CHAPTER EIGHT

Running the process

Even if you do everything else right, you can get bad results if you don’t have the right process wrapped around your conversations. If you just show up to meetings and hope for the best, you aren't making a good use of anyone's time. You need to do a little bit of work before and after to extract full value.

A common anti-pattern is for the business guy to go to all the meetings and subsequently tell the rest of the team what they should do. Bad idea. Telling the rest of the team “What I learned” is functionally equivalent to telling them “What you’ll do.” Therefore, owning the customer conversations creates a de-facto dictator with “The customer said so” as the ultimate trump card. 

But as we’ve seen, it’s easy to misinterpret what the customer said.

When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck. Avoid creating (or being) the bottleneck. To do that, the customer and learning has to be shared with the entire founding team, promptly and faithfully. That relies on good notes plus a bit of pre- and post-meeting work. 

The most extreme way to bottleneck is to go to the meetings alone and take crappy notes which you don’t review with your team. At that point, your head has become the ultimate repository of customer truth and everyone just has to do what you say. 

In my case, I bottlenecked so hard that our CTO quit while saying, “We’re never going to succeed if you keep changing what we’re doing.” In my defence, the stuff I’d learned was true (at least, I think it was). But it didn’t matter anyway since I hadn’t properly communicated it to the rest of the team.

Symptoms of a learning bottleneck: 

• “You just worry about the product. I’ll learn what we need to know.”
• “Because the customers told me so!”
• “I don’t have time to talk to people — I need to be coding!”

Avoiding bottlenecks has three parts: prepping, reviewing, and taking good notes.

Prepping

Your most important preparation work is to ensure you know your current list of 3 big questions. Figure them out with your team and make a point to face the scary questions.

If you’ve already learned the facts of your customer and industry, then you should also know what commitment and next steps you are going to push for at the end of the meeting.

It’s easier to guide the conversation and stay on track if you have an existing set of beliefs that you’re updating. Spend up to an hour writing down your best guesses about what the person you’re about to talk to cares about and wants. You’ll probably be wrong, but it’s easier to keep the discussion on track and hit important points if you’ve created a skeleton. If you have an appropriately focused segment, then you’ll only rarely need to do this. 

While prepping, if you come across a question which could be answered with desk research, take a moment to do it. You want to move past the obvious stuff and spend your conversations finding answers the internet can’t give you.

Similarly, if you’re about to meet with a business, do your basic due diligence on LinkedIn and the company website. It takes 5 minutes and will save you from borking the conversation and looking like an idiot. 

Sit down with your whole founding team when you prep. You want both business and product to be represented. If you leave part of the company out of the prep, then you end up missing their concerns in the customer conversations.

Some founders react with hostility to the whole idea. They’ll say something along the lines of, “We need to be building the gosh derned product, not fuffing around talking to people.” On the surface, it appears to be a refusal to face the reality that there might be something wrong with the product’s foundations. But having seen it in several teams now, I think it’s actually the desire for speed, where speed is measured by building features instead of by de-risking and validating the business.

Beyond asking a grumpy cofounder to “humour me”, there are 2 questions to help tease out hidden product risks. The first is asking, “If this company fails, what is most likely to have killed it?” If we had asked that about my very first product (a user-generated cartoon community), we would have answered that either nobody wants to create cartoons or that their cartoons will be so bad that nobody wants to watch them. This gives us a good starting point to begin exploring with a combination of technical and conversational tools.

Prep questions to unearth hidden risks:

• If this company were to fail, why would it have happened?
• What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?

The second question is a flipped version of the first, from Lafley/Martin’s strategy book. “What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?” In this case, I might have answered that we need lots of hilarious cartoons plus scaling revenue from brand advertisers.

These aren’t long, involved strategy discussions. Your gut reaction is enough. You don’t need to be too rigorous. All you’re really trying to figure out is:

• “What do we want to learn from these guys?”

In fact, if you’re tight for time, asking this question is the only prep you really need.

Reviewing

After a conversation, just review your notes with your team and update your beliefs and 3 big questions as appropriate. 

The goal is to ensure the learning is now on paper and in everyone’s head instead of just in yours. Talk through the key quotes and main takeaways of the conversation, as well as any problems you ran into. 

I also like to talk about the meta-level of the conversation itself: which questions worked and which didn’t? How can we do better next time? Were there any important signals or questions we missed? This stuff is more craft than science: you have to actively practice it to get better. It’s a valuable skill for your team to have, so it’s worth spending a bit of time improving.

