Idea Validation and Customer Development – Mike Taber – MicroConf Starter 2017

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0:15so I'm probably gonna be a little bit more energy right now just then I have the past couple of days because I've been trying to catch up and you know take things easy until we we go through this my throat is very raw I will try to get through it so I'm gonna be talking to you today about idea and customer validation and as soon as that thing comes up we will get started so we're gonna go through all these different things we're gonna talk a little bit about idea validation and customer validation where there are a little bit combined so we'll talk about some of the

0:43differences between them kind of the first phases of what people have kind of learned over the past several years and probably the past decade or so and then we're going to talk about how to get your initial audience so after that we're gonna go through idea validation specifically and it's that encompasses how to validate and make sure that the problem that you're solving something that people actually want solve after that we're gonna dig into customer validation differences between them we'll also cover we're going to talk about some of the mistakes to avoid lies we tell ourselves and we're gonna wrap things up at the end with some lessons

1:14learned so why is validation important and this kind of goes back to validation 1.0 which is how to launch a product and this is kind of the classic thing that everybody looks at again this is a little bit dated in terms of idea validation first step find an idea so you can either talk to people you go out on the internet you find some things that you're looking for or you can't find a tool to do something and so you decide that you're going to you know build this because you can't find anything so you go out and you decide to build this product we're not real sure

1:48what happens at Step three this is the classic reddit mechanism for launching a product but somehow we're going to figure this out we're reasonably smart people and after that we're just gonna cash in make our millions maybe sell out maybe not but eventually we're just going to roll in the twenty dollar bills on the mattress and the fact is that this doesn't work and it's not immediately clear why we understand that in step three we don't really know what's going on we're not real sure what to do but the fact is that we know after looking at experiences from various people time and time again this does not

2:19work so we're going to talk about why this doesn't work but biggest risk that is being overlooked with step three is the fact that you're not you're building the product that's not the problem everyone in here or most people in this room are probably developers in some capacity that's the vast majority the audience that comes to micro coffee when you look at a product that's not the risk the biggest risk is finding the customers you're not sure where to find them you're not sure how to get in touch with them you're not sure that you're solving the right pain points for them you're not sure about

2:49the SEO there's all those things that go into it so essentially what you're doing is you're deferring that risk building the products and not the problem you can do that eventually you'll get it done even if it's really hard even it's a lot harder than you thought and that's easy to get into a trap of going through building a product you think it's a lot easier than it is I'm sure Rob went through this with drip I'm definitely going through it with bluetick where I thought it was going to be a heck of a lot easier than it is and there are certain times where you just

3:15miss estimate it and that's going to happen but if you hold back on the marketing you hold back on the customer development what you end up doing is you're under deferring that risk rather than dealing with it if you've ever estimated a project you know that those technical risks or if you push them off they're going to become a problem anyone in here ever do consulting anyone ever here try to push off the biggest risks till the end how well does that work we all know that it doesn't work but when we develop products and historically over the past five to ten years a lot of

3:48people have done this part of it's because they're uncomfortable part of it's because they don't know what to do part of it is because they don't have that roadmap and sometimes they just don't really want to do it some people just don't like the marketing side and part of it's because you're not technical or you are technical you're not marketing savvy you're like oh I'm sorry away from that I'm a reasonably smart person I'll figure it out and the problem is you go out and you build this product you take it into the market and this is the way things go you're going out there and you're like yes I've got

4:20this product I've built it and we're gonna take it out in the market I'm gonna takes market by storm it's ten times better than all these other products and you know you're just gonna overrun them it's going to be easy but you get out there and then things turn on you whether it's the market or the competitors or even the product itself and you're like hold on this is not looking good in your response to why things are not working is because it's it's the beta and that's not right at all the problem is that you've deferred that risk that risk you pushed it off and it does not go away because you

5:00ignored it it's like other problems in your life if you ignore marital problems they don't go away so the issue with that is that by ignoring those problems you actually make them worse further on so my voice here so we're gonna talk about validation 2.0 kind of what that involves so validation 2.0 a little bit more slightly more complicated but it helps people avoid mistakes and I ran a survey last year where I looked at a bunch of bootstrap businesses it was back in January so about sixty sixty-five people came back with it a response of some kind and I went through those and I looked said how many of these succeed

5:49and how many of them don't and only one out of three succeeded and that's sort of great but at the same time that means that there's 67% that don't so when you start looking at numbers like that it's kind of scary you want to say okay well let's take a step back this first step there this first phase of validation validation 1.0 it does not work how can we improve it how do we make that better so you come up with your idea and then you go talk to customers

6:23I don't want to talk to anybody I want to sit behind my computer my keyboard doesn't yell at me it doesn't say that's but this there's a bug here it doesn't complain it just runs programs and that's nice it's helpful but it makes you it does make you feel good but the problem is that it doesn't give you this sense of confidence that you're actually doing the right things so you have to get validation to point out you go out you find the receptive audience you start talking to them ask them questions find out are you on the right track are is the problem that you're solving actually

7:01a pain point that they have and a lot of times it's not you may think it is but it is not there's other times where you may think that a particular market has a problem and they do but they're not willing to pay for it so there's that idea of validation phase and then there's the customer validation phase right after it so again you go talk to these people ask them a bunch of questions you get commitments from them and this is dicey this little this piece here is does not always work well and I'll talk a little bit more about that and after you go after you've gone

7:36through those then you build the product then you start going back to those people and that's when you get the money that's when you start selling the product making it profitable building a business out of that I want to point to this book that was brought to my attention by James Kennedy last year he spoke at growth Edition and he also spoke at the microcon Europe Edition this past fall and he pointed out this book that he learned a heck of a lot from and the the key piece that stuck out in my mind from this book that he'd brought my attention to was that there's

8:12essentially this process of sales you find out what people want you go out and get it and then you give it to them in that order so the out of order part in that word is is the key piece of this you can do this out of order however it's much much more difficult we've actually we already have some questions earlier talked about some of the business model if you're doing this out of order and a lot of people do it myself included but there's probably a lot of people in this audience who have done that where you build something and then you go and try

8:47and find the people to buy it and the problem is you're shoehorning into a different market or to try and get it to people that it was not necessarily originally designed for or targeted at and you have in your mind it will solve these problems but those are are not necessarily aligned with what their problems are this is very similar to analogy in analogy that I came up with a while ago about pizza so with pizza it's designed of as well it's not designed but it's a you use pizza to fulfill a need which is hunger and let's say that it gets to be dinnertime tonight would you go out and

