Product People

Hey Product People! What’s your process for finding an idea that people love? How do you take your initial hunch for an idea, and make it a reality? What is a funnel? Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics is back to answer these questions and more!

Show Notes

Hey Product People! What’s your process for finding an idea that people love? How do you take your initial hunch for an idea, and make it a reality? What is a funnel? Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics is back to answer these questions and more!

Highlights
  • “Making human connections is the most important thing in any startup.”
  • “You need some sound reasoning behind why you’re building your product. It’s a balance of having a vision AND taking all the customer inputs you can find to make sure that your vision can be a reality.
  • “Study great product people.”
  • “You have to have an unbiased curiosity; like a method actor. You take off your shoes, and go find that other person’s shoes and start walking in them. You start walking, acting and observing like them.”
  • “Get unbiased facts about your customers. Know them better than they know themselves.”
  • “We discovered that building a funnel in Google Analytics is painful. And so we started thinking: how can we take the pain out of that?”
  • “One of the best things about going to industry conferences is learning about your potential customers. It’s full on anthropology!”
  • “The creation of the product is a big social experiment. As you understand people, you can ask: how can I save them time, make money or save money?”
  • “Any step by step process that exists in life, has drop-off. And to me, what a funnel allows you to do is figure out that drop-off. It helps you identify where your problems are.”
  • “One of the key things we’re learning is that you need to build an audience before you build your product. Build your audience not for marketing, but for learning.”
  • “Our listeners tell us that building and audience is way scarier than building a product.” – Justin Jackson
  • “Ask these questions: 1) Who is it I’m trying to reach? 2) Where do they hang out? 3) How can I reach them there?”
  • “In today’s world you should be able to get people paying right away. If you’ve spent a year, and you don’t have anyone willing to pay you, it’s likely they’ll never pay you.”
  • “An idea is a solution to a problem. What problem does that idea solve? My suggestion to people is asking: how do you know that a lot of other people have this problem?”
Show notes
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Shout outs

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Creators and Guests

Host
Justin Jackson
⚡ Bootstrapping, podcasting, calm companies, business ethics. Co-founder of Transistor.fm

What is Product People?

A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them

Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome to another episode of Product People. What's your process for finding an idea that people love? How do you take your initial hunch for an idea and make it into a reality? Heaton Shaw from Kissmetrics is back to answer these questions and more. Last week I created a new account on sprint.ly for a new product project I'm working on.

Speaker 1:

And the reason is that whenever I enter tasks and user stories into sprint.ly, I actually get things done. I move towards my goal. In sprint.ly, when you add a task, it's completely focused on your customer. Especially, what outcome does the customer want to achieve? You and your team can try Sprintly for free by going to www.sprint.ly.

Speaker 1:

Are you frustrated with your current web host provider? A few years ago I was looking to switch from my cheap host to something more robust, but trying to search online for hosting providers is a nightmare because there's so much spam in the search results. Then Rob Walling recommended WP Engine and I've been with them ever since. If you're looking for dedicated WordPress hosting that can handle huge traffic spikes, like 40,000 visits in a day, is lightning fast and has great support, I highly recommend them. Go to www.productpeople.tvwpengine and get up to two months free.

Speaker 1:

Well, let's shift now into some practical things that you've learned that you can maybe share with our audience of people that are some people are building their first thing. Some people haven't started yet. And some people have already they've been doing it for a while, and they're really looking to get to the next level. So let's start with metrics. What do you think are the three most important metrics for a startup?

Speaker 2:

I don't think metrics are that important for a startup.

Speaker 1:

Your company's called Kissmetrics, Heaton.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I know. I think there's only one thing that matters. It's that your your customers are happy, excited all the time to use your product. Okay. And so the way I would measure success in a startup is actually are, you know, are people are people raving about it?

Speaker 2:

Are people excited about it? Do people understand it? Those kind of things are so much more important to me than any metric. And more importantly, are you building something? Are you servicing customers that you want to be?

Speaker 2:

So that's why, you know, you say, what are the three most important metrics? You know what? I don't know. It really depends on the business and the company and all that. What I think matters, is the metric of customer happiness and how I don't even mean quantifying it.

Speaker 2:

I think this is a more qualitative thing of just people tweeting about it. Are they mad at you? Right? Yeah. If you have issues, Are you communicating with them?

