Idle thoughts about customer development but otherwise not much to show (Week 64)

Bit of an invisible week this week.

This milestone (called Aster) was all about tools for gardeners. Like, as a gardener: if your goal is to help your endorsed companies with their hiring, wouldn’t it be useful if Job Garden could tell you how to target that effort?

I mean, could it? Maybe. Who knows. We have a hunch that it can, backed up by informal user interviews (I have a product roadmap for Job Garden, and I make it a habit to talk through this with users on the regular). But you can fool yourself with hunches. And you can additionally fool yourself with imagined products which are very different from how the products actually turn out when you make them.

So the process over the last couple of weeks has looked like this:

• make “minimum viable” versions of all the different tools that have been bouncing around my head. One of those tools includes infographics, a glimpse of which is at the top of this post
• imagine walking a user through these tools to get their feedback: this led to packaging the tools into a new, hidden, area of the website. A prototype of a coherent product, really

The next step with the prototype is to show it to some gardeners and get their feedback.

Michael Sippey, VP Product at Medium, has some great tips about product development and customer feedback. Here’s the first one: Set up at least 30 meetings, or you won’t have a good product.

I do a talk at Bethnal Green Ventures about sales and marketing for super-early-stage startups. (I rarely do sessions like this, but I’m in love with the BGV mission about #techforgood, and I love that they take on founders for whom this is often their first startup.) I think I’ve given this talk five or six times to various cohorts since 2015.

And it’s dumb. Each time I prep for giving it again, I look at my notes and I think, this is dumb-as. I am teaching them to suck eggs, I think.

Tip #1 is to tell people what you’re doing.

Tip #5 is that you should write stuff down.

Then, while I’m doing the talk, and having the open discussion during and afterwards, I think to myself: hey, I should really be doing these things more myself, I’ve been neglecting that bit.

If the person doing the talk can still learn from it, maybe it’s not too dumb.

Take tip #5, about writing stuff down. The slide title is “Your sales process is your product.”

A sales process is a ramp a prospect takes from zero awareness to successful user, and that’s true whether your product is free or paid.

If you build a product that is great to use but doesn’t include a sales process, you’ve not built a product. You’ve built a furnace that you need to constantly stand next to, shovelling in coal. You’ve built a machine that, in order for it to keep running, requires that you never take a holiday.

If you build a product and focus on it being great to use, with the idea that you’ll get to the sales process later, you’ll end up with one or the other being compromised. The way a product’s features mesh together creates a mental model for a user, and expectations about what your product will and won’t do. Once a product is logically “whole,” it’s very hard to untangle those features. But if the expectations that are built fight against the new sales process — well, something will have to give: product quality or growth.

So for me, part of product development is also sales process development. The two are simultaneous.

But a sales process, being a process, and being early so you don’t know what the requirements are which means it can’t be automated, doesn’t exist anywhere except in actions and in your head.

When the sales process exists only in your head:

• it’s easy to fool yourself, as mentioned above, so you think things are working when they’re not; and,
• it’s really hard to think with freedom about (for example) new product features, and also keep momentum with sales. So you end up not sleeping at night.

Hence: write stuff down.

So the rest of that section of the talk is about how to document a sales pipeline. The next tip is about how to move people through it.

It’s possible that these tools for gardeners, developed during Aster, are the beginnings of a commercial tier for Job Garden. It’s possible. I don’t know. It would be neat if that were the case, and that’s how we’ll position it in user interviews, but I’m reserving judgement on the idea that there is a commercial model for JG at all. We’ll see.

What I do know is that’s it really hard to figure any of this out without lots of meetings with users, and lots of feedback on prototypes like this.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

That’s Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, on getting the customer feedback loop started as early as possible. Good essay.

One neat thing:

During the development of these tools, one of the infographics surfaced an interesting fact that I hadn’t spotted before: one of the startups I’m connected with had a hiring spike about 1–2 months ago. That means good things or not-so-good things (an alarming jump in staff turnover for example). Either way I should be in touch.

So I dropped the CEO a line, and things over there are really good. We’re grabbing coffee on Monday and I’m looking forward to catching up.

Stretch goal: somehow ensure that all of Job Garden’s prospective customers have that kind of experience too.