9:28buy a pizza and then bring it in and say hey you're probably hungry let you know it's pay me $10 for a slice of pizza chances are could probably not even if it looks like this it sounds fantastic you're like yes look at that pizza it's fantastic it's like a cake but you've got people that are like anyone in here have kids lots of lots of people you ever make something for your kids for dinner and then ask them if they want it it it doesn't go like this I could guarantee it absolutely does not if even if you ask them what is it that you want

10:13I want chicken nuggets this is the response sometimes I don't want chicken nuggets I want tacos but you said chicken nuggets and they're not gonna say well I lied but that's kind of what happens sometimes and customers can be the same way they may tell you they want something or that something is important and it is not always the case and it's not that they're lying to you in all cases sometimes they are but most of the time what's happening is that they are surfacing something as a pain and you misinterpret it or you misunderstand exactly what it was that they were talking about so sometimes there's a

10:48something lost in that translation so can always take what they say at face value you have to respond to their behavior you have to understand what it is that they're doing and how they react versus what they've told you so let's move on a little bit to the book the 4-hour workweek how many people have read this alright fair number of people how many people like it okay all right so if you're if you're not familiar with the book the title the 4-hour workweek came from him from Tim Ferriss doing a bunch of experiments where he went out online drove a bunch of traffic to a

11:24bunch of different ads and decided on the title of the book based on the traffic that he drove and what respond resonated with people and what did not and the problem with that is that it can get very expensive it's also very emotionally driven but it is not necessarily data oriented because because of that emotional component it may work well or better for something like an information product or something that's an impulse by where the price or the the cost of that good is much lower but if you're selling a SAS application or a desktop app or mobile mobile app sometimes but um there's they may be a

11:58little bit lower but with those other types of products that doesn't necessarily work as well and it's only partially a function of that emotional component the biggest piece is that it's difficult to send that traffic and I've tried this before I've died I did it this past year so I was evaluating two different products to build it and this is the one that I actually thought was going to go well and much like somebody else in the audience I had a consultant customer come to me and if I remember correctly they paid me around $60,000 to basically build a program they would take a bunch of spreadsheets load them into a

12:33database pull the data out and give them an Excel Swan excel spreadsheet that was combined from multiple sources and they could just look at the data in that one spot and I had to do this thing over and over again and it was a pain in the neck and everything had to be formatted right and I was like God if I only had a program that would take all these things and piece them together in such a way that I could write essentially code that would say oh well take this column over here if it's named this thing do that do this translation with this piece of data

13:00and then aggregate all these rows sounded fantastic it was like I could really use this and IV I've been in that situation before I'm sure that some people in this room have had that problem where you've got a data source of some kind and you need to extract a bunch of data out of it apply some sort of a transform and then load it into some other system like a sequel database or my sequel or what have you so that was the basic idea and so I went oh god what about trying to say okay well I've gone down this road before I want to make sure that I'm going in the right

13:30direction so let me see if I can drive traffic to it and it was actually very very difficult to drive that traffic and what little traffic I was able to drive it was difficult to get in touch with those people I couldn't talk to them they wouldn't talk to me so what I found was that in addition to being overly expensive it was very difficult to get in touch with those people and I spent more time trying to track those people down than actually talking to them it was just absolutely absurd in the fact that the customer development side of it was so difficult meant that I knew it

14:04was gonna be difficult to grow the business in any meaningful way so I said okay well I have this other idea based on quite frankly microcon sponsorships people have asked me kind of where the idea for blue tick came from so in the early days of microcon back in 2011 12 13 timeframe what I had to do is as Robin mentioned earlier there's a delineation between us in terms of who works with sponsors and who works with the the speakers for the most part so he handles the speaker side of the house I tend to handle sponsors and even if I know who the sponsor is even if we have

14:37a relationship sometimes it's difficult for me to get on the radar at a high enough level that they're going to respond to an email so I looked at and said well you know I I need to follow up with these people just to kind of paint them again make sure that I'm getting in their mailbox that they're I'm getting a response of some kind and even if the response is no I don't care but I need to know one way or the other because I've only got this limited number of slots etc and I looked at this idea back in 2013 or 14 or so and I said well I'm

15:06sure that I'm not the only event planner that has this particular problem there's got to be lots of others and I talked to a few other people I had some friends that were in this particular space and they did have the same problem but from a business model perspective didn't really seem like it was a good fit and the reason it wasn't a good fit was because they only did events so often so even if I charged 250 or $500 per event they're only running one each year it makes it difficult to build a large business out of that it would have been a lot easier or at least I've you

15:37did it as a lot easier to find people who were going to pay me more money over a longer period of time rather than trying to land these you know quote unquote big whales of a customer we're gonna pay me four or five hundred dollars a pop but only do it once a year and they may not even cycle out so they might not even be running that event next year so what I did for this is I decided to go out into my network and I said well trying to run ads to something didn't work and I did try to go to my network for the other product the ETL

16:05studio that didn't work I got five people to talk to out of my entire network only one of them said I think I would pay for it and they didn't know of anyone else who had that problem enough that was willing to talk to me or wanted to so I knew again I going back to that I knew that that wasn't gonna fly with this I talked to about 15 people out of 30 to 35 very very quickly it was it was very easy to get on people's radar and at least get a response one way or the other with ETL studio I had less than 10

16:37that I could talk to with this I I was able to easily identify a bunch of people who might be a prospective target doesn't mean that they all said yes it was just that I thought that I could reach them so I emailed a bunch of people and I started doing pre-sales for it I said okay well let me explain my idea this is what I'm trying to do is this a problem that you have and I'm going to show you some of the results for this so over the course of November to December of 2015 I took this idea and I went out to these people and I said

17:09hey I'd like to see what you think of this idea and go through a pre sales process with them and this is what came out of that so between those two months I had a ton of conversations I had 11 people prepay me I had established revenue on paper of $600 Mr in almost $1,500 in revenue and I had not yet written a single line of code to do it and this is a SAS app so a SAS app is a lot more difficult to sell than a lot of other things because you're asking people to make a commitment over time over the course of the next couple

17:48months I so I decided to start writing code in January of 2016 we broke code on it and over the course of the next five months I got it up to twenty prepayments now during that time it was not really going out and trying to actively recruiting new customers I looked at that and said I probably have a pretty good channel these people were just basically being referred to me either from people who had heard about it or heard about it from somebody who made a prepayment I did almost nothing to get it from 600 to to a thousand the rest of them just kind of came in organically

18:18through word-of-mouth so that to me was a really a good indicator of what was going on and I do want to point out the length of time here is important because it's not an overnight process if you look at the graph of what that revenue looks like the the graph of the M are are from the time period that I started all the way up to when I kind of stopped taking those pre payments it is kind of a lengthy time period but like I said I really only focus on it for those first two months and you can see that it kind of grows organically pretty much on its

