Product People

In this episode of Product People: does Amy Hoy still get scared before a launch? How do you choose an audience? And she answers some listener questions.

Show Notes

In this episode of Product People: does Amy Hoy still get scared before a launch? How do you choose an audience? And she answers some listener questions.

Highlights
  • “The 30×500 bootcamp has been moved to June 15/16: Why you should do a tiny product first”
  • “So much of what we’re doing (with our online courses) is creating community.”
  • “Our Bacon Biz community will be open to everybody: baconbiz.com”
  • “People have set-up their lives where they let themselves get jerked around by their emotions all the time.”
  • “If you launch something, you’re going to get good feedback and bad feedback. No matter what the price is, somebody’s going to complain about the price.”
  • “People unconsciously prioritize their feelings as an excuse.”
  • “Sometimes you’ll go to someone, because you need some advice, but they’ll end up re-enforcing the wrong things. You need to find people that can focus on facts.” – Justin
  • “So many ills are cause by just reacting to feelings.”
  • “What really scares me is karaoke.”
  • “Ask yourself: What logical data is telling me I should be afraid? What’s the worst possible thing that could happen?”
  • “The key, seems to be, to keep trying things. Not everything’s a home run, but they keep trying.”
  • “A lot of people’s fear is of what people will think of you.”
  • “The easiest way for me to turn this around, is to quit being so self-centred. To keep reminding myself: it’s not about me.”
  • “Don’t ask: what do I want to build? Ask: what do people need?”
  • “You can’t actually help anyone; you can only help people that want to help themselves.”
  • “You have to help people with something specific, as opposed to being general. You’ll
  • “When people ask me: ‘what audience should I serve?’ I ask them: ‘Well, what are you? If you’re a Ruby developer, than serve Ruby developers!’ Stick within your own circles.”
  • “You’ve already chosen your audience by who you’re already associating with.”
  • “To punch above your weight you need to use every single advantage you have. If you try to pick a new market you know nothing about, you’re giving up one of your core advantages.”
  • “Start serving the audience you already belong to.”
  • How can people break out of their insecurity? “It’s not a question of ‘who you are’. Do your research: what does it tell you? You don’t have to wonder ‘what do I have to offer that people want?’ Look at your resume.”
  • “Always be researching customers; never stop. I look wherever people congregate: forums, mailing lists, blog posts, off-hand comments from people on Twitter, support portals, user groups.”
  • “Don’t walk up and ask people what their problems are; you have to observe.”
  • Where do you keep your customer research notes? “I use a text file. Simple as that. Don’t use fancy tools.”
  • “For content marketing, I take what I’ve learned in my research phase, and write posts around that.”
  • When we sell people things, are we pandering to their narcism? “It’s not narcissistic to think about yourself, and what you need. It’s narcissistic to think that everything’s about you.”
  • “We don’t have to add new features to compete. New features don’t always make a product better.”
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:

In this episode of Product People, does Amy Hoy still get scared before a launch? How do you choose an audience? And Amy answers some listener questions. Stay tuned. First, I want to tell you about some great sponsors.

Speaker 1:

Sprint.ly just pushed out a big update. Behind the scenes, everything is faster and snappier. It's the best way to manage the software development process. It's agile project management that works. You and your team can try Sprintly for free by going to www.sprint.ly.

Speaker 1:

If you're looking for dedicated WordPress hosting that can handle huge traffic spikes, is light lightning fast, and has great support, I highly recommend WP Engine. Go to productpeople.tv/wpengine to get up to two months free. If you want to stay up to date with the show, get extra resources sent directly to you, and also learn about the other projects we're working on, you need to join our email newsletter, productpeople.tv newsletter. Now let's get back to part two with Amy Hoy.

Speaker 2:

I'm wondering if we could talk about because

Speaker 1:

we've touched on habits and motivation.

Speaker 3:

Right.

Speaker 2:

And you had said at one point you weren't as disciplined as you were today. So what happened? How did you kind of cultivate good discipline? How does that happen?

Speaker 3:

I don't think that it's about cultivating discipline so much as it is changing the way that you think about everything. You have the wrong conception. I don't think any amount of going to the discipline gym, so to speak, is going to change that. Have to well, here's an example that I teach my students in March. They'll say, I don't feel ready.

