: Yes.

Andrew: Or, "I know I found myself doing this."

Jason: Exactly.

Andrew: I say, "Well, you know what? The world might want this." Then I
start and I go, "Huh. I can really do this." Then I think, "Hey, you know
what? I have these skills. Finally, I've got a platform to use them." I
start building a building and then I put it out there, and I realize nobody
gives a rat's ass.

Jason: Yes. Yes. That's the thing is the only way to really tell is with
data, so that's the analytics on your site to learn what's going on. Then,
it's also talking to customers and finding out, who's passionate. Who's
jumping out of the phone being like, "I want this. When can I get this?"

All the conversations that you do and everything you research, the goal is
really just to find those people that are ready to jump through the screen
and say, "When can I get my hands on this?" That's the level of excitement
you're really looking for. One of the things I always tell people when I've
kind of given presentations and stuff on this kind of subject is like, it's
like if someone says, "Oh, that's kind of interesting," that's the really
polite way of saying, "I don't care."

That's the really polite way of being like, "Well, I don't want to be mean,
but I want to get off this phone call. So, I'm just going to say that
sounds interesting and leave it at that." So, if you learn two things from
my interview today, I hope one of them is that if you hear "That's
interesting," when you talk to someone, you know that that means they don't
care. That isn't good signal.

Andrew: Okay. So, in this section before we move on to the next section,
what we're looking for are the big problems. You specifically will ask
people, "What are your top three problems with..." and you'll go and you'll
probe even further. But your goal is to do a lot of writing on their
problem so that you walk away with a real understanding of where their pain
is, where their frustration is.

Jason: Yep.

Andrew: Okay. All right. Anything else before we go on to the big board?

Jason: No. The whole thing through this process, you want to have really
big ears, so to speak. You want to be listening a lot more than you're
talking.

Andrew: All right, then I've got to do more listening also. Let's go on to
the next big idea.

Jason: Sure.

Andrew: Once we've done that, the next step is to introduce your product or
solution. So, let's bring you back up here on the screen here. How did you
do it? How do we do it?

Jason: At this point, basically what you have is you've hopefully heard
them say that one of the things you think... You should have a bunch of
problems that you think your product solves, and you want to see if the
people you talk to mention those problems. So, ideally we're going to
assume that you have now had someone say that they have your problem.

Ideally, they will have said it unprompted, but it's not the end of the
world if you had to bring it up. Either way, you're still going to present
the solution because, hey, they're on the phone. You never know. But the
whole goal is you want to try and line up the problems they said they have
with your solution.

So, you're going to say, "Hey, okay. Cool. So, you said you have this
problem." In the case of KISSmetrics, they wanted this super report to wow
them and slice and dice their data more. So you say, "Okay, so you mention
one of your top problems is the ability to dig deeper into your data."

So, then I would tell them about this solution, which we had this mock-up
of the power report that I was able to show them and say, "Hey, if you were
able to do this, do you think this would actually help solve your problem?"


Andrew: This is what you'd bring up that, "Do I have this right? This is
what you would bring up. Do I have this right?" This is what you would
bring up and you would say, "If you could do this, would this solve your
problem?"

Jason: Right, so I showed them and, you know, I [??] this actually looks
like something that you'd understand what it does. So, this report, like,
you can see at the top, you know, you can select the date range, and then
you have these columns and segments which would be the rows. And we said,
OK, we're going to let you chose any metric [??] that you can find on [??]
and make that columns in the spread sheet you're going to build. And you're
going to able to actually segment that, you're going to be able to drill
down into dotmetrics so that you can only show a certain group so, where it
says population, it is going to allow you to drill in based on any events
and properties in [??] which are just things that happen on your site and
characteristics.

So, it might be property, it might be that someone got a ten percent off
discount which they signed up; an event may be that they clicked a certain
button. And so, we were like, okay, you're going to be able to create a
whole bunch of columns based on these metrics, and you are going to be able
to filter them based on specific characteristics that you know we're
tracking on the site. Then you are going to be able to segment that group,
based on other things on our site.

