MicroConf Recap 2018 – Christian Genco – MicroConf Starter 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] hi so like Ben said last year at growth and starter I took the official microcon free Kip notes for every single talk this year this talk that I'm going to give right now is a recap of the major themes and highlights that I saw coming up over and over again in specifically the starter conference if you like what you hear in the next seven minutes check out micro Kampf Genco or micro comfrey capcom you can read the full recap store every talk that i'm referencing here and I'll show you that URL again at the end spoiler my recap for this talk is going to be choose who to help talk about

0:47their pain and help them solve it let's break that down start building a company by choosing a group of people to help over building a product how many people in this room are some kind of engineer yeah look around it's like everyone so same intuitively it's as an engineer it makes a lot of sense to start building something building things is fun that's that's why I got into this but you run the risk if you start by building a thing instead of help with a group of people to help of building something no one wants ultimately businesses are about helping people fundamentally we're building a business not a not a charity

1:27so make sure that when you choose your audience they fit three criteria first make sure that they have money so don't pick for example homeless snowboard bums as your audience that would be a terrible idea you want to pick an audience that you can reach so if you pick for example real estate agents but you've never worked with a real estate agent and you've never talked with a real estate agent and you've never bought a house and you're not fully sure the real estate agents actually exists maybe houses just get delivered by House Falcons or something that's not gonna work it's much easier if you pick a

2:03group of people that you're already a part of that you know how to help importantly here also the more specific the group that you pick the easier it will be to build something to help them if you try to build something for everyone it won't work there's only things for everyone are like air and coca-cola lastly you want to make sure and this is very important but often overlooked make sure that it's a group of people that you enjoy interacting with if you decided to to that your audience was going to be dentists but the prospect of interacting with dentists every day for the next ten years with their tight

2:38latex gloves and their sharp pointy sticks was just horrifying that don't pick dentists you can pick somebody else next talk about their pain now I know what you're thinking talk to people that sounds crushingly terrifying and it is but here's how you're gonna do it invite them to an interview talking about the work that they do people love this people love talking about themselves imagine if I invited you to an interview if I want to get to know you want to talk about yourself people love talking about themselves they love talking specifically about the pain that they have um don't be afraid to follow up you can follow up with people seven

3:13times and it's not weird one of the founders of Micro Kampf founded a company around sending follow-up emails because it works you picked a group of people that make money people who are making money are probably very busy making that money so they appreciate the reminder the more in person that this conversation can be the better you get a lot more information talking with someone face to face than you would get the less in person that it gets importantly make sure that you're recording the conversation as opposed to trying to take notes during the conversation this is for two reasons first you get a lot more information if

3:51you're free to be talking with the person you're not distracted taking notes and also the exact words and phrases that they use are very useful and we'll talk about that a little bit later lastly make sure that you're listening to them instead of talking at them if after this talk I go up to you and I'm like hey did you like my talk you'll say yes because saying no would be rude I hope I wouldn't learn a lot of information from that I would just learn oh this this is not a rude person if I wanted that actual information I would ask you a leading question I

4:27ask you something like could you tell me about some of the points that you learned in some of the talks and let you go from there the more that I'm giving you the reins the more that I'm listening as opposed to telling you exactly yes-or-no questions that I want the more information I get so applying this to business if I was interviewing my audience and trying to figure out what they were doing and I wanted to guide them in a particular direction you could ask a question like could you tell me more about when patients or lay to appointments and that really makes you mad so you poke em extra hard on the gums

4:57you'll know that you're done when you stop learning new information in these interviews this happens 10 to 20 interviews depending on how focused your audience is either that or you're just terrible at listening and you've learned nothing the whole time so we've picked a group of people that we want to help we've talked about their pain now comes the fun part we get to help them with their pain because we've picked such a focus group we're going to avoid a lot of common pitfalls like building something no one wants you can be pretty sure people are gonna want this because you're building a thing in response to

5:31what real people have told you is their real actual problem you'll also avoid problems like spending too much time on details no one cares about so your the things that you're building should be in direct response to helping a person if the feature that you're working on you can't point to exactly okay this is helping a person don't build it skip it if the very first version of your app has crazy auto scaling features and it's multi user authentication and things that's probably not directly helping a person so you don't need it it's much better to ship something as soon as it's ready and then iterate from there based

6:07on feedback lastly it's gonna be very easy for you to market the classic problem of developers that make these software companies is that I built this thing and no one wants it I don't know how to market it how do i how do I get Facebook to do this it's trivially easy now because we work through it from an audience standpoint because we can use the words that people have said of what their pain is and use that right back at them so you could write an ad that's something like don't you hate it when patients are late to their appointments and then start crying in your chair for

6:36no reason here's my product it solves it I've been running a SAS --fill time for the last five years and it's been great um the thing that I've learned though from the microcon community is that building a software business is not about the software building a software business is fundamentally about helping people I've met several founders who have built a business that's helps tens of thousands of people and haven't written a single line of code because they're very hyper focused on helping people the more that you can focus on falling in love with the process of solving real people's problems instead of building a particular solution to a

7:18problem you can get bored building a particular solution but helping people will never go out of style that's something that'll continue to help you through your business career I promised I'd show you this again at the end microcon Genco for the recaps I'm also taking live recaps of all the socks from today you can watch me furiously typing as it goes through and if you sign up at the email lists on the bottom I'll send you a free PDF recap of all events thank you very much you