Talk to me
They say you should start with a problem you have yourself and try to fix it. Or at least that’s what Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, startup power couple and founders of Y Combinator, have been saying for quite some time now. This seems obvious but it’s actually remarkably easy to come up with startup ideas that solve problems you think other people have but which you don’t suffer from yourself.
In fact, this is possible even when you yourself have had a very similar but distinct problem, even if the distinction is just that it was yours. I am trying to solve a problem I have come across countless times in my life. I have felt the pain of not knowing what to do with my life. It’s the pain of feeling like you don’t properly exist yet, like you’re waiting in the wings of your own life to finally arrive and take the stage. I felt this even when I was successful by other people’s standards. It happened at school, at university, after I found success as an antitrust lawyer. This is the problem I want to solve: connecting people to the right work for them. Surely other students, graduates, young professionals must also have this problem? Surely?!
You can see how the logic goes. The temptation is to skip validation of the problem: of course it must exist, I’ve talked to people who have this problem, I’ve been through it myself. But it’s not enough. I think many people struggle to find meaningful careers. But do those people know they have a problem? Is it painful enough that they are desperate for my product to come along to fix it? How can I articulate my solution so that it fits with their articulation of their problem? I’ve come across many people who are miserable in their jobs but who also can’t seem to bring themselves to change (if you want to meet these people visit any big law firm in the middle of the night). They have the problem I have outlined but they might not be interested in any solution I come up with. At least not at first.
The (now) conventional wisdom is to focus the early efforts of your startup on “customer development”, or “customer discovery” — that is, figuring out who your customers are and what problems they face. The search for product-market fit defines the startup methodology. If you knew what to build or who you were selling to or what your business model was going to be then you wouldn’t be facing the huge risk (and potentially huge reward) that startups face. A startup is a business in search of a business model; a repeatable, scalable way to deliver a product and generate revenue. If more people said those words out loud, perhaps while in front of the people that love them, they’d realise how preposterous this mission is and quit while they’re ahead. I am one of the preposterous people.
I had sheets and sheets of brainstorming, indecipherable scribbles, hypothesising on who my customers might be and the many ways that my product could help them. But I knew I had to “get out of the building” and actually talk to some.
This is easy to say but hard to do, which is probably why (apparently) so many startups avoid doing it. I thought it would be easier for me since I don’t have the technical skills and therefore I don’t have the temptation to “procrastinate” by building. Plus I love talking! But no, it’s definitely still hard.
It’s hard because it’s uncomfortable, you’re not quite sure you want to hear what they have to say. You’re not quite sure what questions to ask. You’re not quite sure who to ask! And wouldn’t it be so much easier if you just waited for them to come to you?
Well, yes, but your startup might die waiting. I was determined to be proactive. I started with finding people virtually. I thought I’d just go to the places online where people go to talk about careers. I found a few but not many, and a closer look at those I found was like hurtling backwards in a time-machine to the 1990s. I didn’t think people even used forums and chat rooms anymore but that’s where thousands of people are right this moment advising, consoling, sympathising and cheerleading each other on all sorts of career topics. The interfaces are pretty janky but people don’t seem to mind.
It’s where people are going to ask important questions of total strangers, like whether they should take this or that job, or whether they should move to another city. Or whether they should have a shower….
It was fascinating to trawl these forums and discover the lively discussions going on there. It really reminded me being 15 and locking the living room door so I could take over the family computer to chat to Mark Hoppus, the bassist of Blink 182, in the dedicated fan forum. I loved him in the way that only a teenager can.
I planted some links to my MVP on these forums (where I could get away with it — in most cases my posts were deleted by the moderator). I ran the experiment for one week and I, modestly, hoped to get 200 clicks. In the end I got 146. Not great, but at least it was evidence that people were interested in the idea of a platform for real life career videos. But I still don’t know much about the people who clicked or what motivates them.