So, you are going to be able to drill in and we told them you can do up to
three segments, Steve, on different questions you have. So, like the
example I used earlier was, they may do, one segment would be the AB test
they ran and then the next segment would be, which ad campaign they came
from. So, you can compare both the AB test and the ad campaign against all
those metrics you chose in your column. I know that is a mouthful, but the
added jockeys, the guys that get really excited about this stuff would look
at this and go, oh, that's awesome, I want to do that. And other people
would look at me and their eyes will kind of glaze over and they would be
like, what is this? And that was really kind of the instant moment when I
knew the difference between someone who would be really good for this
product and someone who is not really ready for it.

That's the key about when you show the solution, is you're engaging
interest. So, what's great is, if you have like videos [??] going, you
know, I can look at Andrew and say, hey, does he look engaged and
interested. Well, he is leaning forward, so he must be curious, he's paying
attention. You know, you look for any signs and indicators of strong
interest. If you're just on the phone, look at the rate at which their
talking. If they start talking faster, it means they are excited. If, you
know, they have a higher energy in their voice, again, their interested. If
they are sitting there like, oh, that's, that's kind of, that's cool, okay,
like, they don't care, like, just think about it the same way you would be,
you know, paying attention to see if someone is  interested in the general
conversation you are having.

That's what you're looking for, like, basic signals of interest. Because
the whole goal of the solution thing is to see who is the most amped up for
your product. What I found was, the guys who look at our power port, mock
up there, and say, oh my god, when can I do that? Those are you're great
people. You want to find more of those. So we double down on people like
that and, you know, went back and looked at people and said who are these
people that are like that. And that's when you kind of figure out, who's
your target market early on for this product. Who is going to help you
build it because they are going to mostly [??] their hands on it even when
it's a little messy and not perfect.

Andrew: I see, okay, that does take you back to that first part of the,
first part of the three parts of questioning where you start to say, all
right, I see some people getting excited. Let's go back and figure out what
they all have in common and those are the guys we are going to talk to.
What I'm wondering, Jason, is, this is a pretty nice design. How well
designed does it have to be to show it to them? Can it just be a sketch on
a piece of paper? Can it be an idea that you express to them? Does it have
to look this beautiful, this pretty?

Jason: No, no. We're lucky, we actually have three designers at [??]. So we
can get away with some really pretty stuff. And this is actually a little
further along in the process actually, this screenshot that I have here. If
you consider the, honestly, I had literally taken a little [??] notebook,
open it up when I'm next to someone and draw on a solution. And that's been
how I'm showing people my, like, first idea for what the solution would be
and that's actually worked really well. You can do all kinds of things. I
have a friend who literally just used kenotopia [SP] which is a set of
templates that you can use in keynote [??] to mock up your solution. And he
basically just threw clip art into a mock up of an iPhone and used that,
and he sold Universal Studios on it.

Andrew: I see, he basically said to Universal Studios, if we built this,
does this solve the problem that you just told me about and they say, yes,
absolutely. And that's when you know what you need to build.

Jason: Exactly. It's amazing, seriously. Like even [??], like I said, he
got paid cash for universal records based on an i-phone app that he had not
built, that he had only mocked up in keynote?? Now, granted, he is pretty
slick with it, so he was able to do some things like transitions, to show,
it looked just like the iPhone, but it's not that hard, you can do it. So
don't be afraid to show something really basic and just see if it works.
Because you are going to learn a lot from them on what they do and don't
like and whether it actually addresses the problem and why or why not. You
just want something to spark the conversation around what the solution will
be and the idea is that you have a little something for them to go on and
grasp so that they don't have to totally try to come up with it in their
head on their own.

Andrew: I see. OK. So I'm imagining in the first set of conversations that
you're having with people where you're trying to uncover their problems,
you're not walking in there with ready made solutions, are you at that
point?

Jason: No, not usually.

Andrew: At that point you're going to sketch out with them on the call or
with them in person on a napkin.

Jason: Yeah. Or what actually can happen too is sometimes they have the
solution. So I mentioned earlier when sometimes people will use like Excel
spreadsheet and stuff to build their own solutions, sometimes early on if
people have that you can make the solution part of the conversation about
what they did there and say "OK. Tell me why did you do it this way and
what are the things that you just can't do on Excel that if it could be
done right you would include in it?" You can make the conversation then
about their own MVP versus yours.