Speaker 2:

So even when there's an issue, they're happy, right? Or happy enough. Yeah. I don't know those kinds of things I've learned. Like, you know, and it relates to the thing I said earlier before, which was what got me, what made me happy was when someone put me as a reason to use Crazy Egg.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. Because that that's really what hits home for me more than even anything else. Because if they're thinking of me as the reason to use it as one of the reasons, then I've already got past the product being good enough and all that kind of stuff and got to the heart of making a human connection, basically. Mhmm. That I think is what's most important in any startup.

Speaker 2:

Does the customer understand what you're all about, what your product's all about and why they should love it, how they should use it? Those things are more important to me.

Speaker 1:

And what's your process for finding an idea that people love? Do you kind of throw a bunch of stuff up against the wall and see what sticks? Or do you premeditate? You know, this is the thing we're going to build. This is why I think people will love it.

Speaker 1:

And then you go and test that. Which approach do you follow?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I tend to always have the product vision. So, you know, that's my job. But like every time that I typically screwed up a product is when I had way too much conviction and and did what I would call started smoking my own crack.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I believed in what I was doing so much that, you know, you couldn't convince me otherwise, and I think that that's a mistake. Mhmm. So I I actually wouldn't tell you that either way. I would just say that you need some sound reasoning around why you're building what you're building and and some vision for it. There's so many people that are so good at figuring out what customers need or want or or all that, but they suck at actually having a core reason to do what they're doing and a vision for what they're doing.

Speaker 2:

And I think, you know, to me, it's a balancing of both of those things. So you have a vision and what you're doing is you're taking all the inputs you possibly can find to make sure that vision is correct. That vision can be a reality that many, many people use and pay for or whatever it may be, depending on what type of business you are. So to me, hyper customer centric, hyper customer focused, but at the same time, always conscious of what the vision is and how it needs to evolve. You know, that to me is like probably one of the most important things that is hard to learn, hard to develop unless you have a lot of experience or you study good or great product people, great vision, product vision is what I would say.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And what is it about, you know, like that initial hunch about what's a good idea? How is there is there something that just comes through practice of noticing things that are, you know, a legitimate pain and that you think you could solve and that people would just be in love with you if you solve that pain. Is there a skill set or is there something that you notice with those kinds of ideas that make them more likely to succeed?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah, so let's talk about the interesting things, because I know, you know, I obviously heard the conversation you guys had with Jason, product manager, and an awesome entrepreneur. And he talked about all the tactical stuff. So I won't get into any of that because I think what he said pretty much sums up, you know, a lot of the we're very aligned with how we think about a lot of that stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So I'll talk more about the vision side, because I think that's something that people just don't understand. And that's kind of what your question was about. So what I would say is like, you have to have this like amazingly unbiased curiosity is what I would call it. When I because I started thinking when you asked the question, like, you know, my thought process was, well, like, you know, you have to use products in the this is like what my own thought process just to kinda get you to understand how I got there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. You have

Speaker 2:

to use the products. Right? So for example, when we built Kissmetrics in the funnel tool that was person based, we were heavy, heavy users of Google Analytics and Omniture from our consulting company and stuff like that. We realized there's just a couple of things that are just pains in the ass for using Like, those just awful. Like, for example, to build a funnel in Google Analytics, it just sucks.

Speaker 2:

I mean, love the product, love what that company has done Mhmm. For the for the industry. But like that, building a funnel in Google Analytics, just so painful. It's probably one the most painful things about the product. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So we said, well, how do we take all that pain out of it? And that's what we built. But that was from having a core understanding of the pain points. But that came from this like unbiased curiosity. What I mean by that is like, we just use the products and you can do that even if you're not a user.

Speaker 2:

If you're sort of you know, one of my favorite, favorite things is the concept of method acting, where the idea is you're you're literally you take off your shoes. I mean, is how I describe it. Yeah. You take off your shoes. I'm actually taking off my shoes right now.

Speaker 2:

It's kind of fun. And then you literally go find that other person's shoes and you step in that and you start walking in

Speaker 1:

them. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And what that means is from the ground up, you think like them, you observe, you act like them. Yeah. Like that to me is a way to do that. And just sort of get the information you need, the unbiased information, the facts about your customer. Know them better than they know themselves, which I know a lot of people have started to say, but I think that's really important.