Speaker 3:

They're like, I don't think that programmers pay for things. I feel like I'm going to launch this and no one will buy

Speaker 2:

it. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And I'll say, what evidence are you basing that on? And the answer is, there isn't any. People have set up their lives where they let themselves get jerked around by their emotions all the time without thinking. And it's not to say that if you hate your job, you shouldn't quit it, for example.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

But, if you do something, if you launch something, you are going to get good feedback and bad feedback. No matter what the price is, someone's going to complain about the price. Possibly several someones. If you get that quote unquote feedback, no matter what you do, what does it mean? It means nothing.

Speaker 3:

It means nothing. If you're always afraid before you do something, but you do it anyway and it works, what does the fear mean? Nothing. It's meaningless. It's noise.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And, I think understanding that is really the core discipline. So you think I should really add this feature before we ship. Where's your data? Why? Do you just feel that way because you're afraid?

Speaker 3:

Or is there actually a reason you have to do it? Like, what will happen if you don't?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And people would prefer, I think people unconsciously prioritize their feelings as excuses. I think that people use fear as an excuse more than fear prevents them from doing something. Because everyone will say, Oh, it's okay. It'll be fine. Blah, blah, blah, if you say you're afraid to do it.

Speaker 3:

But that gives you, like, a hit of what's it called? Validation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Validation. I read an article. This is a really controversial guy. I'm not even going name him.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

He's so controversial. He writes about well, it's called the last psychiatrist. I will warn you, his blog is pretty abrasive.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

He thinks everything comes down to narcissism and he's honestly persuaded me that it's probably true. He wrote an article about one topic, but he used an example. The topic was basically why do people do stuff that they know that they're going to regret? Like, really weird stuff And he says it's because if they then confess it to someone, the person will say, Oh, well, that's not you. Why did you do that?

Speaker 3:

That's not you. And that that is actually the payoff, not the action itself often, but the payoff of someone saying, That's not you. Why would you do that? It's actually a gratifying reinforcement of their identity. To hear someone say, That's not you.

Speaker 3:

Why would you do that? Yeah. You know? Or like, It's not like you. That's not You're better than that.

Speaker 3:

It's actually sort of a twisted kind of behavior to get the praise. Another example he used was a child, a young girl, like 10 years old or whatever, who ends up prioritizing not doing her homework overdoing her homework. So she knows that if she does the homework, it's like, you know, a lot of effort, and then she'll, you know, may or may not feel good about herself. But if she doesn't do her homework, she has like a brief period of feeling really bad, and then she can go on with the rest of her life. She doesn't want to look at Facebook.

Speaker 3:

So it's, it would seem like, why would you not do it? You feel bad afterwards, but feeling bad for ten minutes is better than feeling bad for an hour it takes to do the homework. And so that's how these vicious cycles get embedded.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And how do you fight that? Like if you're in that rut, what are the things that get you out of that?

Speaker 3:

Well for me it was the epiphany, right? So I don't know. Afterwards I never had that problem really again. Not to any large degree. I think asking yourself why are you doing something and if the feelings that you think you have make any sense is a good one.

Speaker 3:

So, were starting to do We were going to do Bacon Biz is a much bigger Bacon Biz Compass is much bigger conference. We were planning much bigger is relative. It's going to be 45 attendees, maybe 50 if the tickets all sell out and might open up a couple slots. But, we were going to do like 110. I was on the phone with the venues.

Speaker 3:

Booking a venue is fucking awful. Oh, man.

Speaker 2:

I know. It's like

Speaker 3:

the worst And thing so, I was about to give them, you know, $5,000 as a deposit. And I was like, wait a minute, why am I doing this? Before I actually forked through the money, thought, Why am I doing this? And then I called Alex and he's like, What do you mean? I'm like, Does this really make sense?

Speaker 3:

Why are we doing it this way? And he's like, Oh. And we talked. And then we decided to do it completely different. Like, so the feeling was, stop, don't do that.

Speaker 3:

But I didn't just cancel it and I didn't just listen to the feeling. I sat and I thought, well, why am I doing it this way? And why do I feel this way about not wanting to give them a $5,000 deposit? Not wanting to commit to, you know, dollars 30,000 in catering. I didn't We just not do were like, alright, well, what are our goals again with the conference?

Speaker 3:

We were kind of, you know, following the template of what we used for our last conference. But then I realized that I didn't want to do it that way. And so we thought, alright, well how else can we do it? What are our goals that we're trying to achieve? And we decided that community and connection was the most important thing.

