The Necessary Ingredients for Being Successful, and Making Them Happen in Your Biz – Amy Hoy

0:00[Music] [Music] so the talk title that was in the on the speakers page on my comp comm was if you hate drunken frat boys don't open an Irish pub I have to say that the talk that I actually wrote for this day kind of evolved away from that but I feel like I can't put a title like that out there without giving you the reason why yes I did combine clipart to make a barfing Shamrock it is barfing rainbows I do not feel like rainbows are a good thing though so don't don't get my opinions about frat boys confused so I have some friends who are super super into karaoke and some of

0:50them don't live in town when they came to Philly to visit we're like we have to go do karaoke and our usual karaoke joint was not having karaoke that night so we did up at McGill ins which is pictured and it's not actually that pixelated in real life so McGill ins first thing it's an Irish pub warning sign second it's actually from 1860 and has been operating continuously since then so it's an old Irish pub now I don't like Irish pubs that much as you might have guessed I do love my friends however and so we went to karaoke and there was a guy doing yes that's Sarah

1:25so it's Toni Sarah and Alex right so I mean for some reason toni has a balloon animal crown thing there was a guy doing balloon animals there and it was full of people like this but less attractive and we had fun because we were really trying hard to have fun but honestly didn't really enjoy the location or the music or the people so it was kind of a wash except for the fact that my friends were there and so of course it made me think of Socrates right cuz when doesn't karaoke make you think it Socrates or am i right all right men are mortal the

2:03example goes Socrates is a man therefore Socrates is mortal I think we can all agree with this right that's basic logic that's a syllogism totally makes sense so I hate frat boy Irish pubs attract frat boys therefore I will not off my own leg before I ever open an Irish pub now you might think okay Amy that's hilarious but what does that have to do with business how many people here are frustrated with their customers who here is afraid to raise their hand a lot of us we start businesses because we think we're going to solve problem and we never really think about who are we solving it for

2:46and can I stand them and that was gonna be my one of the theological points in my old talk and I was going to make a joke about when Irish eyes are crying so yeah the talks not actually gonna happen this talk however is actually about shut up and take my money which is pretty good right not as good as karaoke pretty good hi by the way I'm Amy as you may have already guessed I teach a class called 30 by 500 I call myself a product Crusader and product wise my husband and I started a business this was our first software-as-a-service freckle time tracking and since we launched it at the

3:27end of December 2008 we have grossed 461 thousand dollars and in March it was twenty seven thousand six hundred and fifty five dollars and when I tell people this they say on time tracking honestly can you think of anything more boring well yes I could sorry was it wasn't a hiccup or was that someone gonna say something more boring the time tracking yeah yes you can make this kind of money on time tracking and that is what this talk is all about because there's a secret which a lot of us out there staring us in the face but we don't see it and that's the talks about and by the

4:04way the secret is secret I will reveal it at the very end of the talk but I'm hoping that if you pay attention you will guess it beforehand in which case I will buy you a free drink at the party later but this talk actually isn't about me even though I've been talking about myself up to this point this talks actually about you could I see a show of hands if you folks who already have a business who already have act out in the wild awesome that's so great I'm so glad to hear that is it profitable looks like our hands were down by about half is it now your main source of

4:40income looks like we went down by half again we have sort of a I forget the mathematical term for that I'm a girl when it out insult your gender always good for laughs so you folks who have businesses who raise your hands yes I have a product out in the wild are you worried about marketing if I worried I mean doesn't make you uneasy when you sit down to do it doesn't make you uncomfortable do you feel like you're searching about for ideas do you feel like you're not doing it just right can I see a show of hands all right that's a good portion about you and I

5:15think the rest of you are probably lying right do you worry about your prices are you pricing are you charging too little are you charging too much when people say your prices are too high is that really why they're not buying all that stuff do you worry about pricing can I see all right lots of people fantastic and finally all these things together are you concerned that you're not making as many sales as you should or ought to be all right that's pretty much everybody awesome that was more to the fact that you took the effort to raise your arms then that you're concerned about stuff just so you know so those of