Just like prepping, reviewing is so simple that it sounds like a non-step. It’s tempting to skip it. Don’t! The review is important. Disseminate learnings to your team as quickly and as directly as possible, using notes and exact quotes wherever you can. It keeps you in sync, leads to better decisions, prevents arguments, and allows your whole team to benefit from the learning you’ve worked so hard to acquire.

Who should show up

Everyone on the team who is making big decisions (including tech decisions) needs to go to at least some of the meetings. The tech guys don’t need to go to most of the meetings, but you’ll all learn a ton from hearing customer reactions first-hand occasionally. You’ll also be able to help each other catch and fix your conversation mistakes and biases.

Meetings go best when you've got two people at them. One person can focus on taking notes and the other can focus on talking. As the second person, sometimes you'll notice the lead asking bad questions or missing a signal they should be digging into. Just jump in and fix them.

Don’t send more than two people unless it’s group-on-group or you’ve got a particularly good reason to do so. Three folks interviewing someone can be a little overwhelming.

Going in solo is fine once you get good at taking concise notes. The main problem of running solo is that it's harder to catch yourself and recover once you start going off-track asking bad questions or missing the point.

If you’re shy and have no cofounder to take the lead, call in a favour with a friend to come to your first couple conversations with you. You can just play the role of the note-taker until you’re comfortable. If there’s no workaround and you have to bite the bullet, remember that confidence is domain-specific. Instead of suffering through, focus on getting better and understanding the process. It will get less scary as you improve.

You can't outsource or hire someone to do customer learning. There are exceptional team dynamics where it works, but generally speaking, the founders need to be in the meetings themselves. When a hired gun brings you bad news (“This problem isn't real and nobody cares about what we're doing”), properly assimilating it is difficult.

More insidiously, if the signal is lukewarm, it’s tempting for a hire to gloss over it. Hiring out your learning is a guaranteed way to get bad signals. Until you've got a working business model and a repeatable sales or marketing process, the founders need to be in the meetings themselves.

On the bright side, even though you have to be in the room to process the learning, you don't necessarily have to be the one setting up or leading the meetings. You can hire people to help as long as you’re there with them, listening.

How to write it down

Taking good notes is the best way to keep your team (and investors and advisors) in the loop. Plus, notes make it harder to lie to yourself. And when, months later, you decide to adjust the business's direction, you'll be able to return to your notes instead of having to go do a whole new set of interviews. 

When possible, write down exact quotes. Wrap them in quotation marks so you know it's verbatim. You can later use them in your marketing language, fundraising decks, and to resolve arguments with skeptical teammates. Other times the exact quote isn't relevant and you just write down the big idea. 

In either case, add symbols to your notes as context and shorthand. I use 12 main symbols and make up more in the field as I need them. You probably won't exactly copy mine, so don't worry about memorising them. You'll build your own go-to list as you have more conversations.

Emotions

:) Excited

:( Angry

:| Embarrassed

Someone saying "that's a problem" should be interpreted totally differently depending on whether they are neutral or outraged. Any strong emotion is worth writing down. For example, depending on your industry, you might also choose to make symbols for lust or laughter. Capture the big emotions and remember to dig into them when they come up.

Their life

^ Background or context (symbol is a distant mountain)

These five “life” symbols are your bread and butter. Combine them with emotion symbols where appropriate. Pains and obstacles carry a lot more weight when someone is embarrassed or angry about them. 

Obstacles are preventing a customer from solving their problems even though they want to. They're important because you'll probably also have to deal with them. For example, a lot of corporate folks would love to use cloud services and hate their current options, but can't use anything else because their company's IT policy is an obstacle. Their workaround might be to use their personal phone as a secondary computer or by doing certain work at home. Also worth noting.

Specifics

As we discussed, feature requests usually get ignored, but they're a good signal to capture and explore. Must-have purchasing criteria are obviously more important. Money signals are also key.

Write down specific names and companies. If it’s someone they know, ask for an intro at the end of the conversation. If it’s a competitor or alternate solution, write it down to research it later.

Put a big star on items to follow-up on after the meeting, especially next steps you promised as a condition of their advancement/commitment.

Where to write it down

You want to take your customer notes so that they are:

• Able to be sorted, mixed, and re-arranged
• Able to be combined with the notes of the rest of your team
• Permanent and retrievable
• Not mixed in with other random noise like todo lists and ideas

In practice, I’ve found that taking notes in my primary notebook is practically useless. Over the course of several months’ sprawl, you set an insurmountable search and retrieval task for yourself. If you won’t look at your notes, they aren’t much good.

If you do end up taking notes in non-ideal places, you just need to spend a little extra post-meeting time moving them over into your permanent format. Otherwise you’ll be kicking yourself when you remember that amazing quote someone gave you which you can’t quite remember well enough to convince those skeptical investors.