18:47own and my targeted deployment for early customers was in April that didn't work out for other reasons but I'll talk about those later if anyone has a interest in seeing those so again going back to this the first step that you want to really focus on is identifying those people to talk to you it's really important to find that initial audience whether they're in your current network or they're friends of friends or my wife's a fitness instructor I thought about going into that direction to say okay is there an app that I can build for that particular market and there's lots of ways that you can build this

19:25initial audience there's you know LinkedIn there's Twitter there's Facebook various forum software you can use Google you can just go onto the search results and find and identify people in specific markets you can use Google Local searches if it's a retail business of some kind or e-commerce you can also use paid as extent I wouldn't rely on them solely but you can definitely use those to help gauge interest to see if people are searching for it because if you have a product that is not being searched for it's going to be much harder to sell it because you're gonna have to do outbound sales for those types of products I

20:00would start with between 30 and 40 people and use that as kind of a benchmark for whether or not you should proceed and start with your warm leads the warm leads that you have the people in your personal network are going to be much more likely to talk to you and give you the time of day than cold leads and that actually is important as well because you want to make sure that you're talking to people who are going to give you the time of day because you want to use that to translate it to say well I know that I can oh I'm only talking to about half of these people

20:29only half of them are responding if they're warm leads and you know who they are how is it going to respond when they are cold leads when they have no idea who you are so you have to keep that in mind if it's really hard to reach the people that you know and are in your network it's going to be exponentially harder to reach people who have no idea who you are so we're gonna kind of look at this particular piece of it and there's the people that you know those are the people that you want to start with and I think it I'm sure that it's in

21:03somebody's mind or a couple of people's mind here that you know Oh Mike Taber it runs a podcast it's got you know X thousand listeners he's got a much bigger network than me and that is that's true to some extent but that does not necessarily translate to I have an audience to the particular I have a direct channel to the particular audience that I'm trying to reach and I it's going to be easy it's not gonna be easy no matter what Jason Cohen talked about this for wpengine I think that he posted it to his list of several thousand people I think he got I think

21:31it was less than five people there's like thousands and thousands of people maybe ten or fifteen something like that so he got like five it was it was almost not even worth sending the email um so there's the people that you know and then there's the people that know you and this is kind of where I fall into this mix cuz I might like there's probably more people that know me then you know somebody who doesn't have a podcast for example so I do you want to make that distinction and kind of point that out that I think in many cases it's kind of irrelevant unless your product is specifically

22:04targeted those people you've built a strategy around creating you know a podcast or following or audience in a particular space with the intent to do that stuff later beyond this this is the important part who do you know that can introduce you to other people that would be like the ones that you're trying to target the vast majority of people that I talked to were actually from this group it wasn't from the people I knew it wasn't from the people who knew me it was from basically friends of friends with bluetick I was only amp i started out with probably 15 or 20 people and I

22:45doubled it by asking who is it that you can introduce me to who is it that you know that's also having this particular problem and I do want to point out that this is one of if you go back a couple years ago to the Microsoft website I shall now go to either growth or starter edition up in the videos Rob has a talk from a few years ago that's called the unfair advantages I forget the exact title but it's talks about the unfair advantages that you can leverage as a founder and the people that you can be introduced to that falls under that bracket so the last group of people is

23:27people who have no idea who you are and I want to make it a point here to say that it's important to understand who these people are and whether or not you're gonna be able to reach them because you're not gonna be able to rely just on your network forever you can't rely on just people who you know are friends of friends forever you're gonna have to eventually go to a cold market but just keep that in mind as you're going through the validation process because you're going to need to get there but if you can hone your message enough for those people who know you and get the introductions so those

23:57friends of friends then that will help you because you're gonna be able to have those conversations and get the messaging right and get the product right and get the feature set right and then you can go after that larger market of people who have no idea who you are you can target SEO or paid ads or all those things they're going to grow your business without you having to personally know every single one and that's what we all want we all want a business where it can scale and you don't necessarily know every single customer and it's helpful to be able to do that but we all want to try and jump

24:27there and it's actually a really big step to go from the people you know all the way to the people who have no idea who you are that's a big gap to try and traverse all in one shot and this is validation 1.0 most people actually fail at that like they either don't validate the market at all they don't even talk to people or they'll talk to a few people maybe three or four or something like that they just don't get that critical mass and don't talk to people who are friends of friends I can go to probably a few people in this audience and say hey you know let me let me talk

24:53to you about this particular idea have you probably be receptive to it to some extent but then if I'm talking to somebody that you know and you've introduced me there's that social proof there's that trust factor that's essentially been transferred from you to me enduring that introduction and we'll talk a little bit more about that as well but as I really want to emphasize that point asking for referrals and introductions to other people when you're talking to somebody in your network works really really well so I'm going to talk a little bit more about validating the idea so I said I'd differentiate between validating an idea

25:31and validating the customers a little bit more the main difference is that when you're validated in an idea this is more the the problem solution fit are you actually solving a real problem if you're developing a product and your main competitor is Excel you probably don't have a great business model it's probably going to be really hard because most of the people you talk to are already going to have Excel if you're if they're running any sort of a business I can almost guarantee that they have that or Google sheets which is gonna be free and it's gonna be really hard to compete with those things when I went out and I

26:07started doing this validation this is the exact email that I sent to people - the the x-x-x and stuff but what you'll see here is there's important pieces of this that you can extract from this type of email and you don't have to write this down I actually have a link to this email and all of the that I have and you can feel free to completely rip them off and I'll give those at the end of this talk but you can basically copy paste I don't care but this is a this is very important it's basically just says I have a question for you and it kind of evokes

26:40trust but it also says hey I need your help could you help me out can we can can you answer a couple of questions here and says I'm in the process of validating a new business idea and thought it might be applicable to you no worries if it's not but if it's a problem you're having I'd love to get on a Skype call to discuss it in the near future kind of non-committal but it evokes that level of trust and there are people in this room who have received this email I could see a couple of them nodding and I did send this email to probably 15 or 20 people to get that

27:12initial conversation going the second piece of this is I guess it's on the second page here as of right now I'm simply trying to validate this idea and have conversations and get verbal commitments if I reach a critical mass of people interested I'm going to go back to these people with mock-ups and an implementation plan get financial commitments for people and start building and that's important because I've essentially laid this out for them I told them what's going to happen and as foreshadowing they know what the next email is going to get they know what the next next step in this process that I'm going through is going to be so it's not