5:48you who have not got approached out in the wild yet do you actually have something in the works already your hands awesome or are you still looking for the right idea okay just a few of you Wow hope you're not bored are you guys worried about marketing you guys who haven't launched a product yet yeah are you freaking out that you're gonna build something and then no one will buy it okay the laughter means I just hit on a real nerve even more awesome so everybody would you like to feel more certain that you're doing the right thing every day in your business I know I would I screw

6:31up all the time and if you don't raise your hand for this you're either of not paying attention or dead or a liar would you like to make more money with less stress effort and less waste okay all right good that's why you're here right that are the the drinks again so shut up and take my money how do we get to this point this quote by the way is something that one of my students said to one of the other students who kept talking on the mailing list about his product and everyone was so revved up to buy it one guy actually said shut up and take my

7:02money he wanted to buy it it wasn't launched yet that's the kind of response we could all do with a little bit more of in our lives right and the secret they were going to talk about today or talk around is about making that happen and the secret is really obvious once you see it it's easy to understand and difficult to master know the secret is not go or chess and it is the key to the universe at least the universe made of people but first we're going to take a little trip down experience Lane has this ever happened to you this is a recruiters email that I

7:41got and what's really irritating mathesar cruise email is it came from somebody whose company I was aware of in Philadelphia now I was so pissed at this I tweeted about how they're lying scumbags and then they got into Twitter conversation with me and it ended up with an apology and my inbox has so many of my Twitter conversations do and it made me so mad that I couldn't control myself I just tweeted why the hell is the theme ale so irritating and I know that if you're here and you're designer developer you've received emails just as infuriating right from recruiters I mean has anyone not received an irritating a

8:17recruiter email okay fantastic the first reason this was really irritating was because I came across your resume today is a total lie right off the bat I love they lied to me whatever but why normal recruiter emails such as they are are irritating is because of things like this I'm highlighted in pink all the phrases where the recruiter is talking about himself and the company this is a lot of pink in this slide I highlighted all the sentences that began them that is most of them there is no room for me in this email it's like a giant gaping maw appeared in my inbox with me me me can you tell I feel kind

9:05of emotional about this I hope that didn't hurt anybody's ears sorry if only everybody in the world would read one book if I could force everyone to read one book perhaps in their native language it would be this one how to win friends and influence people which is a terrible talk title because the issue a show of hands who has read this book oh wow you are people after my own heart most people especially most of us intellectual types would be like I don't know that sounds like sleazy marketing and manipulation I won't read it but this book is fantastic and the author of the book didn't get to title it so in

9:40this book Dale Carnegie takes if you like lips apart he he has some tear downs and some real letters he and his students have received and he says things like in other words that in which we are most interested is mentioned last and the whole effect is one of raising a spirit of antagonism rather than of cooperation aka the email I just took down for you this was the way that that email closed this is the first part first time they really talked about me other than me as something that they wanted if you were curious or interested in speaking with us further please feel free to let me know a few good days

10:16times you are available to speak first of all if you're curious worst pitch ever right well us Vegas his tagline isn't if you're curious please feel free to let me know douchebag right they can't even come out and say what they want they have to sort of dance around it and that is that's why this kind of email is so irritating what I did is I analyzed this I realized that fully 70% of words in this email are ones that in sentences that start with I or we oh my gosh it's all about what they want and this is actually my favorite line from how to win friends

10:59and influence people and I'm going to dramatize it for you right now you desire you desire you unmitigated ass keep in mind this guy was riding in like 1920s he's my hero I'm not interested in what you desire or what Mussolini desires are what Bing Crosby desires let me tell you once and for all I'm only interested in what I desire and you haven't said a word about that and this absurd letter of yours it's not awesome so I don't know if if someone else was on the stage presenting this to me right now I would be thinking all I'm doing way better than they are

11:37that is truly obnoxious that email for one I don't lie my sales pages yada yada yada it's so easy to look at this and think well I'm not that bad I'm not a recruiter therefore I'm not evil but the sad fact is that we are all guilty as hell or guilty as recruiters same thing so I have some examples for you Microsoft there's actually a box on this page it says I want to but if you look at the headlines find the perfect gift no one goes to Microsoft com looking for a gift this is the marketer wants you to want which could be a good cheap trick