Speaker 3:

So it actually made way more sense to hold a much smaller conference in our office for free.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you and Alex must have a relationship or some sort of working relationship where you can focus on actual facts and goals and things like that as opposed to because sometimes we fall into that rut of you'll go to somebody because you're feeling something's wrong, but they'll almost reinforce the wrong things.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I think we established in the previous half that I just don't listen to people.

Speaker 2:

But do you think, I mean, like obviously, you feel like Alex is someone you can trust to have some sort of rational response.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, we're on the same page most of the time. But we talk about this stuff. This exact stuff. Like we talk about the fear and why it's stupid to listen to it. And we teach people to look for the data instead and to think about it.

Speaker 3:

And, we do that because that's because we're like that.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

We're like that. And, I think that if you're working with someone who seems to be sabotaging things, you have to ask yourself, why are they doing it? Why does this client want infinite revisions? Mhmm. There's something illogical going on.

Speaker 3:

And, if you realize, most people just basically respond to feelings the way that a trained pigeon responds to a light in its Skinner box, you know, peck light, get food, you realize how many ills in the world, big and small, are just caused by just reacting to feelings. I just repeated myself, but there you

Speaker 2:

go. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

This is my dime store philosophy that you're getting right now. Hopefully, people aren't falling asleep.

Speaker 2:

Well, do you still get scared? Like before a launch? Like if you're something new, do you still get that fear like, is anyone going to buy this and is this going I to

Speaker 3:

wonder if I'm going to sell as much as I want to sell or sell any sometimes, sell out. But the thing is that I know that I've got I've done my homework and I know what people buy in the past. And every time I launch 30 by 500, I kind of suspect I won't be able to sell out that time, but I always do. In fact, just yesterday I was saying, don't know if we're going sell out bacon biz comp, but I'm sure that we will, like, logically. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Logically. The thing is I just don't give those feelings any credence whatsoever. Now, when I'm actually scared, it's karaoke. It scares me so much my handshakes. But I've done it like five times now, and my hand didn't shake nearly as bad last time, I couldn't find my key, so I paused.

Speaker 3:

I just paused in the middle of the song and tried to pick up my key again, I couldn't. Yeah. But it didn't matter.

Speaker 2:

And so how can people deal with that if they have a fear of something?

Speaker 3:

Do it anyway.

Speaker 2:

It's just do it anyway.

Speaker 3:

Yep. Well, yourself, why do I why am I afraid? What logical data is telling me to be afraid? And if there isn't any reason to be afraid, then you just have to ignore it. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Like, what is like I said the last time, what is the worst possible thing that could happen if we shift freckle without password reset or without the bit of code that deactivates people's accounts if their credit card doesn't work after the thirty day trial? We lose a little bit of money or someone has to email us to reset their password, which did happen. Yeah. Nothing bad happened.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think also, I mean, sometimes people are scared that they're going to release something and, you know, maybe it's not going to meet their expectations or But I think the people I've talked to, there's lots of people that have tried things, lots of things before they got their initial success or whatever that everyone knows about them.

Speaker 3:

And

Speaker 2:

it seems like the key was that they just kept trying things. Like they would do things and not everything was always a home run, but the worst possible thing that happened was that they didn't hit a home run. They hit, you know, they bunted the ball the first time or whatever.

Speaker 3:

Right. I think a lot of the fear has to do with what old people think of me, as you're saying meet their expectations. I don't know if you meant meet the expectations of the person who's doing it I or the was assuming you meant the audience.

Speaker 2:

You know what? I think what will people think of me is a huge thing.

Speaker 3:

Right. I agree. And the answer is, can't control it. Chances are they probably won't think of you at all. And why would you outsource your motivation and self regard to people who have nothing to do with you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Well, and you know what I've found has helped with that is changing because I wrote a blog post about this that got a lot of traction. It was because it was about going to events feeling like I'd go to a conference or something and I would be completely self focused. I'd just be thinking, I hope when people get there that people notice me and that someone comes and talks to me. And there was just all this kind of me, me, me stuff.

Speaker 2:

And the turning point for me was when I realized I'm being completely self centered right now. The easiest way for me to turn this around is to get focused on other people. So instead of saying, How can I get cared for? Say, How can I care for other people?

Speaker 3:

Bingo.