27:49going to be a surprise when I get on a call with them and I say hey I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do that and we've already kind of discussed exactly what the idea was it was all that other text that I kind of glossed over because it's not particularly relevant but you can inject your own ideas in there and kind of describe it to them and then again this is an email that you would send to people that are in your audience or you don't know the people that you know personally you would probably not send an email like this to somebody that just would either be a cold contact or

28:17somebody was in that you were introduced to so this last piece of it is does this problem resonate with you if so let me know we'll set up a time to chat if it doesn't resonate do you know of anyone who might be having this problem that you'd be willing to introduce me to regardless of whether they say yes or no I have that problem they most likely know Allah people that you do not and this is how you extend your network so it allows you to kind of extend the the reach of this now you'll notice that that email was probably fairly long I happen to be

28:51long-winded when I write emails I'm sure that there's any number of people if you've received an email from me it's probably rather long and I do see some smiles so I have a short version of this too which is also not particularly short but it's kind of the same thing it's like I got the top and the bottom you can kind of cut and paste those things and then you puts the other things in the middle that are important to you like well these are the things that I'm looking for these are the things that I'm trying to figure out do they resonate with you are you you know

29:19contact and warmly to schedule a meet and engage interest or contact to lead to follow up on a price quote getting a question/answer scheduling a podcast or following up on a missed failed payment and I'm kind of shooting in the dark here because I don't really know exactly what people will be using this product for I know that it could be used for getting sponsorships I know there's a few other use cases for it and I've talked to some people at this point but I'm kind of like trying to figure out what it is that people would resonate with people and it hit those different points and if any one of them hits since

29:50they know me they're more likely to say yeah I'll talk to you for a little while so then we go down to you know if it resonates with you here's the calendly link and then try and get them to that next step if you can record the audio for that first call I would not make this call more than fifteen or twenty minutes you're really just trying to gauge interest and this is a there's this is another piece of it that's kind of important is that when you're going through this process it's really important to get on a call whether it's Skype or phone or anything like that and

30:22the reason is because when you talk to somebody in person or over the phone you hear their voice you get voice tone inflections you hear pauses you hear them say something then say well no let me take that back let me say something else and they go down another path and you get to hear every single one of those things and what's so important about that is that it's a very different communication medium than email people are very meticulous about their email they will say something some people are very meticulous I'm a ticket but some people will start to write an email and they want to make sure that they don't

30:59come across as an idiot they want to make sure that they are presenting themself in a way that you know reflects on them and the you know the position that they hold and the things that they do so they're very careful they won't just spit something out but when you're in when you're having a conversation with somebody it's a very different story and you start to get those things you start to hear those things so recording the audio is helpful you don't need to do that I actually forgot until probably 3/4 through so I didn't do this a lot but that is one of the mistakes

31:29that I made is I probably should have had those recordings so I'm telling you guys that if you start doing this and going through this process you really want to make sure that those things are recorded you can tell the person or not it depends on your comfortability with that you don't have to obviously like you probably wouldn't publish these or anything like that but you want to be able to go back and say oh he said something and I forget what it was where he mentioned a particular product and you couldn't remember the spelling or you asked a couple times what it was and you really just didn't quite hear it and

31:57you got tired of asking that for the third time so you make sure that you're recording them and you want to ask a few very key questions the first one is how are you solving this problem today this gives you an idea of what they're doing whether there's other tools that they're using whether they're actually experiencing enough pain to try and solve the problem if they're just doing something in a tracking an Excel probably not how often are they doing it if they're paying for another product though they're paying $39 a month for something chances are good enough that it's a big enough pain that they're

32:31willing to pay you for it as well it's not saying that they will become a customer it's just saying that it is big enough pain for them to pay for it so that right there says that it's a little bit of idea validation and customer validation they're probably a good fit if you're gonna build a product that is exactly like that one or very similar to it second one is what have you tried this is an important one because you want to know what competitors that they've tried how they have tried to solve this problem in the past what didn't work and why this gives you an indication of

33:06potentially the features that those things lacked that you could build those are not things that you're going to get out of an email but you can get them out of that conversation and the last one is would you pay for a tool that solved this problem I lied that's not the actually last one can we have a follow up call and that's an important piece too because you again you want a foreshadow you want to make sure that you're letting me know how you're gonna move forward you don't want it to be like oh well you know you had this conversation with them and then six

33:35weeks later you email them or call them out of the blue and say hey can we get on another call I wanted to talk about this oh I didn't really feel like that level of commitment but if you ask for permission to have a follow up call some people will say no they're like yeah I'm not really all that interested so it's a helpful disqualifier it's a helpful flag too or a data point to give you an idea of whether or not you should move forward with that and the last one is do you know of anyone in your network who might have a similar problem again

34:05you've asked for it an email kind of foreshadowing they're probably not going to tell you in that first email unless they say no if they didn't have the conversation with you but if they have if they did say yes to the conversation you get to that point you have the conversation if they didn't email you someone already asked him and in fact asked for three that's how I was able to do it and I actually got five from somebody somebody gave me five other leads and I got introductions to them I said hey can I get an introduction to these people - sure no problem again transferring that social capital

34:40and that right there is what allows you to expand your network expand the number of people that you're talking to and expand your ability to reach the customers or the prospects that you really want to hit you can even provide them a pre-written template and that's very easy to do and when you're talking to them as I said you want to ask them for those three people and send them that introduction and with that when you there are given an introduction usually it's just like hey I thought you guys - you two should talk and you can template size your response to that introduction say hey nice to meet you I wanted to I

35:19don't want to take up much of your time and ask Dave to introduce us I meant to get the rid of that but so Dave sorry so introduce us because I'm a you know validating a product idea aimed at small services based companies who have warm prospects got warm prospects and who aren't responding some point in sales funnel I can't read that from here very well from here you can read that so again those two pieces that are highlighted though those are the important parts that you kind of kind of rip and replace with whatever it is that you're selling and again it's like does this sound like a problem you're having

35:52so let's set up a call let's talk about it so you've established like where you got their contact information from there's already that email in their mailbox that you reply to with something like this and what that does it says the other person took their time that they know took time out of their day and thought it was valuable to introduce the two of you and then you reply and it's like boom this is why we're talking and you would BCC the other person sometimes I would put right in the the first line says hey you know so-and-so be see seeds to you know prevent cluttering up their

36:24mailbox so remember find out what they want go get it and give it to them very straightforward in that work maybe sometimes things do not go as planned and if anyone is unfamiliar with kind of why I'm up on stage to begin with and I have run into people who have no idea who I am which is perfectly fine I love asking you people like why you know what you like about micro comp because I get very honest answers very quickly but for those who do know me or listen to our podcasts you know that I've gone down this road before and you know probably how painful it was depending on how long