Speaker 2:

One way is you become the customer, like our example, the example I gave you. You have to do it in this unbiased way. You have to do it in this way where like you remove all your sort of notion of what it should be and you just go try to figure out what it actually is right now. That's the only way I think that you can actually make it better. Make it like a 100 times better.

Speaker 1:

That's interesting. You know, the the idea have you ever actually gone and like hung out in places where your customers are and like, is that has that ever been a part of the process?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's like one of the most valuable things about, like, going to an industry conference. Get to speak to all of them. Mean, you get to talk to them, and it's not even by accident. It's on purpose, and you're they're all around you. You're surrounded.

Speaker 2:

Well, what can you do but act like them eventually? Right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. What

Speaker 2:

else can you do? So, you know, if you So I think conferences are actually brilliant for that, not just sales or marketing, but literally. So you can just sit there and be like, okay, what do these people drink? What do they eat? How do they think?

Speaker 2:

How do they dress? What do they think about? What are the talks that are packed? Who are the people they look up to? Like all that, it's a full on like anthropology, for lack of a better term, right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And then to me, the creation of the product is just basically a big, big social experiment.

Speaker 1:

In what way? What do you mean it's a big social experiment?

Speaker 2:

I mean, if you understand these people, it's all about, okay, what can I do to make them react differently than they do today? Right? Whether it's save them time, make them money, you know, save them money, whatever it is. It's actually one of those three usually, right? Save time, make money, save money.

Speaker 2:

That's what most products do for you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And, you know, so let's take that one right there. Make money is often that is a most businesses want to make. They want to know how they can make more money. Do like funnels, because funnels is a big part of Kissmetrics.

Speaker 1:

How do funnels help customers make more money?

Speaker 2:

If you think about business, business models, all those kind of things. In in a lot of ways, everything's a funnel. So try to think of a really good example, but any step by step process that happens in life, in business, there's drop off. And to me, that's all what a funnel allows you to do is understand that drop off and helps you figure out where losing the most people. And then, it's what's basically a tool, in my opinion, to identify where your problems are in any process.

Speaker 1:

And

Speaker 2:

then from there, you can basically figure out how to make it better. You know, and it's all the sort of tactics of marrying qualitative and quantitative data. So you use a funnel to understand baseline, let's say. And then you So let's say it's a, you know, there's a lot of people signing up for my free trial, but only 2% of them end up paying me after the trial or paying the business after a trial. Well, there's 98% of people that don't pay.

Speaker 2:

So now you can go find them. A funnel allows you to go identify who those people are. Our funnels do that at Kissmetrics and go talk to them. Go find out why they're not paying. Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

And that informs how you sort of optimize the funnel because based on what they say, you basically start running experiments back to the social stuff. And you see if those experiments change user behavior. Simple as that.

Speaker 1:

And is that something you did with Crazy Egg? Is that one reason you ended up canceling the free plan? Was by analyzing your funnel?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. We couldn't figure out how to get those free people to convert at all in that product. And it had a lot to do with what the product did and how it was designed and all that. If you couldn't get enough people to sign up and convert, so the funnel just wasn't right in terms of a free plan. Now that doesn't mean we won't introduce one again, or that doesn't mean, you know, there isn't a world where we could have a free plan, it's just that it was much more efficient to not have a free plan.

Speaker 2:

It had a lot to do with the size of the market, the type of customer we were getting and we couldn't get and things like that. And

Speaker 1:

in terms of funnels, because funnels are interesting to me because in some ways, to be honest, I feel like I'm still learning what exactly that is. What is a funnel and how does that all work? Is it is there some like let's talk about the top of the funnel. And what a lot of people want to do these days is get number one on Hacker News. You know, there's still some people that feel like being tech tech crunched is a is a big deal.

Speaker 1:

Do those kind of are those funnels in your experience for software companies, especially are how important are those kind of big, like heavy traffic funnels as opposed to other types of funnels? Maybe talk about, is there other things that people might be missing when they kind of focus on those really high traffic sources?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know, when I think about funnels and traffic, I just think about are the people I'm getting qualified? Or how qualified are they? So when you look at a funnel, not a funnel, but like traffic from TechCrunch and people coming from there, you know, just think about who they are. They're usually tech people closer to early adopters than not, and, you know, very much into knowing what new startup exists out there. Because TechCrunch is all about startups for the most part.

