Do we prefer easy and confortable conversations or hard and unconmfortable ones?
People who work on startups typically like to spend time with other people working on startups. That makes sense. It’s often a lonely experience, and it can help to share that with others who empathise. But it’s important to realise that these are easy conversations. A lot of people have opinions about startups. It is a broad church. We need to filter a lot of noise in order to get to the signal.
Working with the Timely team taught me a better approach. In the beginning we incorrectly considered ourselves a technology company targeting customers in the health and beauty sector. That seemed logical. We were software people and they were health and beauty people. But over time it dawned on us: we were part of the health and beauty sector and our product was technology services.
This might seem a subtle difference, but it resulted in a significant change in how we positioned ourselves, how we spent our time, and who we spent it with. Rather than talking mostly to other technology people, who were all working in very different sectors, we prioritised talking to our peers in the health and beauty sector. We quickly found we had a lot more to learn from them. Rather than describing our technology and listing the features we had built, we switched to focusing on the problems we were hoping to solve for our customers and talking about our solutions using language and a style that was more familiar to them. Rather than spending all of our time with other startup founders who were the same age and stage as us, we tried to connect with those people who best understood the customers we were trying to reach. Some of them were self-employed. Some of them were working in much larger businesses. Some of them became customers themselves or referred others. Some of them would even later join our team.1
As we discovered, these are hard conversations. Which may explain why most founders prefer to stick to startup events. No doubt, these have a real draw – there are always opportunities to learn, and bouncing off others who are in a similar position and struggling with similar problems can help. A good question to ask is: what do we disagree with? If we already believe everything that is being said at the events we attend we’re probably not learning much. It’s important we don’t spend too much time preaching to the choir. We need to be exposed to different people who will challenge our thinking. That creates friction. It’s outside of our comfort zone. But it helps us to understand our customers better.
When we categorise ourselves as a startup it’s easy to get sucked into celebrating the milestones that startups talk about endlessly – how fast we are growing, how much capital we’ve raised and from whom, how big our team is and who is on it, et cetera. But customers don’t really care about any of those things.
To create the feedback loops we need to improve, we need to prioritise conversations that are uncomfortable and hard over conversations that are comfortable and easy. We need to think about what sector our customers are in, then lean into the hard work that will, over time, make us part of that sector.
Visualise an audience
The buzz of a big crowd is electric. At a sports event or music concert you can hear and see everybody in the arena and get a sense of the size of the crowd. It’s exciting to soak up the atmosphere created when lots of people are all in the same physical space at the same time. For the band, or sports team or keynote speaker that is the focus of a crowd’s attention, that is quite powerful. Or terrifying, I suppose, depending on their mood.
It’s more difficult to visualise the people using a website or application. Customers are everywhere and nowhere, so we need to work harder to have them in mind. We can always go back, in our minds, to real crowds.
For example, if we’re working on a product that has 2,000 people using it, that is roughly the capacity of a large theatre. Imagine a full house, and the noise those people make. I consider all the possible links between them and the conversations they have. By keeping that specific crowd in mind it changes the way that we think about that group.
Product teams often dismiss a subset of people because they only represent a small percentage of the overall audience. It’s better to envision these people as a distinct group. For example, when considering accessibility, imagine the affected customers gathered in one place – those who struggle with small fonts, those who are colour blind (or completely blind), and those using older devices. How would we justify our design decisions to them face-to-face? While these users might seem insignificant on a percentage basis and are easily overlooked, it’s harder to imagine telling them in person that they don’t matter. Similarly, when planning upgrades, if we think it’s no big deal for services to be temporarily unavailable, picture all the people trying to access the service during that time. Imagine them forming a physical queue while we make changes. Even if the number is small, it would feel like a lot of people. We’d likely be more motivated to restore service quickly if they were all standing behind us, impatiently looking over our shoulder.
We can use this technique to put any audience size in perspective.
If the numbers get bigger than that, we need different techniques.3
This can cut both ways: I’ve also seen startups where the founders have a deep network in the specific sector they are working in, who never break out of that bubble and connect with other startup founders who could help them quickly understand some of the specific challenges with operating at that age and stage of business.
As is so often the case, the optimal answer is: a bit of both! ↩︎
Rowan Simpson at Westpac Stadium in Wellington
The idea behind that photo was the same: there are 35,000 yellow seats at that stadium and at the time there were about that many people online at once every evening on Trade Me.
It was a typically wet and wild day, hence the slightly damp windswept look and the Icebreaker jacket. ↩︎