37:18you listened to the podcast you know like how far I went down this road and how much money and time and I spent on it and I'll give you the really short version for those of you don't know so I spent probably five years and only about $50,000 on this one product did not go where as planned I was basically a subject-matter expert on this I was implementing security systems exactly like this and companies like United Health Group Pfizer Nasdaq GlaxoSmithKline the Department of Defense Japan Symantec Dell etc custom systems that covered their entire enterprises for this one product I was basically the only person in the world

37:55who knew how to do this so I knew it very very well so I decided I'd build another one and unfortunately contractually barred from going back to those customers so I couldn't really leverage that network that I had long story short did not work out but I knew like as I said like there was this timeline I spent a ton of time on it I knew there was a business need I had that market knowledge and I had prior to connections I just really couldn't leverage them as much as I could as much as I wanted to or needed them to so this kind of goes back to the idea of of an

38:28MVP people think about this MVP the concept of an MVP is a Oh Minimum Viable Product the problem is that MVP is not always Minimum Viable Product it starts with a question or hypothesis it's not a a minimal product is a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers so when you use the MVP methodology what is it that you're trying to do you're trying to answer a question and most people most people will take that and say well the I want to build the smallest thing that I can and in order to see if people will pay for it and you don't have to do

39:07that because if building a product or building a minimally functional thing can take anywhere from like a couple of days there's been people who have been able to create a product over a weekend and you get that initial traction you could do that and that's great that's great for some products but it doesn't work for all of them especially ones that are more complicated that take longer to build or that have more complex requirements from the customer or than in the market so what I decided to do was I decided I was gonna go on I was gonna build a bunch of mock-ups and you saw me refer to them in those the

39:37emails that I sent previously so I went through and I spent about 30 to 40 hours building balsamiq mockups of the the entire application I even went down to like the password reset page I mean it was that detailed and you can see in certain cases and it's kind of like an early version of it you see all those little arrows and stuff those are all things that you can click on in presentation mode from balsamiq mockups will take you to another screen and you'll see that like these things got really in-depth and really detailed and I had a Google Spreadsheets and documents like outlining like how this

40:07would work why I would be like that of what people were gonna use it for and I'm only showing a few of the different screens here because I don't want to go through all 90 some slides that I had for that but you can see they think there's a lot of things going on and I wanted to be able to demonstrate that because I didn't want to get burned again I didn't want to put something out there and spend six months to a year building something that wasn't actually going to be useful to people I want to make sure like I wanted to nail it I

40:33wanted to make absolutely sure I'm not wasting my time because that's the biggest resource we have that's the biggest thing that we have going for us is our ability to charge large amounts of money for our time and then leverage that into a better life so I had these 90 some screens mocked up and then I went back to the people that I had talked to and of course you know can we schedule a demo time and I said my expectation is this demo may take a full hour I want to make sure we have time to address any use case scenarios when I come up my hope is to be finished with

41:09all this by Friday December 4 but I'll keep you posted on that because reality is you are not necessarily in control of everyone's calendar so I had a list of probably 20 or 25 people who were like yeah I'm kind of interested in this let's talk and I had the conversations with them and I had 20 people who had initially said I will give you money which is fantastic but they hadn't given me money yet they just said that they would so I went back to them with this and when you do this what you'll realize that there are some customers who are better than others some prospects are

41:42better than others and this goes into the customer validation so when you're doing a demo like this for customers or prospects you're trying to find out is this the right type of person to talk to you are they going to be a good fit for the software and the this is that is not always easy to tell this far in advance if you're going to get that product market fit in fact it's almost impossible but you can at least figure out if you're totally off-base and that's the part that you're looking for you're looking for disqualifiers at this point you're looking for ways to find out should I even invest my time to

42:16do this if you've got three or four ideas and it takes two months to validate each of them okay so you spend the next eight months doing your customer validation an idea validation that sounds like a lot of time but would you rather do that then spend the next eighteen months with a one in three chance of success hmm probably not you could you could do that twice you could do customer validation twice during that time actually you know for six products at that point or eight products anyway I'm bad enough so during your demo again going back recording the audio that's that's pretty important write down every

42:55single question that they ask and if you don't have time during the demo to do it if you're not a fast typer don't worry about it go back to the audio do it later or pay a VA to do it have those things transcribed then you can go back to them later it's not that big a deal even if you just have somebody listen to it and say pick out the questions that they asked you could at least go back to them and refer to them in a spreadsheet or Google Doc or something along those lines if someone asked you for something do not say I can do that ask them is

43:21that important to you oh can it send things through Twitter is that important to you no I was just asking it's amazing how many times somebody will say no I was just asking but in your heads we're engineers we're developers we're like I can solve problems you've got a problem here I'm gonna solve this thing and you immediately jump to like build node develop mode and the the problem with that is that now you're developing features that they were they're just like yeah does it do this I was just kind of curious now you've spent three months building a feature they're just like yeah I didn't really care just

43:54wanted to know you also want to make sure that during this demo you actively overcome their objections because this is a sales demo you are taking something like mock-ups and going through to them and trying to say hey I want to I want to sell you on this vision I'm gonna build this it you know I get enough people who agree to it if I can get enough people to agree to it though I'm gonna ask you as part of that group to pay for it and I want to know that I'm building the right things that there aren't any things that are being left out of this application

44:23now you don't need to go to the extent that I did with the 90 plus screenshots but I would needed a good idea of what I was going to be building anyway so that kind of served as part of my design and I had a really good idea that it was going to work but I also didn't want to you know have to go through it twice or you know spend too much time on certain pieces of it so when you get to the end of the demo it's really really important to actually ask for the sale ask them to pay for there's a huge difference

44:54between would you pay for this versus will you when you ask somebody for a credit card is a very very different conversation that you have with them when you just say would you pay for this yeah I would sure will you pay for it is totally different and I actually had a bunch of people fall out at this point which it was a little concerning because I had probably 20 or 25 people in this particular bucket who had previously said yes and out of that I only walked out with 11 that's a scary thought those people you have 20 people who say yeah I'll pay for I would pay for that and

45:36out of that you only get 11 who actually say that they would that's about half half of those people that you know or you were introduced to who said yes I would pay for you for that and then after this piece of it this second phase they said no well why did they say no what are their objections when I went through this one of the things I also tested on us was the the pricing of it so you'll see you can't see real well here but this right here that payment per month is $50 so blue takes fifty dollars a month for a mailbox that was