Speaker 2:

So those are people that generally are in startup land. They might they're mostly probably entrepreneurial or entrepreneurs more than anything else. And so if that isn't relevant traffic for you and your business and you don't want that type of traffic or customer, then you have to think really hard about whether that's customer acquisition strategy for you or you're just trying to get on tech once you can get exposure so you can go raise money or something.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm. Because I think a lot of people are just, you know, we get addicted to especially traffic. So, you know, if you got 40,000 visits in a day, you might feel like this is amazing, you know, this is a ton of traffic. But obviously, you're right. Like, if it's unqualified, it might not mean much.

Speaker 1:

I'm sure you've got data on this. Have you seen other kind of low traffic funnels that have converted better than high traffic funnels? Do have any examples of what those might be?

Speaker 2:

Sure. I mean, like if you go to if we were to advertise on a on or or actually, this is a great example. So there's a blog there's TechCrunch and there's a blog called MarketingLand. Okay. There's actually a blog called that.

Speaker 2:

If we are a tool for marketers and we advertise on TechCrunch versus MarketingLand, MarketingLand tends to get us less traffic, not even advertising, even if we got a blog post written up about something we're doing. MarketingLand will convert better because it's marketers only that are reading it, while TechCrunch, because it has all kinds of people, it just won't convert as well. So it's really just thinking about the audience and the readership if you're targeting a blog or, you know, if you're targeting like things like Twitter and, know, all that kind of stuff. It's really just about audience. It's all about audience and whether they're qualified or not.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that I think I've noticed is a lot of the winners in our space have gone after a really digital audience. So, you know, I'm from Canada. I know the FreshBooks guys. And they deliberately they could have gone after anyone with their invoicing product. But they went after Web design firms, people that were online.

Speaker 1:

And, you know, that same kind of scenario kind of plays out over and over again in our industry. Do you think that's still a good tactic to go after kind of like that digital audience as opposed to, you know, other types of funnels, I guess, like other types of audiences?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, mean, as of right now, the digital audience is still the easiest to reach and most scalable and everyone's going online in that sense. But I think it's actually getting easier and easier to reach people that might not be digital, but still reach them digitally, so to speak. So FreshBooks could go after mom and pops now compared to when they started, which is what, eight, nine, ten years ago or something. Mhmm. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So so I think, you know, it really depends. And they might notice that that mom and pop has a higher lifetime value, so they can spend more to try to acquire that customer than even, you know, the the kind of web design shops of the world. Yeah. So I would just say that it's all relative and, you know, as time goes on, different types of people are easier to reach non digital, if you want to call it that. Mhmm.

Speaker 1:

Well, Here's another question that I've been thinking about. You know Cindy Alvarez?

Speaker 2:

Yes, actually was our original product manager for Kissmetrics.

Speaker 1:

Oh, no way. Okay. I just follow her blog. But she's talking about she asked the question of whether there's a limit of how many SaaS apps a given business would use. She was wondering, you know, maybe does it cap out at six or, you know, is there eventually do people kind of get tired of paying for things monthly or whatever?

Speaker 1:

And I was thinking about, you know, there's other types of there's kind of two types of products. There's products that people use every day, every week, every month, no matter what. Right. So FreshBooks, I've got an invoice every day or every week. I need it.

Speaker 1:

Hosting. I need hosting. And in some ways, Kissmetrics falls into that as well, because it's something that you need to do all the time. You need to be analyzing your analytics. Was that something you kind of set out to do to create a product that people are using all the time as opposed to I'm thinking like I actually think that surveys is an interesting example because a lot of survey apps SaaS based.

Speaker 1:

But a lot of times you're just creating a survey as a one off. Or there's user testing products out there as well where you can get people to do click tests on different things. Often people want to do those one time and then wait until the next time. It's not something that you're kind of depending on as a business. What do you think about that whole distinction?

Speaker 1:

And is that something that, you you guys went after with Kissmetrics?

Speaker 2:

It's a good question. I think it's an interesting discussion. I think people tend to we're in a world now where, like, it's harder and harder to build a one size fits all product. And so I actually don't you know, in some ways, would almost say that I don't think there actually is an upper limit to the number of SaaS products a company can use. I think the upper limit is more about what can those products do for people?

Speaker 2:

Are there enough jobs that those products need to do for people? And can, you know, back to the question I was saying earlier, can a single product do the job well enough that someone doesn't go out and eventually look for another product in that category for some reason? And so since everything's evolving, it's probably evolving faster than ever. I mean, probably, we know that right. I think that makes sense to that.