Andrew: Do you ever come back to them afterwards with the solution and say
"Hey, you know. We all spent some time internally and is this what you're
asking for?" and show them that?

Jason Yes, absolutely. You should totally do that, especially for the ones
you think are the most interested people because one of the best ways to
gage how much you really learned in your conversation is that you send this
stuff to someone afterwards and see if they follow up. They were excited in
the call, [??] and sent them stuff and never replied to my email? That
shows they didn't really care. But if otherwise they get off the call 'Wow,
this person's already emailed me saying Jason it was so great to talk to
you. I can't wait to use this. Please let me know when it's out there', you
know you got something.

Andrew: I see. All right. Anything else before we move on to the next big
idea?

Jason: No. I mean, this is the cool part that I know every entrepreneur
gets excited about. I think the hardest part is you have to wait until the
end to get to this. It's so important that you don't pollute the earlier
questions and answers with your solution until the end. It's really, really
intentional that this is step 3. It's important that you start out and you
learn these other things first because otherwise, once you showed them the
solution, that's all they're going to be able to think about, which means
that they won't think of their top problems properly anymore if you
introduce the solution before that. And they won't be as open to talk about
their problems. They are going to rush it.

Andrew: One more thing, Jason. You said you'll have phone calls, Skype
calls, in person meetings. How do you prefer to do it and is it the same
for every stage of your understanding? So maybe the first conversations are
done on the phone and the last ones are in person. How does it change and
what do you prefer?

Jason: I guess it's two sides. Ideally I would do every one in person but
travel time to Israel would be probably a little too long to [??] to let me
do a [??] interview there with someone. In order to get a wide variety of
people to talk to, you're going to end up depending a lot more on Skype
than anything else. I prefer Skype with video to most because I can see
facial expressions and stuff, which I love reading and then I can also do
screen shares to show them things. But I'll settle for phone calls and when
I can do in person, I love to do in person. Because there's so much more
rapport you can build when they're face to face, side to side with someone.
And generally you can get more time from them. If you come to their office,
I found out you can get 45 minutes out of you and really learn a lot that
way.

Andrew: All right. Let's go back to the big board. Next big idea is you got
to analyze the data and look for patterns. Tell us about that.

Jason: You take all these notes. Maybe you do recordings and have someone
transcribe. Whatever you do, hopefully you got a really detailed record of
what you just have on this conversation. Some people actually bring a
person along just to be note taker. Whatever works, just realize how
important it is to do not depend on just your memory. I know I personally
have the memory of a goldfish so I'm pretty bad on remembering things but
no one is perfect and specially if you go and talk to 10 or 20 people,
you're not going to keep straight who said what and like those valuable
nuggets. So make sure you have notes because that's where the pattern
matching comes in. And so what I end up doing is every couple of
interviews, I go over all the interviews and I look for key patterns and I
say "What do I keep seeing and hearing in these interviews?".

And so what I do is try and summarize each interview with the 5 or 10
things that stood out most in the interview. And from that, I'm looking for
repeatable patters that I can use to start to think about what a solution
is going to be or what are the common patterns that come up. Everybody
who's jumping out of their chair wanting this, is this kind of person. It
really is just a matter of reviewing what you have and highlighting what
matters.

So what I'll do is I'll look at my notes and the first thing I'll do is as
soon as I hang up the phone, I'll clean them up. I'll make the bullet
points really nice and neat and I'll bold things that were really
interesting. Then I'll come back later and I'll summarize the takeaways
saying 'OK. What were the things that really stood out? What were the
patterns I started to notice that resonated a lot?' and I'll summarize
those at the top of each interview. Need it a lot. And I'll summarize those
at the top of each interview. Then what I'm going to do is, after I've done
a bunch of these, I'll go back over all of them and say, like, "OK. What
were the things that stood out across all the interviews?" Like, "What did
I keep putting in all my summaries that stood out?" And I'll piece all
those together and that's when you start to really notice the pattern. OK.
So we're talking about data jockeys, at big companies, really have this
problem. And, they're generally on KISSmetrics every single day.