46:08actually blank I let them decide on their own price I ask people what would you pay for this what is this worth to your business that was part of the pricing discussion so I just plugged this into a product called WP simple pay pro it's a wordpress plugin very easy setup didn't even have really a website it was like this page and that was it and you'll see in there that's like you know here's the pre-order page you know here's the prepayment how many months of service to prepay for that was a drop-down list defaulted to three they could bump it up to six or as low as one

46:40I had one person who paid me for one month I had two people who paid me for two months everyone else paid me for three when I got started to get in critical mass the as for as far as the payment amount I had one person paid me $100 a month because that's what they said it was worth I had I think two people pay me around $40 it was either 39 or $40 I'm kind of lumping those together and then everyone else paid me between 47 and 50 and that was telling so that's why I kind of went with the $50 price point it's like okay yes the

47:14vast majority of those people are right in that ballpark so eventually what I did was I changed it from a text box it's just kind of a static field it says okay it's $50 a month and that's it so a lot of the later prepayments like that was just kind of it then you probably wondered what I did for the person who paid $100 a month I basically said okay well I'm gonna drop your price down and then I'm also gonna give you a 20% discount with lifetime for you know being an early access customer and I took his prepayment of $200 and applied it as a credit he is in this room so

47:46beyond that again the part of the important piece is here is that says you will be charged as soon as your credit card is processed how do you do this for the first person how do you tell them oh you're the first person what do you tell them about what it is that you're going to do like if you decide not to move forward well that's where like a liberal refund policy kind of comes in you're deciding hey I'm gonna charge you but if I don't move forward with this you know I'm gonna give you a refund and I was pretty liberal with the refunds that I gave and

48:16that's why it's part of this validation process you have to be a little bit careful about what you're doing in who you're charging and what those conversations look like you have to be very transparent very clear about what it is that you're doing and why so I've already talked a little bit about that that payment field but during your purchasing discussion discussion if you don't know how much to charge somebody be a little bit flexible pricing it's it's actually not that difficult to do especially if you don't know how much it's worth to some people you might have in your head oh this is worth $100 a month somebody might come

48:48back and say well I think that's worth $500 a month you have no idea until you ask especially at the point where you're starting to charge them the second thing is be honest and transparent about what that process looks like how you're gonna go about it that trust is going to be extremely critical make sure they know what the refund policy is make sure that they know that if you walk away from this or you decide that you don't get that critical mass that you're going to give them their money back delivery timeline they're gonna want to know when is it that you're going to be

49:18able to deliver on this and when does the regular billing start when are you going to start charging this is one of the mistakes that I made is when I started onboarding people I put them in there and I did not say okay I'm gonna start charging you $30 or you know extra dollars a month 30 days afterwards and the problem is that when you don't do that when you don't make a clear expectation it's very easy for them to just kind of let things go so if you're giving an intro to somebody you want to make sure that they know everything that's going going into this so there's

49:54some disclaimers with this there are some things that you want to make sure of early you're at least aware of going down this pod path not all those demos are going to convert into sales even if they said yes some of those people who said yes and gave you money are going to ask for refunds that's luxu but at least you know that those people have turned out you've got an answer and that's important because remember what we're trying to do is we're trying to get down to answers and actual data versus guessing that's validation 1.0 where you're gonna guessing at that step three you don't

50:25know you don't have the data at least if you've got an answer yes or no then you've you know one way or the other you can start working from that not all of those prepayments are gonna convert to paying customers some of them we're gonna ask for refunds some of them you put them through that onboarding process and it doesn't work out but this money that they're giving you it's a proxy for a vote of confidence that's all it is it's a proxy and it's an approximation it's an estimate it's not perfect but it's better than nothing it's way better than nothing so talk a little bit about good

50:56customers one things to be very careful of is are those customers currently attempting to solve this problem if they're not using anything right now to solve the problem and for the product that you're pitching the issue that you run into is you get one of two answers either one I'm using nothing and that's bad the reason it's bad is because now you have to educate them and you probably have to educate every other customer that is also like that person the other answer that you get is I'm paying X dollars a month for this other product also bad the reason it's also bad is now you've

51:28got a competitor that you haven't even built your product yet you have to match them on the features that this customer is using so it is very much a double-edged sword you have to be really really careful when you start asking that question and pay close attention to what those answers are and why they're using that product why they're paying for what they really use on it if they experience the problem on a recurring basis that's another good sign if it's something they're going to use for a month or two or a couple months or as I mentioned before about event planners maybe use it a couple of times

51:55a year yeah probably not a great customer because then you're gonna have to continually find those those new customers they use the product regularly if it's something that they're going to not only log in but use on that regular basis you know much much better you want them to achieve a lot more value out of it if you can charge eight or ten X or sorry yeah you want to target an X if you want them to get eight to ten times more value out of the product then you're charging for because it makes it a no-brainer it makes it very easy for them to make those decisions yes I'm

52:25going to pay for it and you want them to pay you to solve the problem obviously so let's talk a little bit about some of the validation mistakes so targeting the wrong piece of people if you're not talking to the decision-maker it makes it difficult to make inroads so this is it kind of goes back a little bit to the top down selling versus bottom up selling if you're targeting the CTO he's basically making the decision the decisions but if you're talking targeting a developer and a large company if they have a credit card and it's actually a very low purchase amount probably not a big deal you can easily

52:55do that as well but you need to make sure that you're talking to the decision maker not like you know an assistant who's running through a bunch of campaigns and they don't actually make the decision about what gets per and what's not it's usually their manager so you want to make sure they they whoever it is that you're speaking with has the authority to make the decision the next thing is you don't want to target people who aren't actively making an effort again that goes back to that education you don't want to be in a position where you're trying to educate an entire market of people because it's very difficult to do

53:24it and it's time and resource expensive and it just costs too darn much especially for people like us if you have funding it's a totally different story but that's not what we're talking about so these are the types of sump shion's that you're going to run into or that you will probably come to come to as you start going through this process you know prepaid customers means you're doing the right thing and they're paying for a solution and prepaid is the same as paid absolutely not none of these things are true being your guinea pig is a priority for your customers it's not trust me it can take a long time to get

53:59them to actually use your product especially if they're already using something else Rob came up with a concept a few years ago called concierge onboarding where he would help people move and migrate their data from MailChimp or you know Aweber or Constant Contact whatever they were using he had he basically came up with concierge onboarding because that was in some cases the only way he could get people to move into his product because it was painful for them to do it people who don't know you are going to act differently than the people who do you do need to just kind of keep that in the