12:15song but it is not a good landing page and you think all right Microsoft they're totally socially boneheaded nobody looks to Microsoft for how to talk to people well then there's the other people content streaming content marketing is our favorite phrase if you'll notice this paragraph not a single word about it is in about their customers not even indirectly there's no word you there's no indication of what you can actually do it's all blah blah blah blah and let's talk about us now the Kapost content marketing platform enables brands to efficiently produce compelling content to grow traffic and revenue you think startups better right well no not so much I looked up a list

12:57of Y Combinator startups and they're like one sentence pitches and you'll notice that every single one of these is about them only one of them even contains the word you this is kind of sad and it's a sickness which I call verbal diarrhea I was gonna make that brown but I decided that I would protect your delicate sensibilities and make it read and said I'm not immune so Patrick and Keith had me on their podcast a few weeks ago and Patrick said basically why don't you take this opportunity to pitch us on 30 by 500 and what did I do I was not prepared and I would I i i i i

13:41i and then dale carnagie bitch-slapped me from the past and said you unmitigated ass i wanna hug him from the grave diagnosis only human so I make this mistake I'm intimately aware of this problem and I fight it every day but I still make this mistake it takes preparation to avoid but we all start off with me me me me we are natural narcissists have you figured out the secret yet so if you look at these elevator pitches and you think all right all right they do all start with the company name but they think they're pitching their company's about them that's just a copywriting problem and we

14:27know that there are these copy copywriting tools we can use to fix these copywriting problems they exist for a reason show don't tell benefits not features USP focus on the reader and it's true that there are companies which do a vastly superior job hi guys so postmark is an excellent service which solves real problems and they have benefits and a USP right in the very first paragraph way way better than anything I've shown you this far jump chart having a plan feels good that is a benefit we say it feels good that's definitely benefit speak Apple is not usually a good model to follow because there Apple we can't be Apple but they

15:08do a great thing or the perhaps the best example of showing don't tell until Steve Jobs passed away and suddenly they started using talking people and their commercials all Apple commercials had no speaking or they had speaking only from an invisible person using Siri up to that point was like you were in the ad video chatting with your baby across the ocean or zooming and pinching pictures or rocking out with your iPod and it's silhouette but is better copywriting enough I'm guessing that by the fact that I asked this question you know that the answer is no but let me prove it to you so I was looking for anti examples

15:51the other day when I was preparing my talk and it's like you can't search for bad landing pages and expect to get anything so my husband had the fantastic idea of looking up product project management apps of which there are like eight point three billion right there's one project management app for every man woman and child on earth it seems like and they all look like this it's the best project management in the cloud your people projects clients files and budgets managed it lasts this sounds like benefits doesn't it oh so does this it's made easy you can stay on track share and collaborate oh this is project

16:32management for the rest of us rest of us who who don't already have a project management app collaborate with your team to project success these are all benefits but they're not actually doing anything for us I don't know do these make you want to sign up anybody new I want that exactly no one wants that even though they are benefits they appear to be doing things right here's benefits it's focused on the user so is this deliver on time never miss a mile so again these are benefits but something is not right and if you've been taking paying attention you probably think USP right they don't have

17:12a USP in fact they all look the same well USP is the unique selling proposition and as Entrepreneur Magazine writes unless you can pinpoint what makes your business unique in the world of homogeneous competitors you cannot target your sales efforts successfully so I know that actually I think all three of those apps make pretty sick money but a hundred percent of their copywriting can be swapped out from one to the other and you would never know the difference also the phrase easy to use is no longer credible I've seen it applied to Microsoft Project Union ooh by a quantum super collider it's easy to use so where do you ESPYs come from we

17:58didn't focus on the first aspect of this acronym unique selling proposition and as i flossed my teeth this morning I thought I know floss made from diamond razor blades that is a hundred percent unique but would you buy it know where we should be focusing on is the unique selling proposition this is the actual reality of what makes a USP a USP and this is the phrase you've heard all weekend and by weekends I mean Monday Tuesday I where am I what day is it what country and land um be sure you're solving a real pain talk about the customers pain in the case of diamond