In fact that’s one of the reasons I’ve restarted blogging. It may seem like a waste of time when what I’m meant to be doing is customer development but I’m hoping these posts about startups and careers will act as a focal point, a beacon that says: I’m here, I’m thinking about you and your problems. Come talk to me.
What’s more, that’s only half of the problem. There’s a whole other side to the market after all: the people who are going to be posting these behind-the-scenes careers videos. On that front I thought I’d start with lawyers who have left the law since those are my homies and I should be able to speak their language. I emailed 25 ex-lawyers. 3 got back to me. One was an outright no and two asked for more information.
I thought that perhaps the lack of enthusiasm was because although these people might be sympathetic to the cause — they may have previously found this kind of platform useful — it wasn’t currently their problem. They didn’t have a reason to post. So I changed tack and starting looking at startups in London who are actively trying to hire right now, thinking that they might have a particular need to communicate their company mission and culture to potential candidates. I emailed 20 startups. Only 1 responded. It’s not much but it’s a start.
When I got on the phone with that one startup, a brand acceleration agency, it became clear that while they thought it was a nice idea to have videos showing company culture, they couldn’t see the value in creating the content themselves. It was unavoidable evidence that I didn’t yet understand my customer. I thought hiring would be one of their top problems. But an even bigger problem is lack of time, so anything that solved the hiring problem but made their time problem worse wasn’t going to work.
But but but! Eventually they’ll realise how easy it is! Eventually I’ll have a nice app that will streamline the posting process! Eventually!
But it’s a red herring. Yes, eventually maybe people won’t see posting to my site as a hassle, but in the meantime it’s clear I haven’t communicated the value and/or I haven’t found my early adopters.
I could have taken this to be a pretty bad blow to my whole thesis. But I think it’s more helpful to see it as actually quite promising (delusional much?). I just needed to find a way to take the pain out of the process. So I offered to go down to their offices and film the videos myself.
Clearly this cannot be the basis for my business. Personally filming all the videos to go on the site is not a scalable model. But I had these echoes in my mind: do things that don’t scale. Airbnb did it this way in the early days, flying back and forth across the US to photograph hosts’ apartments. The legends also tell of Stripe, hijacking people’s laptops and on-boarding them on the spot. And look where those companies ended up! [Ok they did a bunch of other stuff too that no doubt had some bearing on their astounding success, but for the point I’m making it’s more convenient to ignore all that.]
I pitched it to the startup and they agreed: I could come down to pay them a visit and explain the value proposition in person at the same time.
I’m queen of the positive spin, and pretty thick skinned, but even I will admit this first site visit was a bit of a disaster based on any reasonable metric. Firstly, I sat there and explained my product for 30 minutes and this potential customer still didn’t understand what it was. 30 minutes! Most people wouldn’t give me 30 seconds to convince them. Second, I travelled for an hour to the other side of London to film a startup in action and when I got there they wouldn’t let me film anything. Nothing. And worse, they had loads of really compelling reasons why they didn’t want me to film them. I had, I think, equally compelling arguments for why they should, but that didn’t change anything.
It was incredibly useful to get the real customer feedback. But here was rejection, staring me in the face.
I was still smiling as I left, but only because I’m starting to feel like failure is actually part of a successful startup process. Like you can’t figure out what people want without first figuring out what they don’t want. And of course it happens in that order, and it will happen over and over again. I’m not sure you can tell between pre-success failure and failure-failure until after the fact. [If you could, you’d have the ingredients for an extremely successful venture fund.]
And I’m also coming to think that a startup is not a business at all, but a system that produces a business. Ask me again in 6 months, when I’ve been rejected another 100 or more times. Maybe I won’t still be smiling then. But I hope I will be.
Are you looking for direction in your career? Talk to me on Snapchat (videyay), Twitter (@heyvideyay) and on Anchor ⚓
Are you based in London and doing work you’re passionate about? I’d love to meet you! I will come to you and film your work in action so you can show people what you’re all about.
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