Modern College, Week 3: WTF are we writing?
This post is part of the Modern College book project, in which we will be publicly documenting our experience writing a book on college with the help of the community.
Last week we ended our post by stating that we had a simple goal for this week: Interview 2–3 college students each.
While the process of running interviews may seem simple, I strongly believe that this is the most important thing that Kasey and I could be doing right now; even above churning out content. Allow me to explain why.
For just under 2 years, I worked for a company called Intuit. Besides being known for products such as TurboTax, Quickbooks & Mint, Intuit is highly respected for their user-centric mindset.
The basic principle behind how Intuit builds products is that you should start by focusing on the end user so that you can learn about their problems and actually build something they want. While this sounds incredibly obvious, hundreds of companies have been run into the ground because they ignored their customers and spent all of their time, energy and money building something that nobody actually wanted.
I’m beginning to realize that writing a book is a lot like building a product. Ultimately we are trying to deliver a final piece that people want to purchase and read. If we assume that we know what our prospective customers/readers want in a college book, we are running the huge risk that we are wrong and write something that no one is interested in.
In order to avoid this disaster scenario, we wanted to take a reader-centric mindsight by interviewing people who we believe to be in our target audience. Below are the insights we gained from interviews this past week.
#1) Running interviews is difficult.
There’s a reason that so many people struggle to find the time to talk with their potential customers/users/readers. For starters, it requires coordinating schedules with outside parties. These outside parties usually have nothing to gain, so the onus is completely on you to put in all the work to make it happen or else it definitely won’t.
There’s also a certain psychological aspect to running interviews, specifically around fear of judgment or criticism. Sure, we have publicly put out some blog posts; however, that is very different than talking to someone 1-on-1. It can be embarrassing to put out an idea in front of someone and have them say point blank that it doesn’t make any sense or lacks appeal. But this feedback is precisely the reason it’s important to run interviews.
In order to combat this fear, I decided to take the easy route this week and interview 2 of my family members in college. The good news is that they both gave me great feedback and helped build my confidence before I talk about the book concept with complete strangers.
Similarly, this week Kasey interviewed an acquaintance from high school. Despite years lapsing since they last spoke, the interviewee offered upfront to contribute to Modern College, so the process was organic.
In order to maintain a level of consistency, we created a script to run through in interviews. We found this resource helpful in reigning in our main questions, especially when the conversation began to branch off into other directions.
#2) Our target customers may be different from our readers.
One of the most eye-opening moments I had this week was during the interview with my cousin Tess. At the end of the interview, I was trying to gauge her interest in the book, so I asked her a series of questions that were all intended to get her to put more skin in the game. This is a common practice run by startup founders early on.
One of the questions I asked her was the following: “Try your hardest to pretend I’m not your cousin so this doesn’t become biased. Based on this book description, would you give me your email so I can email you a link to buy this book when it comes out?”
She gave me an awesome unbiased answer, which was that in a normal situation she probably wouldn’t. The reason? A lot of college students don’t read for fun in college, so the idea of going out and buying a book is a stretch. However, she would consider reading the book if it was recommended or gifted to her by someone else.
That’s when I realized our target customer and end reader might, in fact, be different. The group we may end up pitching this book to could be parents/guardians/advisors of soon-to-be or current college students. While this group may not be the final readers of the book, they may be the group most interested in purchasing it.
#3) Common themes are beginning to emerge.
Despite both of my interviews involving people I am related to, there were major differences in the paths that they were both on. As a result, both of the interviews went in slightly different directions.
However, I did walk away feeling like some common themes were emerging. For instance, both my brother Austin and my cousin Tess have recently undergone changes in majors/study paths. A big reason for both of these changes was that neither of them had a lot of insight into what professional jobs mapped to their majors were like.
They also both stated that they would love to read stories about other people that have gone through the same trials and tribulations of college, and ended up becoming successful. Both of them mentioned that this was less about getting specific steps to success, but more to gain a general sense of confidence that what they are going through is normal and that they will be okay.
For Kasey, her conservation illuminated the importance of conducting further field research. One of the largest (and most loaded) topics discussed in her interview was the feasibility of college. Her interviewee was a first-generation junior-year college student who highlighted a different variety of obstacles including FAFSA, seeking out resources and advocating for oneself.
This was important for us to hear about, as both Kasey and I were fortunate enough to have not needed to deal with these challenges in college. We knew this was a blind spot of ours going into this book, but it only emphasized the fact that we need to lean on others’ experiences to cover this topic of the book.
Plan for Week 4
It has become apparent that we must keep our future customers and readers at the center of our writing experience, from beginning to end.
We will be dedicating another week to interviewing college students before we nail down our book thesis & overview the last week of January.
This week will also be an interesting one as @Kasey will be moving to NYC to start her next chapter! While the 3-hour time-shift will be a challenge, we are more motivated than ever to move forward with this project.
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