Once I find those patterns, I know what I'm looking for, and can also then
say, "Hey! So when it was those specific guides, their most important
feedback was the ability to go three segments deep, not two. And the
ability to drill in and more easily set the population [??]" Whatever it
is, you're looking for the things you hear commonly with the people that
this resonates with most. Your goal is to be hyper-focused on the people
that are most excited about your product. \

Andrew: So it's who's most excited? What do they have in common? And what
gets them super excited? What's the problem that they're most pained by?
What's the solution that gets them most excited?

Jason: Exactly.

Andrew: At this point do you say to yourself, "Are there enough data
jockeys out in the world who are also going to be online for me to make it
worth my while to pursue it?" Or do you leave that for afterwards, in a
different conversation to say, "Is this a big enough market to pursue?"

Jason: That's definitely, you know, you have to be intellectually honest
with yourself. And that is exactly one of the things you need to do then,
is you need ask yourself if the group you found, either, is that group big
enough on their own? Or, is there a way to expand from just that group? You
know, you always have your early adopters for any product.

Andrew: Mm-hmm. (affirmative)

Jason: And you end up then expanding to a broader market. So you need to
ask yourself, "Are these people too small and narrow a group? And can I
expand this to be interesting to other people? Or are they big enough on
their own, and this is great?" So what we found with ours is data jockeys
are a big enough part of our existing user base that it's worthwhile for us
to build this feature. But, in the long term, we need to make this feature
easy enough to understand that those people I talked about, where their
eyes glazed over, and they were lost. We need to find a way to educate them
to potentially be able to use this a little bit, as well.

Andrew: I see.

Jason: And that forced us to be honest with ourselves, that the way we
designed it, we don't want to go too far towards a super duper power tool,
that only a handful of people are going to be able to use.

Andrew: All right. Let me see if there's anything else in this section that
I want to ask you about. No, I think that's basically it. You just end up
cleaning up your notes afterwards, looking for patterns. And then, what
you're trying to do is come up with a document that says: Who's having the
biggest problem? What exactly is this problem that they're most frustrated
by? What's the solution that they're most excited about?


Jason: Yes. And this is the point when I really engage the rest of the
team. I want the developers and designers to understand what's going on and
what the feedback is? And the biggest thing they always want is, they want
to know the big problems. Who they're building it for. And what are the use
cases. So it's really helpful for them to understand, how are people going
to use this? Because they need that in mind when they build the solutions.
They don't accidentally build it in a way that you can't do some of the
things that people really want to.

Andrew: OK? And all of this applies, of course, to even someone who has no
business, no idea yet, or maybe not a solid idea yet. Can they still find
the people who they want to go after? We want to build solutions for. And
they probe them, looking for their pain. They want to understand why they
have that pain. What are the top three problems they have in the area that
the entrepreneur's looking to address? And then they want to show them some
potential solutions and say, "Is this? Should I build a business based on
this? Is this the kind of thing that you need to solve this big, painful
problem?"

And then once you have that, you may not go back to your team of three
designers, and I don't know how many developers you have at KISSmetrics,
but you may go back to the friend, or consultant who you've hired as a
designer and the team of developers who you might have hired overseas, or
maybe your co-founder who's going to develop this out. But basically all of
this process, and we have 1 more step, that's the way it would be done by a
fresh entrepreneur with a brand new business idea.

Jason: Yes. The whole goal is to figure out what you want to build for
people, before you actually invest the time in building it. This is going
to help you make it so that time you invest, like, if you're outsourcing or
something, you're probably investing your own money in trying to get this
built. Might as well make it worth your while. And this is the best way to
learn how, you know, what you actually should build.