54:32back of your mind I don't have a select specific advice for you in this particular case but definitely keep it in the back of your mind that they will behave differently in terms of other mistakes I if you're trying to build something you're going through this validation process do not assume that just because you've taken somebody's money that you have to build it you're not committed you can always go back to them and say look I try this out I try to get a bunch of people and it didn't work I couldn't do it here's your money back I'm sorry they got their money back you told them up front it's not like

55:03this was hidden from them you it will not reflect poorly on you and the worst thing you can do is continue plotting forward solely because you took their money to begin with and you feel bad that's not a good reason to spend the next 18 months of your life doing it indefinite beta period until it provides value for example I would definitely if I were looking back at things I would definitely not say you know I will extend your beta period until it provides value to you put a date on it whether it's 30 days or 60 days whatever it's a lot easier to extend that than it

55:38is to try and rein it in if you say 30 days and they've been trying it for 30 days and things aren't working and there's bugs to fix you can easily say well look let's just push this out we'll we'll spend another 30 days on it I'll give you another 30 day trial but if you're trying to reel that in because you said well you can try it for as long as you want it's a lot harder to go the other direction you don't want to do that traction matters a lot so I talked earlier about the fact that between two months I was able to go and get about a

56:07dozen prepaid customers onto the system or at least you know committed to paying me and actually giving me money if it if you decide that well I don't have enough critical mass yet I want to get to 20 people or thirty people or something like that it's a very different story if you've talked to 50 people versus a thousand because the percentages are different if it takes you a thousand people to get to twenty paying customers to start extrapolating and say well how many of those people am I gonna have to have individual conversations with and it's easier to sell something if you're having an in-person conversation with

56:37somebody then if they're reading a site that you've got and if you can't convince them at that point and you have already said I believe these people are good targets for the software is really not going to work so that quantity is uh in terms of rate of change is very important so I'm gonna talk about the lies that we tell ourselves and III not the type of person to sit up here and swear so I'm gonna call it shenanigans I'm gonna call shenanigans on a lot of things that we tell ourselves so the first one is that it's not done until it ships why haven't you launched yet why

57:14haven't you started charging well it's not done I need to get this feature done I need to do this I need to do that and it kind of goes back to the why aren't you charging yet I didn't have a product and I charge people I mean remember this graph I didn't even have a single line of code written and I was still charging people so I'm calling shenanigans on saying I'm not gonna charge people because I haven't lost yet certain features not done this is my password reset page I had three people use it in nine months every single one of them emailed me and

57:45said hey I didn't get an email for my password reset okay sorry about that let me I'll look into it and see what happened you don't have to have everything implemented you can have things in there that either don't work or you get notified and then you go manually do it and that's this is actually advocated for apps that have a lot of traffic and you put something in this is kind of like the classic MVP strategy put a button there see if people click on it if they don't click on it then it's not important you don't have to implement it but if they do

58:16click on it you can send them to a page says hey this doesn't work you know would you like to work website needs a redesign this is the this is the website I started with that is awful that's a wordpress theme not to say anything about WordPress but I'm going to WordPress is not the greatest when it comes to looking good you can buy themes like this for I think it was 1995 you can do those kinds of thing and but remember it didn't matter I was able to make those pre sales it did not matter for scale it does that's not the busiest that's not what I'm calling shenanigans

58:53though I'm calling on shenanigans on like when do you start charging people when do you start taking those customers in you can do it a lot earlier than you think I don't have traffic that's a very recent traffic number for me you can see that there's not a lot there and it doesn't matter I'm still onboarding people I'm still adding people in there and again like that's the that's the revenue curve four months ago I don't have time it's really not about time it's about your priorities it's never about the time it's about how much you've decided to prioritize certain things over other things so I call

59:35shenanigans on that too

59:41the issue here is though that an excuse all those excuses are an admittance of failure and nobody likes to look at themselves as a failure nobody likes to admit that they made mistakes and there's lots of mistakes that we make every day this is a picture of one of my son's mistakes on a roller coaster he trusted I use this picture because it kind of exemplifies what a lot of us go through running a business and doing this kind of stuff is really scary especially when you don't know anything about sales we're not very much about sales or you just don't feel knowledgeable about sales you don't feel

1:00:22comfortable doing it but most of the things in your life that are scary are worth doing you don't want to test parachutes but most other things so I'm gonna wrap it up a little bit what does this kind of thing look like once you kind of get out of the validation 2.0 phase you get to the point where you build it you start taking things out into the market what do these things look like you can't improve them you can iterate over time and that's the real point here is that a lot of these things it's a cycle of iteration you want to take things take them to a certain step

1:00:55go on to other things come back revise it and make it better it's so much easier to go through a set of code the second time and revise it and make it better and make optimizations that it is to try and optimize it for the best thing it can do on on the first pass through but that's what we do that's a lot of times we're like we look at that and say I want to make this the best possible and the problem is we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot it's not a good idea but we do it anyway and part of it's because we don't know what

1:01:20we're doing we don't want to look like an idiot and we want to make sure that we're doing the right things and it's really hard to do that so this is a screenshot from this morning and this is um this is an email I got from a company called profit well so profit well is cooks in a stripe let's you know like how many things you've how many things you've charged how you're on track for your revenue moving forward and you can see right there it says a 500 and is that five hundred seventy nine percent of your goal forty percent through the month here's another screenshot from inside

1:01:55profit well so I did not start really charging I kind of drew a line back in November between my early access customers and people that I would start charging moving forward and I said look you know what I will still onboard these people moving forward but the product is good enough because I got crap like you wouldn't believe from my mastermind group they're like why haven't we started charging why haven't you started charging I don't know website well I so all those things went into it and I said okay fine I will start charging so I added one customer in November one in December I had a two in January two more in

1:02:25February added four last month I had a three last week I had one a couple days ago and I've got eleven that I need to onboard by the end of this month who've all said yeah I want to pay for it how do I get started I'm like okay just hang on I've got stuff I could've deal with but Micro Council a little bit busy right now but I basically took took that that feedback in that advice very seriously because it put me on a trajectory that is clearly headed in the right direction it is up in the right up into the right and some of these are even coming from

1:02:56referrals by the way so like as people are using my product they're referring it to other people they're finding a great deal of value out of it and they're saying hey let me use this or you know hey you know you're in my mastermind group would you you should try this those referrals are gold they really help you drive your business forward and you can see here that like here's another thing from inside profit well you can see like a thousand eleven hundred percent and fifteen hundred percent growth versus the goal and I'm not doing that to brag and I I want to make extremely clear why I'm not doing