Speaker 2:

And at least in events, and I'm guessing it's with everything, that was monumental. Because then all of a sudden I wasn't cared about what other Like I would talk to anybody and just be feeling like, How can I care for this person? And fighting self centeredness the whole time. Having to remind myself, It's not about me. I'm just here to care for this person.

Speaker 2:

And if they walk away, sometimes people are worried about that, people will walk away and they'll feel awkward. I'm just going to go to someone else that I try to find someone else I can help or care for or whatever. So you're saying it's the same in software.

Speaker 3:

Totally. Here's the thing, right? People are like, I need startup advice for this particular problem. And I'm like, I bet you do this with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, teacher, you know, boss. People are like, I need the special advice for the special situation.

Speaker 3:

Like, nope, that's the human condition.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's

Speaker 3:

like you're a broken person. If you have brokenness in the way you react with people or regular life situations, you're going to have the same exact problem in your business because business is life. There's no distinction. I'm not saying like, business is life, you should live for business. Not like that.

Speaker 3:

But, you don't enter your home office and suddenly you become a different person. Everything you do is through the lens of you. Any problems you have in your personal life you're going have in your business and probably vice versa.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I think that's

Speaker 3:

They're just kind human problems.

Speaker 2:

Another testament to your approach in 30x500 because you talk to the folks that have come out of that. And it's just very different tone than what you hear from other people in our industry. So other people in our industry are often talking about how great, how much funding they've gotten. It's like a lot of self focused stuff.

Speaker 3:

Totally.

Speaker 2:

But you talk to Brennan Dunn or Grumpy Programmer and all these other folks that have gone through your class. And I just hear different stuff. Brennan is thinking What really impressed me about him is he was just always saying, I'm just always out seeing how I can help people. And he said, When I launched, I wasn't scared because I'd already helped these people all along. Like I'd been helping them in this kind of organic way all along.

Speaker 2:

And so when I launched, I felt like this is just another way for me to help. It's not like something different.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. That is the basis of 30 by 400. It is to not go, what do I want to build, but what do people need and how to get to that. And what will they buy and you know who. And that is what the class is about.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. It is turning the focus away from the self. Because there's no easier way to get stuck in your life or your business than to be thinking about everything in respect to yourself. To be thinking, oh, what will they think of me? What will they think of me after I ship this product?

Speaker 3:

Will anyone like me? Will they buy my product? It's like, what can I do? You know, like this stuff. It's if you go on infinite.

Speaker 3:

Infinitely. Right? Because you're stuck in your own head kind of swirling around and I call it quicksand.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

The more you struggle, more stuck you get. I mean, metaphorically. Apparently, real quicksand isn't actually very dangerous,

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but yeah, yeah. But now here's an interesting thought, though, because, I mean, if we take that approach, I mean, could literally go out and try to help anybody. But in business, I'm guessing we want to be a bit more targeted. We want to find people with money to spend. And there's probably other things, too.

Speaker 2:

You don't want to be dealing with clients all day that you hate. So how do you get to that point where you can, like how do you go out and find people that you can help or that need you? Or like how does that work?

Speaker 3:

So there's I've learned a lot teaching this class about people. And the number one thing I've learned is that you can't actually help anyone. You can only help them help themselves.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And that is like a, you know, like it's an old saw, you know, even God apparently only helps people who help themselves if you believe in God.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

But it's really true. You cannot help someone who wants, who doesn't really want to be helped. You can't. So, you can only help them help themselves. That's for starters.

Speaker 3:

Two, if you don't target something, you won't attract people. So, if you just say, this could help anyone who has any problem doing anything, which it could, right? It doesn't matter because no one will pay attention to that. No one will pay attention to that at all. So, you can't help anyone.

Speaker 3:

You can only help people who help themselves and who meet certain criteria, who will be attracted to something specific. You have to be specific in order to help someone instead of being general and end up helping no one. Another Now, this is the thing that's evolved over the class. The earliest versions, all the versions of the class up till now have been about helping you pick which audience you're going to serve. First, you pick an audience to investigate and then you investigate them to see if they have problems if you can find them and find the data that you need to figure out if they have a problem that you can then solve.

Speaker 3:

And if they buy things and if you like them. People always would get stuck at this stage wracked with self doubt and trying to be clever. So the last version of the four month class, we did two iterations. We did a six week version of the class where we assigned everybody the same audience. So everyone did all the same research.