What is a better note-taking medium?

Google Docs spreadsheets and Evernote are both great for team sharing, search, and retrieval. Spreadsheets are wonderfully sortable if you write your key signals in their own column. The downside is that it comes across as rude to take notes directly on a computer during a meeting, so you add a bit of mandatory post-meeting work to transfer your notes. I always found this a bit annoying, but it’s way better than losing your learning in an off-topic notebook.

A dedicated notebook is fine, if you can remember to carry it with you and use it. For a while, I would use my regular notebook for my customer notes and then just tear out every page which wasn’t from an interview so it was easier to find them later. Hardly the most elegant.

My favourite medium is index cards. Post-it notes also work. I carry around blank cards and take notes on them, with one quote or learning per card (along with a signal icon, of course). After the meeting I jot down the date and name of the person on each card. It takes a couple minutes, but it’s faster than moving over all your notes. When we review, we lay the cards out on the table and sort through them. Cards are great because of the random access and sorting. If you learn that the problem you’re solving doesn’t really matter, you can just pull out all the cards marked with a lightning bolt and find yourself a new problem that’s already been confirmed.

When I first started, I would make audio recordings, but that suffered from the same problem as notebooks. I'd end up with a ton of content and no real way to sort it or find the bit I wanted, so I ended up ignoring the recordings.

If you do want to use audio, you’ll find people are surprisingly willing to be recorded. Put your phone on the table as you sit down and say, “Hey, is it cool if I record this, because I’m always paranoid I’ll miss something important in my notes. It won’t get shared with anyone or posted anywhere.” Almost everyone says yes, but it does blow your cover if you’re trying to Keep it Casual.

If you embrace Keeping it Casual, you'll find customer conversations appearing out of nowhere and catching you by surprise. Just go with it. I've got notes written on paper plates from a pizza party, on beer mats from the pub, and on newspapers from the cafe. You'll want to transfer them over to your main storage system once you get back to the office, but it's better to capture what's said on something weird than to try to remember all the important bits.

If it’s totally inappropriate to take notes during the chat, just have the conversation and then immediately retreat to a corner to write down what was said. This is how I usually handle customer conversations at the pub or conferences.

Regardless of the medium, the most important thing is that the notes are lightweight enough that you'll actually review them yourself and with your team. 

The process

Talking to customers is a tool, not an obligation. If it’s not going to help or you don’t want to do it for whatever reason, just skip it. I’m sure you’ve been on the receiving end of a half-assed survey sent out by some new startup to tick the box marked “learn from customers” on their startup todo list. There are better ways to waste your time.

Without figuring out what actually matters to your company and how to deal with it effectively, you’re just going through the motions. 

When it comes to conversations, it looks like this:

Signs you’re just going through the motions:

• 
  
• You’re talking more than they are
• They are complimenting you or your idea
• You told them about your idea and don’t know what’s happening next
• You don’t have notes
• You haven’t looked through your notes with your team
• You got an unexpected answer and it didn’t change your idea
• You weren’t scared of any of the questions you asked
• You aren’t sure which big question you’re trying to answer by doing this

The persistent presence of any of these problems suggests that you’re doing something wrong and wasting your time.

Here are the steps I go through to keep on track. Feel free to ignore or tweak as needed given your situation and company. It’s as light-weight as I’ve been able to get it and should reduce rather than increase the amount of time you need to spend on conversations.

The process before a batch of conversations:

• If you haven’t yet, choose a focused, findable segment
• With your team, decide your big 3 learning goals
• If relevant, decide on ideal next steps and commitments
• If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to
• Create a series of best guesses about what the person cares about
• If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first

During the conversation:

• Frame the conversation
• Keep it casual
• Ask good questions which pass The Mom Test
• Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath signals
• Take good notes
• If relevant, press for commitment and next steps

After a batch of conversations:

• With your team, review your notes and key customer quotes
• If relevant, transfer notes into permanent storage
• Update your beliefs and plans
• Decide on the next 3 big questions

The goal of this process is twofold. Firstly, to make sure you're spending your time well by attacking the questions which really matter and using the whole founding team’s brains. Secondly, to spread any new learning through your team as quickly and completely as possible.

There you go. Now you know everything I do about how to learn from conversations. Combine this process with The Mom Test, Keeping it Casual, and Advancement for maximum learning in minimum time. But even if it goes wrong, don’t worry so much. Eternity will forgive.

This stuff is fast

The time scales of the process are important. The point is to make your business move faster, not slower. 

Don’t spend a week prepping for meetings; spend an hour and then go talk to people. Anything more is stalling. 