18:38razor floss the pain will be all my gums so diamond razor floss unique selling maybe not so much and the only conclusion is that uniqueness at least in terms of a unique selling proposition which wouldn't fit on the slide is quantum and so Schrodinger asks us who is the observer have you guessed the secret yet so what makes bad copywriting what leads to the atrocious recruiter emails and the atrocious project management app landing pages which nevertheless seem to hit all the bullets well first of all of course lack of skill knowledge if you don't know how to write copy chances are the copy you write would bad or you're distracted or

19:23lazy you don't prepare you don't sit down and practice you don't get all your materials you don't talk to customers and finally fuzzy picture of your audience which I'm going to highlight because it's important and these this is what make that this was what makes up back copywriting these are the three diseases that cause bad copywriting funnily enough they're also the three diseases that make bad software so if we look look at these project manager apps which seemed to hit all the checkmarks you need to check off to have good copywriting benefits focus focus on the customer use action words well what do you think alright well fine let's add

20:05a USP let's make it better can you where does the USP come from can you add one to these project management apps which is a phrase I hope to never utter again can you add a USP well USP is another term for killing a real pain it either has to be baked into the product or you're screwed and these apps mm-hmm overshot they're on the arrow key a little too excited these apps don't appear to have a USP probably cuz they don't have a USP have you guessed it secret yet so let's review our argument we all want easier selling and less doubt like who likes doubt pretty much

20:58nobody we're all natural narcissists especially me good selling revolves around the audience and good copywriting techniques and yet so good products and we have these bumper sticker bits of advice that we use when we try to make products and try to then write about products be sure you're solving a real pain focus on them not you and Schrodinger should have said this but he didn't sell ability is in the eye of the beholder or observer so have you guessed the secret yet here comes so this seems pretty obvious right product plus customer equals business what can you take away here if you take away the customer you have no business in my

21:48class I teach people that the fundamental truth of business is that it is to create and serve a customer as Peter Drucker wrote which means that if you have no customer you have no business which means that if you speculatively create a product and then say who will buy this you don't have a business and you're not going to the customer is the MVP not the product you perhaps call it Minimum Viable customers we're probably already said that but I'm gonna pretend I came up with it if you look at the customer the customer will tell you what real pain is they will tell you what value is

22:27to them which will let you create a USP it will help you position your product and of course it will help you price it and sell it without the customer you're just sort of flapping around in the wind throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks spaghetti is the g-rated version I want to quote Dale Carnegie again because I am a total fangirl and this is just a fantastic little story he's wrote I go fishing up in Maine every summer personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream but I find that for some strange reason fish prefer worms so when I go fishing I

22:58don't think about what I want I think about what they want I don't bake the hook with strawberries and cream rather I dingle a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and say wouldn't you like to have that and that's what we all need to do we need to bait the hook to suit the fish but what most of us end up doing is we bait the hook with something we're interested in it and then we sort of cast around hoping that we're gonna find a fish and maybe so you're for different types of fish and then we're gonna craft different value propositions for each

23:30one of those fish instead of just giving them what they want to start with products like this come from what I call ego first development we think I want a project management tool therefore I will build one and then we think it's special because it's ours maybe there's just one tiny little difference but instead of building on that and talking to customers we think all right well it's special because it's mine and that's why these are so interchangeable because the message the benefits and the USP of all these products is it's mine it's not this solves your problem differently than those other tools the only USP they

24:07have is I did it so if you start with your customer first before you do anything before you set down a single line of code a single chapter in your ebook before you write the outline if you look at the customer first you won't answer these questions and you will remove down what should I build or write or film who will buy it the customer that you already picked duh scratch that one out what do they want what will they pay and how can I make sales and that is how my husband and I were able to build a very very very part-time business selling something