Andrew: OK. I can even see that it would have helped me at Mixergy to have
done something like this before I launched it. To say, "I want to address
entrepreneurs with this kind of product. With interviews, even. If I were
going to start with interviews." Well who are the entrepreneurs I want to
help out? Great. Let's go talk to them first. Let's see what their biggest
problems are. You know? And then say to them, "If I were to do an interview
with someone who had this problem, would that help you?" Maybe, they'll
tell me, I don't want just people who had this problem, but solved it. I
want to see other people who are still going through this problem so that I
can see my mistakes through their experiences. I don't know what it is or
maybe I don't want interviews at all. Give me a course that solves it. Cut
out the interviews, give me the solutions first. I don't know what it would
have been but I could see how that would help.

Jason: Yes.

Andrew: In fact, frankly having gone through this, that's exactly how I
would have ended up, now that I've talked to people. Interviews are
terrific but what people really want are sessions like this where there's a
specific problem and a specific solution that's explained in steps that
people can follow along with them. Frankly if I would have had
conversations with my customers or my ultimate customers before I started
as opposed to later on, this is where I would have ended up. It took me a
few years to get here.

Jason: Right. And so that should be a lesson in to everybody that you have
to, the sooner you do it the better. Because you're going to be even more
on target. Like I'm assuming that you guys have had a lot of success in
kind of making this ship so many classes that people are dying to learn
from.

Andrew: Yes. And you want to know something? Heaton Shaw and I had dinner
with a bunch of friends once, and he basically said this is what I should
have done in the beginning. Like before I even did this, he said this is
what I want. He described what is essentially this course and he said maybe
at some point I can get to it. I wasn't sure how to do it. And then it
wasn't until I said it's time to really charge that I was forced to ask
customers what they wanted. Up until the time where I needed to charge, I
could do whatever it felt like. Once it was time to charge, things weren't
working out until I talked to customers.

Jason: Right. And see that was exactly what happened with us at OneForty
where when we were this free open app store, everything was great. We'd get
[??] coverage all the time. Everybody was like I love finding apps and
exploring OneForty. But then when it was time for us to make money, it was
like the harsh truths and realities hit us. Oh man, we have to find a
business model and that means we have to find real paying people. People
don't pay for essentially free stuff that they can just grab and use.
Suddenly our competition of Mashable articles and Google searching is
really hard. You can't charge $1 for something that you can get for free on
the internet like next door.

Andrew: And for me, I couldn't charge anything for an interview that's just
a conversation or even the biographical interviews, people aren't excited
about paying for. Some people of course will because we do a good job with
them but really what they will pay for is if we know what their problems
are and we create a solution for them in the form of a course and that's
where all the hard work we put in finally pays of. Before we could do all
this hard work, to do a biographical interview and they say "Great. This is
really interesting " but they wouldn't pay. All right. Back to the big
board.

So now we understand their pain. We show them the solution. We look for
patterns and we see who's excited about it. Going back to the big board.
The last step is to actually create something. And you say, do a limited
release to gather more data from customers. And so I ask you, what is this
limited release and what do we have to do it instead of just building out
the product?

Jason: Basically the idea is to, there's a bunch of different areas we can
talk about so let's kind of march through it. So when you're a new company,
a lot of companies do like their whole unlimited data, or they call it a
first edition or limited release, whatever you want to call it. The goal is
you want to let only a handful of people that are most passionate about it
use your product because those are the people you can learn the most from.
And by making it exclusive you actually play on the psychological queues
that people have to feel essentially special that they get in and it also
allows you to justify passing it along to a handful of people.

Andrew: Wait. So I don't want as many people as possible to come in and use
it where I could have a diverse group of people giving me feedback, where I
can see ultimately how many people would be excited about it by seeing how
many new people join? You're saying limited just to the people who are
excited?

Jason: Yes. I mean, you can do it the other way as well but I think you end
up in the same place because when people come in and they're not super
excited, they're not going to be retaining anyways. And what I found is
actually really great is if you do a limited release, you can always put up
a landing page to collect more email addresses for the people that are
really excited. I've noticed that like the automation space right now,
there's a whole bunch of companies like Customer [??] and Intercomm and
stuff like that and they're all doing limited releases right now. And it's
great because you can go and sign up on their site and get on the list and
then they can filter for the people that fit best within their market.