1:03:28that to bragging it's because these are the actual numbers behind it numbers lie sometimes and that's super important because remember what I said before about the twenty people who said yes and only half of them came out the other side that's what those actual numbers are so my goal is probably like 30 or 40 bucks for the month and sure I blew it out of the water but that's still really low that's that's what was added for the month and I wanted to make sure that I showed that to you so you're not like oh my god it's just great it is trending in the right direction I'm cautiously

1:03:59optimistic

1:04:05another one at the bottom there you can see right now so I am at around $600 a month and recurring revenue that's actual people who are paying for its fortune customers who are paying on a regular basis I've got another ten or so ten to fifteen in there that are either on their way towards paying or will be shortly there's also a bunch of customers who went through that initial validation process who gave me money I ended up refunding them because they just really weren't a good fit so part of this entire process the fact that I started charging people made me realize who was going to be a good customer and

1:04:38who was going to use it on a recurring basis and who wasn't who was signing up they'll use it for a couple of months and then they turn out those are bad customers to have and I learned that only by charging I would not have found that out otherwise but at the end of the day make sure you remember what's really really important Patrick Mackenzie's talked about this a lot of other speakers have talked about this make sure you understand why it is that you're doing things and recognize that you probably can't read it real well but that thing back there says don't mingle with the elves something about magic and

1:05:16I use that as kind of an indication and say there is no silver bullet with all this things are trending upward and go right for blue tick and it's a good sign but it's not definitive yet I don't feel that it is something that's like oh yes it's gonna become a multi-million dollar business things are gonna be fantastic I don't look at it that way but I want to show you and use it as a point in illustrate like things can go in the right direction if you do a lot of that legwork up front and I have been spending a lot of time on this I have

1:05:42done this for probably a little bit over a year at this point and it is a slow path it can be a very slow path Gale Goodman from she gave a talk of businesses software several years ago she ran Constant Contact till it sold for a billion dollars and she talked about this long slow SAS ramp of death and you've probably heard it numerous times in the past and that's exactly what I wanted to illustrate is like it can be a very long road there are exceptions there are cases where it will go fast there are exceptional businesses where like they just hit it right it's

1:06:10the right time or they are already doing a product I service and they know exactly what those people want but it can still be difficult so there are no silver bullets but you do want to aim twin that was very fortuitous that he wore this shirt by the way he doesn't learn but it is a terrifying experience it can be difficult to launch a new product and it is a roller coaster there are lots of ups and downs and I just want to remind you to like remember there are certain things that are very important and just because you're spending a lot of time on your

1:06:49product doesn't mean that you need to neglect the other things so thank you very very much with that I'm going to turn it over to rob to start asking I love you guys to ask some questions I do have one slide after this it has like some of the different resources for you so before you but oh did you need to go back for that see my thank you slide he'll be three dollars so resources for you um so I talked to penalty from balsamic he is offering everyone in this room four months free of balsamic cloud so if you're interested in that like I use that

1:07:28extensively to do my pre sales process so you can go over there sign up go into the slack group all this stuff will be in the sponsor stuff that gets sent out later the other one WP simple pay pro Phil Dirksen comes to the growth Edition he's been coming for what since like first year so he's like a eight time attendee at this point so he's given fifty percent off of his three site business license it's fifty dollars normally it'll be twenty five dollars so if you want to go through this kind of this exact same model that I used I would love to hear if any of you guys

1:08:00used that model and go through and iterate my goal with this talk is actually to try and get you guys to go through this a lot faster so it took me probably twelve we were like in 15 months at this point I talked to advise Brian castle who's running ops calendar pretty extensively last year cut that down by probably five months or so he's at least that far ahead of me I would love a few guys to do it in like six I would love to see that next the email scripts so there's a link again this will be will make sure that we get this out to you guys we can

1:08:31put it in the slack group so you guys can see it that's a link directly to the email scripts it's every single one that was in this you can just copy replace to do whatever you want to two other things real quick one of the quotes in there was from my book you can guys each one of you can have a free copy of it so just go to that use that you'll use that link it'll say $49 the coupon code will be there you can just click through just gonna freak out the other and then Rob is also offered up basically the same deal for his book start small stay small

1:08:59so with that questions thanks Mike

1:09:07for your approach where you're asking for pre-sales would you do something very differently or mostly differently if you're asking for a higher monthly price if I were having a higher month let's see here like how much higher are you talking like thousands or like hundreds what was that eight I think you can absolutely do it with less or with kind of that approach there's probably platforms out there with it would allow you to like send somebody an invoice I would probably lean more towards like invoicing somebody at that point there is another micro confident nd where's Dan Bruns is he here I don't see him I

1:09:54talked to him the other day he's they keep you a good person to talk to put it in the slack group he was charging three or four thousand dollars a month and got like quarterly pre payments from some people very similar methodology so it does work I would check with him to see if he like invoiced I pretty sure that he talked to them directly though and it was like a face to face conversation so for that initial customer validation group for all those customers did you send them or did you immediately put them in any sort of email list before you went out and sent them like your

1:10:30your your first attempt at the prototype like I have a list of like 50 folks that have interviewed so far and I don't know is it would that be a bad practice at this point to do that and just kind of send it to them because I totally didn't say I was gonna do that but yeah that's kind of dicey I asked people during the call or during my conversations with him hey can I add you to the email list so that was I kind of bypassed that you could easily send them an individual email and ask them hey you know we talked about this you were interested

1:10:57can I add you to the email list you'll probably get a yes if they get if you get a no that's actually a good data point so I would use that yeah I wanted to ask when you're doing sort of the demo and sales calls with your the bosonic mock-ups how how much are you like sort of tweaking iterating but from like call a call and what do you things like a strong enough signal you need to be like making changes there it depends on how many minutes I had between each call there were times where you know like sometimes I just have calls back-to-back or I'd have to cut one short usually I

1:11:32would schedule an hour and a half between them and I would schedule for an hour and some time like there was there were at least a couple of calls where they went to hours long it was just the type of person I was talking to their problems they had one of them was actually a competitor so he's just like hey I don't care like because we're in the same microcon community he's just like I don't care and I told him I didn't care either it's like we're not really competing against each other we're competing against the big guys so we were actually more than happy to

1:11:58share data back and forth and if you're in competition with somebody in this room I would probably treat it very similarly in terms of whether or not I would make changes to the mock-ups I would essentially wait for a kind of a critical signal so like if I got at least three people to say like hey I'm interested in this then I would I would actually make the change in the mock-ups otherwise if somebody asked about it I would say I've heard that once before and I'm considering it but I want to make sure that it's important so if you leave things out it's not a big deal

1:12:29because it's a kind of a sales call you can talk around those things very very easily you should hear Enterprise demos sometime they talk around a lot thanks again Mike [Applause] you