24:44very very very boring with no SEO we do no search ads we do done a couple banner ads ever wasn't really impressed by it but we've built a business that's nearly thirty thousand dollars a month on time tracking something nobody cares about nobody cares about that because we solve a real pain I know that this is probably hard to read so I just pulled out a couple of the bits of text here what do people who use time tracking hate they hate tracking their time so we would write up and acknowledged it we said our software it's super fast so you don't have to use it basically we eliminate

25:24your use of the product as much as possible we help you get rid of the guilt that you feel because you don't track your time and that nasty feeling you get that you're losing money cuz you're actually just estimating your hours weeks later and we make it super easy to keep a watchful eye on your budget but you'll notice that I just set up here said we make it easy but when I wrote the copy and wrote rewrote it and edited it I cut out as many references to us as possible but if we hadn't actually designed the software around specific pains we already knew people

25:59had this wouldn't have worked this wouldn't have saved it this wouldn't have helped us make sales here's another example I like the Pell he said earlier that he had a second product syndrome because I had actually wrote that in my notes the day before to talk about charm charm is our white whale charm is a customer support tool Here I am talking about the product but this is the sales page that I wrote you didn't ever want to he hate hearing from your customers does that grab anybody anybody here hate opening email client because they cannot stand dealing with the email not that they'd mind what's in the emails but that the

26:38whole process is just so irritating and you set out trying to make a business that was customer responsive you want to talk to your customers you want to feel involved in their lives and yet you really find yourself avoiding and cursing at your support inbox now this is just a sales page all this does is collected email hazards at the bottom and it goes on and on and on it's a long sales page and it doesn't that's one screenshot it doesn't really talk about features but over time we've gotten nearly 3,500 people on our announcement list because of the strength of the pains that I outlined people were

27:14tweeting that sales page people I didn't know when they were going oh my god this is so true that just the sales page made them feel like they weren't a bad person and they weren't alone and they were super excited about it the 37signals guys are not our friends in fact we search that out to compete with them it hasn't really materialized but Ryan singer tweeted our sales page not because we asked him but because he found it organically and was kind of impressed by it but this is not the all a me all the time show you here brennan britain britain's one of my 3,500

27:52students and he runs a consultancy in virginia and his new product is plan scope and it's doing awesome and if you look at plan scope and compare it to those other project management tools you're looking at there is no doubt in your mind who is this for what does it do why the should i give a [ __ ] right the days of i have some concerns calls are over that is so specific but anyone think okay i use project management but i don't care about i have concerns calls that doesn't appeal to me but it appeals to his audience and he worked backwards from the audience determine what problems

28:28they have and then he wrote the sales page and wrote the software to solve them directly and how long have you been out like six weeks little less than two months and brennan is not famous i did tweet about it a few times but he's already got his revenues up to you without just under a thousand dollars a month which is just a little bit below where we started with freckle and now it's you know a three hundred and forty thousand dollar a year business and he has achieved this not through fame not through connections but because he investigated the customer he figured out what hurts and that he solved that pain

29:05for them and then he communicated that the copywriting was the last step if he hadn't have designs app that way the copywriting could have been the best in the world that wouldn't have mattered but one example is not enough has anyone seen this ebook bootstrapping design alright fantastic written by a great guy named Jared Drysdale I hope I'm saying that right Jared another 3,500 alumni and another person who investigated the audience figured out what they needed and they crafted a product invent a sales page to make them feel better to help them solve a specific problem that's with pain they had now bootstrapping design is still in

29:45beta and I think he launched it just about a month ago and he's made twenty six thousand six hundred and twenty-five dollars in sales as of when I tweeted him about two hours ago anyone ever hear don't write a book for the money yeah everybody's heard that right no one are you alive what do they tell you you're like come write a book for us PS don't do it for the money first of all conflict of interest right second of all you could absolutely write a book for the money if you solve a real problem and don't set out to write everything about XML for example don't

30:22run a Rox book write a book like this and Jared said to me that his first product was about him and his idea and it failed he created a website for teachers that let you do let teachers here I'm doing it again see it's just natural comes out that way he created website for teachers to help them manage grade books and do all these fun statistical things and track trends and identify problem students so they can help them and all sorts of really cool stuff and it was really really beautiful and over the year he had about 120 free trial signups a hundred of which he bought with AdWords at total