So by doing a limited release, you can focus on people that you want to
learn from most and you can use the carriers like 'Hey. I'm hooking you up,
man. I'm letting you in early. In exchange for that, you got to hop on the
phone with me once.' And that means you can now dictate and say "Hey, you
got to talk to me". And if I just make it open to everyone, now suddenly
it's not exclusive. I'm not doing you a favor by letting you in. Anyone can
use it. And so, now when I say, Andrew, I think you're a power user, I
really want to talk to you. Now there's less incentive for you to want to
talk to me. And so what I love about it being like "Hey, dude. We got this
brand new thing and I'm only hooking you up. All I ask is 15 minutes to
talk to you."

You're going to be like "Dude. I want it. Can I get it?" And then that's
going to come from the fact that you're making it exclusive. That's why you
did a limited release. So even with our new stuff at KISSmetrics, we did
some limited release stuff because it allows us to look for those target
customers and we can learn a crazy amount from them because our response
rate on the limited release is 100% versus the 40 and the 20% we talked
about. So you can definitely learn more from those people and because again
it's limited, it prioritizes checking it out more, and you can validate
that thing of Hey, I talked to this guy and he was super-duper excited. Now
I give him the limited release access. Does he actually use it and we've
found the vast majority of people that were begging for it and total sales
they wanted it, guess what? They were all over it whenever we got it and
then we learned a ton from them because we said "OK. You told sales you
really wanted it. We then talked to you and learned about why you wanted
it. We built the solution and you're diving in and using it and you're
paying KISSmetrics money specifically because we did."

That's a heck of a lot of validation and learning that you get only because
you kind of marched through this process deliberately.

Andrew: I see. And am I also understanding that if in addition to letting
in those people who you knew were really excited about this solution,
really had this pain problem that you're solving for them. If in addition
to them you also allow people in who say didn't even buy ads, let alone
need data on ad buying. Didn't really get excited when you talked to them
about this solution that if you also let them in, they might send you in a
whole other direction by maybe completely ignoring it and giving you the
impression that there's less demand for it than there really is. Or maybe
saying no, I need this adjustment and that adjustment which really doesn't
apply to your target market.

Jason: Yes. Basically you can create a ghost town by doing that because the
whole idea of early adaptors or like Steve [??] calls them, early
evangelists, is that you have these people that are so passionate about the
idea they're willing to look at it and it's in a beat up, not quite fully
formed form. I think a lot of times start ups don't necessarily have a full
time designer on board when they get started, even though that's a hot
trend in the [??] right now. And so, it may not be beautiful the first time
out and you generally broad user in your market is probably not going to be
happy using some ugly NVP that you built but an early adaptor, early
evangelist, is going to be dying to use any solution.

And so they're going to come and use it and they're going to help you make
it better while I think the general customers are either going to get bored
with it and give up on you and it's really hard to get people to try
something once they've used it once and they didn't have a good experience.
So I think that's what you're trying to protect yourself against a little
bit. It's get the people that are really passionate in there and are happy
to use it beat up while the rest of them build up pent-up demand and think
they can't wait to get in but they're not really ready yet.

And then once you've done like an iteration on it, you can now roll it out
to those other people who are going to be more likely to be ready to use it
because you've rounded off the corners a little bit. The sharp edges aren't
there anymore.

Andrew: So what is this? And I'll show another screenshot in a moment.

Jason: Sure. So this is part of the KISSmetrics back end. I'm able to look
up any user and I can see what they have access to. So what you can see
here is on the Features tab we have all the different things people can
use. And so we have integrations with MailChimp and with Curly, which those
should be checked off and someone actually turned on those, actually
sending us data from there.

Andrew: Sorry. So what do you do with this to check on the effectiveness of
what you built?

Jason: So basically you can see the blue checkbox there, it's for the power
report. And so this is where I would go and turn it on manually for people.
And I would tell people it was manual and that kind of again would get them
excited about man, it must be exclusive if they had to build a whole system
just to privately turn it on for me.