Speaker 3:

They could compare notes and we could grade them because we know about the audience. Like, if someone picked, like, construction companies, I couldn't help them. I know anything about them. This was great. And then, would with the second time, people would pick their own real audiences.

Speaker 3:

And here's the thing, it still sucked. So, from now on, this is my advice from running 300 people through the class. If anyone asks me, well, what audience should I serve? I will say, what are you? A Ruby developer?

Speaker 3:

Serve Ruby developers. Or, are you a designer? Serve web designers. You can possibly also serve the people who would hire you, but only if they're a cohesive group. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

So, for example, Jared Drystail. His book and his software product that he's working on serve developer bootstrappers, developer startup guys like him who want to learn design. So they're not a 100% like him because he's a designer, but he's also one of them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

You know, Nathan Barry is great at this. Nathan knows about App Design, so he teaches other developers about App Design. Yeah. Yeah. And his product convert kit serves his audience as well.

Speaker 3:

It's like a different part of his audience. Or shall we say his platform. The people he's collected that paid attention to him or his platform or audiences, the group of people altogether. Every time one of my students has gotten clever and I haven't shut them down, they've had immense struggle, if not failure with their product. That was a learning process for me.

Speaker 2:

Clever as in like they just choose a market they think will be profitable, but they don't know much about?

Speaker 3:

Well, no, because everyone does research. They choose to investigate a market and they decide to serve them, but the market is not They may even know people in market, like teachers, for example. I would never allow anyone to do teachers, but that's another story. Local businesses, vineyards, you know, people who aren't in almost the same exact circles as the person, as my student. I've seen this several times, and it's just made it so much harder.

Speaker 3:

I used to say, as long as the research and they found the data sources and they found the pains and whatnot, that they could go ahead and do it. But actually, it's like an exponent of difficulty.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Here's kind of what I've come up with. Have 30 by 500 will teach you to punch above your weight. And I hate sports metaphors, but that's a really good one. The idea of punching above your weight is that maybe you're this scrawny boxer and you only compete with people in your weight class, but if you have a really powerful punch, you can punch above your weight. You can knock out somebody bigger than you.

Speaker 3:

If you're going to be doing this on the side or if you're going be doing this part time or by yourself, you have to be able to punch above your weight or you're going to fail. Bottom line. You have to pretend like you're running from a bear that's going to eat you.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

You have to drop everything that you do not need to survive.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And as part of, and you're saying part of that is just, is like punching above your weight is part of that choosing like that audience, the right audience right off the bat?

Speaker 3:

It's not that you have to choose it right off the bat. I mean, I think the answer is you're not really choosing it at all. You've already chosen it by the intent of where you are and who you are. Yeah. And you can expand that later, but it's a mistake to think that you can even choose because if you start doing something that's even remotely new, you're discarding all the advantages you have.

Speaker 3:

You have to use every single advantage you have. Every single one.

Speaker 2:

Here's my question. Let's use you as an example. You're interested in a lot of things. You're interested in interior design. You've run conferences before and you're obviously development design.

Speaker 2:

There's all sorts of audiences in your sphere that you could say, I'm going to teach conference organizers, or I'm going to build software for people that love really cool chairs or whatever. How did you like, in a sense you are a member of all those communities and you're active. How would you choose the right group to start with?

Speaker 3:

So that is a deceptively perfect example because those two examples are completely unlike each other. I know a lot of conference organizers. People know that I do it and they respect what I do. I know them personally. And believe it or not, a bunch of us are talking about renting a villa in Costa Rica for a week sometime in the fall maybe and getting together and swapping notes.

Speaker 3:

We call it conf conf. Invited by one of my friends named CJ, Kilbaum in Sweden.

Speaker 2:

That's a great idea.

Speaker 3:

Credit. Nobody fucking knows who I am in interior design.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I like it. I'm interested in it. But it doesn't make me part of that community or part of that group. I have zero connections whatsoever. Because I'm me, I could probably come up with something and sell to these people.