30:57exactly users who paid for at least one month this was a year of his work and when I met Jared he was like what he said to me first time we met on the internet he said there's some funded startups copying my idea I'm just a little bootstrapper what do I do and I said well what's your idea and he pointed me at knack for teachers and I said let them have it let them discover and waste the money on this white whale you're never gonna make money off teachers for this reason and you might think well Patrick makes money off teachers Patrick you here would you

31:31recommend trying to make money off teachers no Patrick wasn't able to make money off teachers because he's a genius at optimization at marketing at conversion or he became one because he went up against this white whale and he had to figure out ways to trap the damn thing you don't trap whale spear that's the thing you spear whales you're here Patrick Spears whales but and that made Patrick a smarter person but he would never recommend you do it because it's a mistake and if you had sat down with a bunch of teachers or looked at what they did online do teachers pay for stuff you'd realize no and so when Jared took

32:11my class he learned the backwards way to do it and he said my second product was about understanding customers and i grossed twenty six thousand six hundred and twenty-five dollars since launch let me just say that again he actually made way more money way faster than we did off our first ebook and that's the power of starting with your customer first don't start with your idea don't look for an idea look for a customer who you can like who pays money for things and then investigate the [ __ ] out of them because then you won't have to ask yourself these questions how do I get

32:45them to buy how do I find them on the internet how do i market to them when I have a budget of zero look for them if you find them on the Internet you know how to market them to them with four zero if you need to know how to get them to buy you look at their actual buying habits look what they talk about what should i what feature should I build what kind of product should it be should it be a fancy Excel spreadsheet or a standalone web app I know lots of people who've tried to replace Excel with something better only to find out that

33:12users will never quit Excel they love Excel they're crazy but they love Excel and they're there for if you try to get them something better than Excel they'll be like I don't know what you're talking about all I see is Excel everywhere Stockholm Syndrome with software is a very real thing but there's no way you can cure that if you said I have to cure people before they'll give you money you're gonna fail or if you need to know how much how much should I charge how much will they pay how much should you charge is a question of value and you can't no value until you know the customer you

33:48know if Bob down the street manages his multinational of Basecamp his value the base base camps value for him is huge if Joe down the other Street uses it to manage his Magic the Gathering playgroup base camps value for him is essentially zero and that's why you need to look to your customer so I recipe ensure it is to find some customers that you like not frat boys okay unless you're selling button-down shirts with palpable collars lurk and study them again not frat boys you'll never be able to wash the stink out of your eyes identify their pain figure out what they actually hurt where they actually hurt

34:28because if you're trying to sell solutions to people who won't admit they're in pain that's the end of it already and then solve the actual pain that they actually have and then you'll have people chopping at the bit saying shut up and take my money so the customer is the MVP go find one thank you

34:55I had to work my other personal hero into this presentation I actually have a lot of personal heroes but this one's the one of the funniest as in really anyone not know who this is you don't know is okay fantastic this is romp appeal you might know him from such infomercials as the Ronco pocket fisherman or the wrong coast Showtime rotisserie or the wrong Cove this baton the other sorry spray on here well not one of his prouder moments what's amazing about Ron appeal is that this man has sold over two billion dollars worth of product in his career two billion and if you would like to know

35:39what it's like to be a showman and to sell things I cannot recommend more of the book but wait there's more where if you read it you'll go wow this sounds a lot like customer development and anyway that's that now questions sorry questions I don't bite hard

36:07so just in talking with with Brennan like he was solving he was his own customer because he runs a consultancy business what are your thoughts on you know solving your own personal need you are your own customer all that stuff it could go either way so it could go either way it depends on how flexible and willing to research things you are if someone came to me it said oh I have this problem therefore although the product I would just tell them that they're crazy the first thing to do is to go and research other people because you're let's face it you're not gonna buy your

36:42product from yourself and it's a shortcut that sometimes works because sometimes we're an archetype but most of the time we're not like a lot of people say well I would never buy that I'm a developer developers don't buy things and they are full of crap so it's nice if a problem that you're going to solve if a pain that you're gonna kill is something you also feel because it gives you extra added motivation but you must must must must not skip the step of finding people who pay for things you like who you like who can be persuaded to tell you their pains and then you can