This obviously wasn't very hard for us to do but this allowed me to very
easily go in and give it, like, anyone who emailed me. I would have all
kinds of conversations because of the feedback box that we showed earlier.
Every once in a while, someone would come along and say "Wow. That's a
great person to talk to for the power report.". I would go in, check the
box off and shoot them an email and say "Hey. I just gave you exclusive
access to a new feature we haven't fully rolled out yet. I'd love your
feedback. I think it will solve a lot of your problems." And very often
that would work very well to have it just go and get their feedback on it
and they'd be very excited and go 'Wow. This is really cool and like you
gave me this thing that most people don't have access to. I feel special'.

Andrew: I can see even for a younger company that doesn't have even a site
up really or one that has a site up but doesn't have the ability to flip a
switch or check off a box and give individual users access to special
features, they can just set a private page up on their site and say, look I
just set this up, I'm only telling you. Don't tell anyone else. Go and play
with it and see if this is it.

Jason: Yes. Yeah, we actually did that on OneForty with the end social tool
that they built. I remember our VP of product would actually show people a
private webpage we had that was a mock-up of it. So you can totally do
that. That's a great way to do it.

Andrew: All right, then what is this?

Jason: This is how we actually iterated on the last version, so we to make
it I have made it very similar, but one of the things . . .

Andrew: Similar to what you showed us before, this is the sample that you
said, hey, if we built this, would you like it? And they gave some
feedback, and based on that, you actually built the final product which is
this, which you're right, to me looks like the exact same page, but it's
not.

Jason: Yeah. So the key difference is actually that population set. So you
notice in the first version there was this yellow bar that had some small
text on it with the little gear icon.

Andrew: Yeah, let me bring that up. Yeah, I see a small bar with a little
gear. It's kind of hard for people to see.

Jason: So that small bar is supposed to allow you to filter things, and
turns out people found that completely confusing and difficult to use. So
we completely rebuilt it in a different format to make it much bigger and
obvious how to do things. If you go to the new version, what you notice is
that now it has a giant bar that says add a new condition, and . . .

Andrew: So here, instead of, let me go to the [??], this is where you said
there was a gear, and you're saying now in the new system, instead of that,
what you've got is, let's bring up the new one, I can barely tell them
apart here, but to the actual users it would be hugely different. Where is
it now?

Jason: Yeah, so it says people who. That whole box, it does the exact same
functionality but we try to make it a lot clearer, so you have this nice
long bar that says "add a condition", and it says "people who" to try to
help you understand what you're actually doing so you're looking . . .

Andrew: Oh, OK. Here, this is "people who" and then you've got all these
conditions.

Jason: Exactly. And so we've created a whole different interface on how you
set those conditions that's a lot more like reading a book, so you say
people did visited sites at least one time. Before it didn't really say
what you had set up, so it was really hard for you to follow. So we learned
that that was a really important part of allowing you to do all the depth
of reporting. That was the whole point we were doing this.

Andrew: And you learn that by showing this to them, the first version which
you have imagined is what they wanted, and they said, I'm not sure I
understand how to use it?

Jason: Yep. And we actually built this first version, did a limited release
to people and found out what they were struggling with and what they liked
and didn't like about it.

Andrew: OK. All right, anything else before we move on from this point?

Jason: Uh, no. Like you said, I think the important thing to realize is
that even though you're an early company you can still do this. You can
make padded URL that you only show to certain people. You can do limited
releases so you build up a huge beta list of pent up demands and only let a
few in. One of the things I love, if you remember the craze of launch rock
and stuff, it was like, "Want to get in earlier, tweet about us, like us on
Facebook." You get them to do all these social things that actually help
your app go viral before anyone knows what it is. Famously Dropbox did that
with their video and got 50,000 sign-ups just from a video. So you can
totally do these things to get people excited about it before you actually
build anything and you can slowly let them in and learn and improve their
product as you let people in that are on your massive list you built up of
interest.

Andrew: By the way, is it kind of weird that I keep you up on this screen
by yourself here. Do you feel like: "Well, am I talking to anyone? Or does
it feel normal?"

Jason: No. It's fine.

Andrew: I asked a friend of mine recently on, I forget where it was that he
was interviewed and he said, they just sometimes keep you up on the screen
and it doesn't feel like there's a real human being listening.