Speaker 3:

But if your plan counts on you being as good at selling as I am, your plan is probably going to fail. And that's not to talk myself up. Mhmm. But I am really good at it. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

If your plan is to be Amy Hoy, it's probably not gonna work for you. Yeah. Yeah. You can't plan on suddenly developing abilities that you don't have. So, if you are a Ruby developer and you think that you're gonna target anybody other than Ruby developers or the people who already hire you Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

Or people who want to be Ruby developers, you're crazy because you're throwing away possibly the single biggest advantage that you have. Cannot survive by throwing away your advantages. Mhmm. Because you have to be, you know They say a great developer is 10 times more effective than a decent one. Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And how effective are you if you take the one thing that gives you connections and insight and the skill to create something that people are interested in and you decide, oh, I'm not going to use that. And people think it's cheating. In fact, someone told Nathan Barry that he was cheating.

Speaker 2:

Because he's someone he already has connections with.

Speaker 3:

Right. For his, like, for his, you know, development, web development challenge.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Well, like you're cheating. And I was like, that is the most bullshitting thing I've ever heard. Yeah. It's like if by that metric, wife is cheating.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. But there must be something in there of kind of finding your voice or just thinking about like Rob Walling tells a story about him blogging for five years or something like that. And nobody cared until he started writing about single founders who are bootstrapping and outsourcing all of the other things. And he kind of found this one little tiny niche and all of a sudden, he would say that was kind of the inflection point when people started you know, he felt like this is something. Maybe Nathan Barry would be a good example, too.

Speaker 2:

Like he tried other things with iOS development and other things. And then he found his voice when he started talking about app design and describing it and blogging it and then doing a book. Is there something about finding your voice in a given community or audience that's important?

Speaker 3:

Nope. Because what you're describing isn't finding their voice. Finding their voice means how that they deliver content and how they write sentences and whether they would answer your long and detailed question with one word. That's my voice and, yeah, that's part of my branding. But, Rob Walling finally started serving his audience.

Speaker 3:

The audience he belonged to. Nathan started serving the audience he belonged to. People who design or want to design mobile apps.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

It's it's not about voice at all. Voice voice is another layer. And, I think it's a real mistake to talk about this as some sort of self introspective journey because then you get into the narcissism again. It's not about finding your voice. It's about figuring out where can I be of the most service?

Speaker 3:

What is it, who's like me who needs my help or any help, whether it's Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Or who's in my sphere. Like with Jared, he was saying because he's a designer, but he's serving more developers that don't have as much design sense, right?

Speaker 3:

Right. But he also was trying to do a startup.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Before that before that, he did NAC. Right? So he belonged to the startup community. He read Hacker News. He was part of that.

Speaker 3:

And the way that I met Jared was he was like, help. What do I do? Yeah. Some venture backed company basically ripped off my my app, and I said, what's your app? And he pointed at me at Knack for Teachers, and I said, let them have it.

Speaker 3:

Know? Yeah. Let them discover that it's just a giant money pit.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

So he was in the startup world.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I think the thing that people can struggle with, and it comes back to insecurity and that kind of narcissism. But it's hard because sometimes when you're in that, it's hard to break out, you know? Absolutely. And so what are some ways people can break out of that insecurity?

Speaker 2:

For me, I'm just thinking of my example of going to a conference in a way that was easier because I already had the venue. I just knew I had to get out of the corner and just start caring for other people. But when people are kind of looking around and they're feeling insecure and some people are saying, Well, I don't know what I am. I program Ruby, but

Speaker 3:

I don't know.

Speaker 2:

How can they get out of that feeling and find where they're going to be the most helpful?

Speaker 3:

It's not a question of what you are. I mean, if you say I program Ruby, you are a Ruby programmer. It's to pretend that that's a question is a trick that people play on themselves because they'd rather moan and groan and feel bad now instead of actually taking the reins and saying, well, now I know this. I have to do something. It's more self indulgence.

Speaker 3:

And how do you break out of that? Well, you said earlier, how do you fight this? And the answer is you can't fight yourself. What are you beating up? Yourself.

Speaker 3:

Right? And it's important to realize just how much of your behavior and how much the words that we use are self indulgent kind of crap. Yeah. And what I tell my students is they're like, I don't know. I'm like, what does the data say?

Speaker 3:

Right? Look at your research. Did you do the research? No. Well, then do the damn research.

