Have you thought about _____?
I’ve been talking to people about my startup for the past two years. Throughout that time I’ve introduced the concept that I’m working on to thousands of people from around the world. These conversations span a wide range of contexts. Sometimes I’m talking to an investor who is trying to decide if they want to fund our company, other times I’m introducing the concept to an old acquaintance from high school or talking it over with a fellow grad student.
Most of the time these conversations follow a similar pattern. I tell them what we are working on in a couple of sentences and they ask a few questions about how PlantLink works before telling me that they or someone they know would really benefit from the product. Generally people are very polite and interested as long as I don’t dwell on the concept too long. Nobody wants to talk to the guys who only talks about his startup.
However, there are outlier conversations thrown in there from time to time. I’m talking about conversations that are either absolutely amazing or incredibly frustrating.
I walk away from the best conversations with a new revelation about my product, my team, my users, or something else about my business. The worst conversations are an exercise in frustration from start to finish. I leave those feeling like I’ve been banging my head against a wall.
These conversations seem like they have nothing in common with one another at first glance, but if you have enough of them you start to notice a pattern. During these extreme conversations the person I’m talking to will ask some form of the question “Have you thought about ___?”, where ___ is some aspect of what I’m working on.
The people on the far left of the distribution are more or less a waste of time. I like to call these people the know-it-all novices. Know-it-all novices can be experts in another field (in fact they are likely to think of themselves as experts in something), but they typically know just enough about what you are doing (entrepreneurship, research, product design, whatever) to be dangerous. After hearing two sentences about what you are working on they come up with 5-10 different “Have you thought about ___?” questions that are completely obvious, but that they seem to think you’ve never considered before talking with them. The phrase “The most successful people usually spend a lot of time thinking about ____” is something they like to throw in to a conversation. Know-it-all novices are much more likely to show up in groups or during the Q&A sessions at a talk or panel than they are to approach you one on one. How will they impress everyone with their brilliant insights if they are only talking to one other person?
In stark contrast, the people on the far right hand of the distribution will touch on something that I either haven’t thought of before, or the way they ask the question makes me consider that topic in a new light.
One great example of this was a conversation I had with the owner of a small business during our Kickstarter campaign. He asked if we were going to do a version of our product for his type of business, because they spent lots of money trying to solve this problem in a way that I hadn’t heard of before. His goal wasn’t to try and sound more intelligent than everyone else; he just wanted to see if we were going to solve his problem in the future. His genuine insight into the problem at hand made it possible for him to ask a question that radically changed the way that I think about my business. It was a great conversation.
At the end of the day it’s hard to determine who is going to be a know-it-all novice and who is going to end up engaging you in a meaningful conversation. I‘ve had to learn to make a conscious effort to not dismiss someone when they start to ask me if I’ve thought something before. I can’t predict if a question is going to be completely obvious or radically mind-blowing. I think that is part of what makes entrepreneurship so much fun.