Don’t spend months doing full-time customer conversations before beginning to move on a product. Spend a week, maybe two. Get your bearings and then give them something to commit to.

You’ll keep talking to customers for the life of your company, of course. I’m not advising you to become a recluse after the first two weeks. Your customers are a crucial source of ongoing insight and will help catch any badgers in the bush, so to speak. With the tools in this book (especially Keeping it Casual) you should be able to keep benefitting from customer learning without spending any real time on it. You can do it alongside growing your business rather than in place of it. 

This stuff moves really quickly when you’re doing it right. This book isn’t meant you an excuse to squander precious months on theorising. It’s meant to help you extract maximum value in minimum time from conversations so you can get back to what really matters: building your business.

Conclusion and cheatsheet

I still ask dumb questions all the time. You will too. Don’t beat yourself up over it. In fact, just yesterday I screwed up a particularly important meeting by slipping into pitch mode (this was yesterday at the time of writing… hopefully not again at the time of reading).

It happens. It’s okay. Review with your team, don’t beat yourself up (or your cofounders) over mistakes. Work on getting better as a team.

I make tons of mistakes. At least now I notice and have a chance to fix them. Most bad conversations can be fixed. You’re trying to do something difficult. You’re never going to be perfect, but it always helps to be better.

People love startups. Startups do cool stuff and make their lives better. Everyone supports the entrepreneur. When entrepreneurs screw up, people want to forgive them. They want the entrepreneur and the startup to succeed. 

By asking good questions, we can fix many flawed ideas before they get us in trouble. But still, sometimes it doesn’t work out. It’s okay. Go to the people who believed in and supported you and thank them. If relevant, apologise. They’ll say something like:

“Hey, don’t even worry about it — I know how it goes.”

Eternity will forgive our earthly blunders. Everyone loves an entrepreneur. After all, you’re putting it on the line to try and make their lives better.

Hack it

In ancient times it was prophesied that whoever undid the convoluted Gordian Knot would rule the land. Coming across the knot, Alexander drew his sword and with a single stroke, cut the knot in half. The knot was undone and he became “the Great”.

Struggling to untie the knot was the “proper” process. Cutting through it was a hack (ba-dum tish!). Alexander jumped straight to the end result without any of the work. 

When we find a new and exciting process, it’s easy to spend hours obsessively geeking out about exactly the right way to untie this big, gnarly knot.

At a workshop about customer segmentation, a personal trainer said he was spending most of his time on the non-billable commutes between his clients. At some point it was suggested that the police might be a better customer, since he could go to the station and spend all day working with different officers. No commute, more billable hours, and a less price-sensitive customer. Sounds good in theory.

We all started geeking out about how he was going to validate this. Who could he talk to? Did anyone have family in the police? What should his interview questions be? What was the market size? Etc etc. 

He looked at us like we were all idiots and held up his phone. “Why wouldn’t I just call them?” It’s not like he didn’t know their number. We all stood around a bit dumbfounded while he went outside and called the police. Twenty minutes later, he came back in with a trial session scheduled. 

Having a process is valuable, but don’t get stuck in it. Sometimes you can just pick up the phone and hack through the knot.

Cheatsheet

Just in case you like lists.

Key skills:

• Asking good questions (Chapters 1 & 3)
• Avoiding bad data (Chapter 2)
• Keeping it casual (Chapter 4)
• Pushing for commitment & advancement (Chapter 5)
• Framing the meeting (Chapter 6)
• Customer segmentation (Chapter 7)
• Prepping & reviewing (Chapter 8)
• Taking notes (Chapter 8)

The Mom Test:

1. Talk about their life instead of your idea
2. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
3. Talk less and listen more

Getting back on track (avoiding bad data):

• Deflect compliments 
• Anchor fluff
• Dig beneath opinions, ideas, requests, and emotions

Mistakes and symptoms:

1. Fishing for compliments

“I’m thinking of starting a business... so, do you think it will work?”

“I had an awesome idea for an app — do you like it?”

1. Exposing your ego (aka The Pathos Problem)

• “So here’s that top-secret project I quit my job for... what do you think?”
• “I can take it — be honest and tell me what you really think!”

1. Being pitchy

• “No no, I don’t think you get it...”
• “Yes, but it also does this!”

1. Being too formal

• “So, first off, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I just have a few questions for you and then I’ll let you get back to your day…”
• “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much would you say you…”
• “Let’s set up a meeting.”

1. Being a learning bottleneck

• “You just worry about the product. I’ll learn what we need to know.”
• “Because the customers told me so!”
• “I don’t have time to talk to people — I need to be coding!