Speaker 2:

I don't know if I would debate that and say that there's only a certain limit because everything's constantly changing. Use cases are changing. The jobs that people are trying to get done with products is changing. And so with that changing reality, I think there's always going be more products and more things people try. It's also easier than ever to switch.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And and I guess that's another thought is because there are things that are less important, like there's a kind of a pecking order of things that I care about as a business owner. So I care about analytics and marketing because that's how I get new customers. Whenever it's tied to money, you know, that really matters. There's other things like, you know, maybe you have an app that helps people with their training or helps people with their hiring.

Speaker 1:

There seems to be some things that maybe aren't as important. Do you think do you think that's the case? Like people should aim to start the products that are in the top five priorities as opposed to, you know, these things that are maybe less down the list?

Speaker 2:

I would say that even those things that are less down the list might still be a priority to somebody. So what's more important is is if is the problem you're trying to solve a priority for somebody in the organization? Is there enough of those people across the world that you can make money, and can you solve their problem? So that's the way I look at that more so more so specifically based on the customer and less so just a generic prioritization.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. Is Kissmetrics profitable right now?

Speaker 2:

We don't talk about that.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

It's venture funded. Yeah. So don't really talk about that.

Speaker 1:

And how about we talk about growth? How have you seen growth happen with KissMetrics? Is it what did you launch with? Like, how many users did you launch with? And, you know, what point are you at now?

Speaker 1:

And what do you think are the things that you've done that positively affected growth?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you know, it's one of the I appreciate your question, but I'm gonna reframe it for you. Sure. Just because questions where you're asking what I've done or what we've done are not as useful to most people. So I'm gonna reframe it and just say that, like, I think and talk more in general and and give some examples as well. Sure.

Speaker 2:

I think one of the key things that we're learning, especially with software products and SaaS products, products on the web, is that you can actually build and create an audience and you need to, it's imperative before you actually build the product. So I think one big lesson we've had, and we've done this in multiple companies for the last ten years that my co founder and started and had been involved in is basically build the audience before you think you need to. So build your audience not for marketing initially, but for learning. So for example, we actually didn't start with our our blog has been very productive for us and we get ton of traffic. But it actually started with a Twitter account and an opportunity we saw to create a Twitter feed that people wanted to read because we were tweeting the most interesting things, the things that were on people's mind, the things they wanted to learn about and specifically marketers who are, you know, what I would put in the category of constant learners, just because that's part of their job.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And, you know, there's other categories like small business owners, like the coffee shop owner doesn't really isn't a constant learner in the same way. Yeah. They're more have problems like a marketer's problem is like, well, I wanna always find new marketing channels. I always wanna find how to how to do marketing better.

Speaker 2:

Small business owner has way bigger sort of different sort of challenges and problems that are more painful such as, what do I do when my best barista leaves? And so their problems might be more around training and think guides and documentation and process. The way I like to sort of think about all those things is like, I'm not gonna understand those types of things about my audience unless I've already built a way to attract that audience and start talking to them. That's what I think is one of the biggest lessons. The companies that I see that are successful are the ones that create that audience from the beginning.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And I mean, I think the hardest part about building an audience, I think to some people building an audience. Well, I know because when we talk to our listeners, building an audience is way scarier than building a product. Partly because I think they all say like they'll look at their Twitter feed and like, oh, I've got 10 followers and, you know, I don't have an email list. You know, does anyone use, you know, our assess anymore?

Speaker 1:

And so, these days, what would you say to someone that has they've got 20 followers on Twitter? What should they start doing to build an audience?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, you have to think about what your goal is. It forces you to also think about what your goal is with the audience and when, you know, and when does your goal evolve? And then who is that audience that you need to attract and get? So those are the two sort of questions. And then the third one, so to me, the questions are simply, who is it I'm trying to reach?

Speaker 2:

Who's my customer? Where do they hang out? And how do I reach them? How do I like engage with them? And so if you can answer those questions, I mean, I think your goal, because the thing is the channel you build or the channel meaning the ability to reach the customer early on, if you know who they are and know where they hang out, it almost comes naturally as to what you do.

Speaker 2:

So I can't tell you that there's a generic strategy that's like, oh yeah, go build, engage people on Twitter. I don't know. Does your customer hang out there? Are they engaging on Twitter? Because if they're not, then it might not be the right place for you.