Jason: Yeah, I mean it feels more normal because I can see the old school
radio mic like with Conan O'Brien have on his set. So it definitely feels
more like an interview. It feels sort of professorial with all those books
behind you.

Andrew: [??] just kind of staring out by yourself, kind of respond. I do by
the way sometimes see the people's, it didn't happen in this conversation,
but sometimes people struggle to come up with how to explain an idea when I
keep them on the screen just like that, and after I bring myself up, and I
don't say anything, they catch themselves and they get a little more
confident.

Jason: That's interesting. I think it helps. Yeah, I really think as humans
no matter how much technology we add, there's still so much value in the
face-to-face, and this is as close as we get to face-to-face, but just to
have a face on the screen to look at add so much more depth to the
conversation, the thought process than when all you here is a voice.

Andrew: I know. It's a dare to have video on here. Some people might have
noticed some of the struggle we have with Skype, because Skype is never
perfect. When you're trying to rebroadcast Skype, it's even tougher. But
before we started doing courses here or soon after, I should say, I started
looking at other people's courses, and there were a lot of just disembodied
voices with PowerPoint and it never hooked me in. You want to take a look
at the person. You want to sometimes judge the background. If there's a
stack of books, does that mean he's reading them? Is he wearing the same
jacket over and over? I want to look over your shoulder and wonder where
you are.

Jason: Sure.

Andrew: As human beings, you want to get a sense of the person plus at
points you understand the concept and you might be tempted to look away if
there's something to look at on the screen maybe, a person moving, it keeps
you engaged.

Jason: Yeah. I was going to say that I think that a two-way conversation
helps, too, because you definitely caught some things that I would have
omitted and been mad at myself later. I know I've seen some of the other
courses where it's kind of one person going and they just try to chug a
long, and I think the energy that you feed off of each other definitely
helps.

Andrew: Yeah. I was on with someone from Start Up America yesterday in
private, just showing them how to set this stuff up because all they had
was people doing PowerPoint, and it would be disembodied voices talking
over PowerPoint. I said, "Look at how easy this could be. If you put in a
little effort, it could really add a lot."

All right. As a last word, what I usually like to do is suggest to people
that they find one thing that we talked about and do it. In this case, is
there one thing that someone says, "You know, I'm not ready to commit to
this whole process. I just want to see what would happen." Is there one
thing that you suggest they do just to get started?

Jason: Talk to one customer, just one.

Andrew: One existing customer and go through these questions that you
suggest.

Jason: Yeah. Or one potential customer. If you don't have customers yet,
just one potential. Just have one of these conversations and see how much
you learn from this process, and I'd be willing to bet you're willing to
find time for a couple more. I know we talk about the time suck thing or
time sync thing, so I understand if you're afraid of the quantity of
interviews I do. You can worry about that later when you hire a product guy
like Heaton hired me, but in the meantime, at least, talk to a couple of
people. Get that first interview going and see if you learn something that
you feel like was valuable and then I'm willing to bet that you're going to
be willing to make time for a couple more.

Andrew: All right. And how long do you spend on a call?

Jason: They are as short as 20 minutes. Some go as long as 45 minutes. I
find if you keep it on the shorter end and do your homework in advance,
like researching the user a little bit, you can keep it pretty short. So,
you can do it in like 20 to 30 minutes, on average.

Andrew: OK. All right. Your site, of course, is as we've been talking
about... You are at KISSmetrics, and people can sign up and try out some of
the features that we've been talking about. If they want to follow you, a
good place to go is Twitter where you've actually got your last name?

Jason: Yes, I did.

Andrew: All right. Evanish, and there it is up on the screen. And you're
also at About Me, AboutMe/Evanish if people want to reach out and say hi to
you. All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this. This has been
incredibly helpful, and you've told us the whole process and you've also
made it simple to start. Just talk to one person, you're saying, and ask
the questions that we'll give people as part of this course package.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me and like you mentioned,
About Me, I have all the different sites you can find me on Contact Info.
I'm always happy to help people with this sort of stuff. That's definitely
something that Heaton has instilled in me because of being able to learn
from him. If you watch this and you have questions, just tweet at me or you
can track me down at other places on the Web.

Andrew: Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you all for watching.