1. Collecting compliments instead of facts and commitments

• “We’re getting a lot of positive feedback.”
• “Everybody I’ve talked to loves the idea.”

The process before, during and after the meeting:

• If you haven’t yet, choose a focused, findable segment
• With your team, decide your big 3 learning goals
• If relevant, decide on ideal next steps and commitments
• If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to
• Create a series of best guesses about what the person cares about
• If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first

• Frame the conversation
• Keep it casual
• Ask good questions which pass The Mom Test
• Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath signals
• Take good notes
• If relevant, press for commitment and next steps

• With your team, review your notes and key customer quotes
• If relevant, transfer notes into permanent storage
• Update your beliefs and plans
• Decide on the next 3 big questions

Results of a good meeting:

• Facts — concrete, specific facts about what they do and why they do it (as opposed to the bad data of compliments, fluff, and opinions)
• Commitment — They are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as meaningful amounts of time, reputational risk, or money. 
• Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer to a sale.

Signs you’re just going through the motions:

• You’re talking more than they are
• They are complimenting you or your idea
• You told them about your idea and don’t know what’s happening next
• You don’t have notes
• You haven’t looked through your notes with your team
• You got an unexpected answer and it didn’t change your idea
• You weren’t scared of any of the questions you asked
• You aren’t sure which big question you’re trying to answer by doing this
• You aren’t sure why you’re having the meeting

Writing it down — signal symbols:

:) Excited

:( Angry

:| Embarrassed

^ Background or context (symbol is a distant mountain)

Signs you aren’t pushing for commitment and advancement:

• A pipeline of zombie leads
• Ending product meetings with a compliment
• Ending product meetings with no clear next steps
• Meetings which "went well"
• They haven't given up anything of value

Asking for and framing the meeting:

• Vision — half-sentence version of how you’re making the world better
• Framing — where you’re at and what you’re looking for
• Weakness — show how you can be helped
• Pedestal — show that they, in particular, can provide that help
• Ask — ask for help

The big prep question:

• “What do we want to learn from these guys?”

Thanks!

It’s been fun. Thanks for reading :). I hope it was helpful. For slides, videos, and other information, check out momtestbook.com. 

When you hit a stumbling block I can help with or learn that I gave some bad advice, hit me up on twitter @robfitz.

My blog where I write about early stage startup stuff is thestartuptoolkit.com. Subscribe to the rss or email updates and dig through the archive.

To learn to be a better founder, you’ve got to get your hands dirty. Startups are more craft than science. It’s something you learn by doing. The tools help, but you need to get out in the field. I’ve learned more from launching silly projects than I ever did from reading books or blogs. Make it happen. 

And finally, if you’re in the business of supporting, training, mentoring, or investing in startups, I work with a few other founders building educational curriculum (slides, workshops, videos, facilitation guides, etc) at foundercentric.com. Download resources, join the mailing list, and get involved. We’ve run training from Costa Rica to Kiev with folks ranging from Oxford to the UN. Get in touch at aloha@foundercentric.com.

Acknowledgements

A huge thanks to all the people who helped with feedback, and especially those who took the time to write up their ridiculously useful line-by-line comments: Daniel Tenner, Andreas Klinger, Veronica Torras, Dave Chapman, Salim Virani, Sabrina Kiefer, Madeleine Evans, Spike Morelli, Adele Barlow, and Orsolya Toth. Thanks!

Nobody gets through the startup life alone. Thanks to Paul Graham for taking a punt on us when we were so clearly clueless and to Devin, Laurence, and Ryan for getting on that crazy train. Thanks to Saul Klein for lovingly yelling at me about sales every Friday and for forcing me to actually read 4 Steps to the E.piphany. Thanks to Steve Blank for writing it. Thanks to Peter Read and Andy C for showing me how sales really works.

Thanks to Ian and Pete for getting us settled in London. Thanks to my peers in the Braintrust who were the perfect sounding board, and especially Salim Virani for calling me on my BS. Thanks to Tom Stone, Dave Chapman, John Spindler, and Tim Barnes for showing me the good bits of the startup education world and giving me my first chance to teach.

Beyond the obvious influence from Steve Blank and Eric Ries, a big thanks to some other writers who have directly helped this book with their work: Amy Hoy on worldviews, Brant Cooper on segmentation, Richard Rumelt and Lafley/Martin on strategy, Neil Rackham on sales, and Derek Sivers on remembering that businesses are meant to make you happy.

And of course, big thanks for Mom & Dad for gently planting the entrepreneurial seed through both encouragement and their own collection of insane startup and/or shipwreck stories.

The cover was put together by Devin Hunt. 

The author image is provided by heisenbergmedia.com. Thanks!