37:16sell something to them other questions

37:28I just I used to run a business with this guy next to me and then I sold out but I really missed the customers and so I would just like to have customers regardless of what they need and try to build it for them so I tried to build something that said hey I need customers and tell me what you want and I'll build it and didn't get really much response so for someone who wants to be customer driven but doesn't have a product yet how do they find potential customers well it would be nice if we could ask people what they wanted and they would

38:01tell us but as anyone who's married knows that doesn't work except for me I tell Thomas exactly what I want it still doesn't happen I'm not sure how this works out sorry honey Thomas is very gracious in being the butt of all of my jokes you can't ask people also if you ask people they will lie to you this has shown time and time again with surveys especially about like medical compliance like taking their medicines and things that will save their lives they'll say they'll do it and then they won't do it and they'll say oh I won't pay for this and then they pay for it anyway they either

38:35forgot they paid for before or they change their minds or when they speak things just don't connect with the other part of their brain it's a great example Sony did a focus group on which color should they make they're like portable disc pen I was redundant this meant black or yellow all the kids said oh I want the yellow and then they left the table of them outside and said take one as you leave it's our free gift to you every single kid took a black one humans are duplicity even to ourselves so you cannot ask what you have to do is watch what they actually do don't listen to

39:06what a person says watch what they actually do when they don't think that you're watching so go to forums somebody yesterday suggested go look at your competitors public support sites that's fantastic look at what people blog about what they talk about it user groups what they tweet about that is the goldmine because if you ask them one what is their motivation and telling you that you're going to build something for them they won't believe that two people are terrible at coming up with solutions for problems they already have three people don't even realize most the pains they have when we were building I kept telling people about how it was

39:40gonna make something better and they're like I don't have a problem and then I laid out specific pains and great detail and they said oh that's I dunno what you're talking about so you cannot trust them to say anything useful do you have to research them and watch them this is really an annoyingly time-consuming process but it'll give you so much good data and most people are too lazy to do it which gives you a natural competitive advantage okay this is a total softball but I am curious can what is this class that you mentioned thank you for asking I did not plant him actually not a plant I teach a class

40:19called 30 by 500 which is all about helping designers and developers make their first product and this is like a condensed version of the first few lessons because I don't mind giving it away and I know that it will help people because we all tend to look at it the wrong way just like we tend to write emails and talk about ourselves in the wrong way and the class covers a lot of different things how to do the research how to find people how to narrow down potential customers people who really aren't how to figure out from that data that you've collected what to build and how to sell

40:53it and all price it and all that good stuff and I don't have to sell it so much when I give talks cuz it sells out like that and I give it I give it twice a year if you want information just follow me and there's a link on my blog thank you so if if you had already invested a bunch of time and energy trying to make money off of teachers do you or Patrick have advice on making that exceed or would you abort mission I would abort the teachers um I'm not I don't have any experience at all and repurposing something for a different

41:34audience this is this is how I do it this is all the only way I've ever done it I don't have specific advice for turning around a product my inclination would be to stop and start fresh the right way but not to waste years of your life trying to micro optimize pennies out of poppers but if you have something it's possible your product could be repurposed in which case you could pivot and do customer validation and all that good Lean Startup stuff but I wouldn't count on it all right we have time for one more nobody yes it's a nice comment I also love the Dale Carnegie book and I'd

42:22highly recommend the audiobook because it's just it's funny because all those old-fashioned languages like you unmitigated ass the way the guy narrates it and also uh what's the one I'd rather the drop a honey gallon of golfing I love ya so check it out that that quote and it's easier to attract flies or the drop of honey than a gallon of gall was in mine quotes to possibly work into my presentation but nobody knows what gall is I was like cook gall is the this the green stomach acid that you vomit up if you vomit really hard in an empty stomach it's secreted by your pancreas

43:04or something and it's really really nasty it burns things that's gross sorry yes yes and now in just a few moments we're gonna go out and eat ice cream thanks Amy thank you [Applause] you