Speaker 2:

There might be something better. For example, if trying to reach developers today, it's very likely that I would do one of two things. One, I would think about where they hang out obviously. And as I thought about that, I'd do one of two things. I would go figure out how to do things on GitHub, build a presence on GitHub somehow.

Speaker 2:

Because developers are sitting right there and they're engaging on GitHub. The other thing I would do is I would think about companies like Twilio and how they reach their customers, which is through hackathons and things like that. Now there's a lot of them out there. So those the ways I'd reach a developer today. Wouldn't even think about Twitter really.

Speaker 2:

They're not hanging out on Twitter all the time. Not the way that a marketer does.

Speaker 1:

And can you give people a sense of like how does this kind of build over time? Like that list of 23,000, did that happen overnight? Did it take a week? Did it take what kind of of progression is there when you're building an audience?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, mean, the truth is back then with the 23,000 for Crazy Egg, we didn't even need that many people. I think the progression these days is like, get a small amount of people that you feel are indicative of a larger opportunity in a larger market and start engaging with them and then get them to pay you. And then use that to sort of get more people to pay you. So you'll get your first ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five people to pay you. Goals can be a lot smaller these days because it's very possible that if you can get 25 people to pay you, 50 people to pay you, a 100 people to pay you, that there'll be thousands more that are willing to pay you.

Speaker 2:

So I think we're just in a different world than even back then when you had to go for reach and stuff. These days you can start very small and it can scale up very fast just because most people are online.

Speaker 1:

And how fast do you think that should happen? Because I think that's a great thing. If someone's willing to pay you for the product, you know that you've got something there. But how long should people wait? Let's say that it's been a year and they still haven't been able to get anyone to pay for the product or they only have a handful of people and there just doesn't seem to be anything above that.

Speaker 1:

What do you think is a good kind of time frame for people to test that out in terms of actually getting people that are buying the product?

Speaker 2:

In today's world, you should be able to get people to pay as soon as possible, especially if you've done your homework and built a product they want. So, usually, if someone spent a year and doesn't have any paying customers, they probably don't have a product people actually need.

Speaker 1:

Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

And that's that's, you know, that's the problem. So there's a more core root cause there that has less to do with the fact that no one's paying them and more to do with the fact that nobody will ever pay them for what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's such a hard thing sometimes when people are especially when we get excited about an idea or what have you. That idea of testing things, too, really quickly and being able to get people to pay almost even before you have anything built is kind of an interesting development because it used to be, you know, especially like when selling to businesses, like you'd have to say, well, we can actually build this.

Speaker 1:

Here it is. You know, it's in a box or whatever. But that has changed now, hasn't it?

Speaker 2:

Completely.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I love that line by Derek Sivers where he says, if it's not a hit, switch. Yeah. And it seems like you can do that these days easier than ever in that you could put up a landing page and then see if anyone cares. And if they don't, you could literally switch in a week or so.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that I totally agree with that. A lot of people just get stuck because they get so excited about that idea and they an idea is actually a solution to a problem. So they get stuck on an idea instead of thinking about the problem that's related to the idea. So, you know, when I hear an idea, I'm like, okay, that's your idea. That's good.

Speaker 2:

You have an idea. That's that's I don't know if that's step one, but I guess it's step one for some people. Mhmm. Yep. What problem does that idea solve?

Speaker 2:

And every idea is trying to solve a problem. So my suggestion to people these days when I hear that, oh, I'm gonna go build x, y, and z is, okay, that's cool. How do you know that's a real problem that enough people have? Right? And a lot of times I get the answer of, well, it's a problem I had.

Speaker 2:

Like, okay, go make sure that a lot of other people have the problem because that's really important. And otherwise you'll just build for yourself and then you won't build a business because most of us are trying to build business that need to. And so I you know, I always try to break it out and say, okay, every idea here, every solution I see, what problem is it really solving? And the ones that are the best are solving a real problem that human beings have that they're willing to use their product for, or in case of a B2B service actually pay for it. So I guess my takeaway would just be simply think about problems, not about solutions.

Speaker 1:

Well said, well said. Hetan, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed our chat.

Speaker 2:

Same here.

Speaker 1:

Where can people find you online? What's the best place?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm HN Shah on Twitter, and that's probably the best place for me just because I share all kinds of stuff on Twitter.

Speaker 1:

Perfect. Well, thanks again. I'm looking forward to connecting again soon.

Speaker 2:

Awesome.

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