Speaker 3:

If you did the research, what does it tell you? And, that is the best way, I think, of getting out of your head. Because you don't have to wonder, gee, what do I have that people want? You know, you don't have to wonder, who am I? Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Look at your job title. Look at

Speaker 2:

your

Speaker 3:

resume. Then find those people and see what problems they have. It's really that simple and it's an epic shift. But that is why people who come out of 30 by 500 who've done the work sound so different. The people who come out of these other processes or ideologies or classes or whatever.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

It's natural. 3,500 is about becoming a better person and so many people, it's not built that way, but so many people have told me, this is much more of a personal development course than I would ever have imagined. I'm not saying that in like a froofy self help kind of way. It actually completely changed the way I think. And that is the hidden lesson of 3,500, but it was on purpose.

Speaker 2:

The hidden lesson being other focus, like focusing on others as opposed to yourself.

Speaker 3:

Right. Absolutely. And how to do that. Like, I can tell you that all day long, but it won't mean anything unless you have the skillset and you've practiced it. It'll just be, you know, like a bumper sticker.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Well, I some user questions. I have some listener questions.

Speaker 3:

Questions.

Speaker 2:

And maybe this one from, his name is Kevin Ya, but he has an accent on the e. Is that Kavin? Kavin Ya. And he kind of asks something along these lines. He says, How specifically do you do customer research?

Speaker 2:

Where do you search? And when do you stop researching?

Speaker 3:

I'll answer that in reverse. Okay. I tell my students, Always be safari ing. That's what I call my customer research method. And the answer is you can never stop.

Speaker 3:

If you ever stop, you have lost touch with the market and you don't know what they need anymore. Always. So I'm always, technically. I don't do Safari in exactly the same structured ways that I teach my students. That's because I'm constantly lurking in all kinds of communities, filing away questions, offhanded comments, tweets, what are people linking to, all this stuff.

Speaker 3:

I track it. Mhmm. I used to just do it, you know, in my head because I have just a great database of data in there. That's how I built up my sense of the market. The answer is you can't stop.

Speaker 3:

Look at anytime more people get together. So forums, mailing lists, you do the same methods to people who write in to support once you have your product or people who write in questions before. Blog comments, blog posts by yourself and others. If you see a really popular blog post on a blog in your sort of market audience, industry, whatever, Why is it popular? Why are people sharing it?

Speaker 3:

Authentic comments from people on Twitter, people complaining about something just momentarily enraged or asking a question or anything like that. Did I say I said forums. Right? Mailing lists. User groups.

Speaker 3:

But don't go up and ask people what the problems are because they won't give you good data. You have to kind of see what they say and do naturally when you're not asking because it changes. There's an observer effect. Mhmm. Or a quest questioner effect.

Speaker 3:

Survey effect, shall we call it. Conversations over beer, you know, whatever. Anytime. Anywhere that there's data of what people do and say and think and wonder and struggle with and curse at or love. That's cost.

Speaker 3:

That's potential research.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And as you're listening, you're looking for trends. You're looking for a common trend.

Speaker 3:

Right. And I teach people how to do this process in-depth in 30 by 500. I can't explain it in an hour.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And you keep notes and organize the notes. Don't just do it in your head.

Speaker 2:

Where do you keep your notes? Do you have a good system for doing that?

Speaker 3:

I use a text file.

Speaker 2:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

I bold things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. So just really simple to get it in and save it, search.

Speaker 3:

Yep. People try to automate it. That's a mistake. The whole point is that you have to have contact with the data. People try to use fancy tools.

Speaker 3:

That's a mistake. That's just a distraction from actually doing the work.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go on to Thomas Schranz. Was wondering about how you do content marketing. If you could give us some insight into your process for that.

Speaker 3:

Sure. I take what I learned in my research phase. I write blog posts that to some degree can help people solve their problem or to make them feel like they're not alone because that in itself is a kind of painkiller or to inspire them. And then I publish them on my blog. And I'm working on a mailing list strategy, but I don't really have one right now, but you definitely should.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Like as a part of that, it almost does get into like a cycle, right? You do the research, you publish some of the interesting findings, people are interested in that and then they respond by signing up.

Speaker 3:

And then you can sell them stuff. A

Speaker 2:

question, because we've talked about narcissism. When we sell things to people, are we selling to their narcissism?

Speaker 3:

I think it depends on what you're selling.

Speaker 2:

I'm just trying to think like often, like people always say like the things that people buy are things that make them money, save them money or save them time. And part of like making more money, like there's a kind of a, you know, for the people that are wanting to do that, there is a little bit of a self centered focus there.

Speaker 3:

We Often it's not. I mean, you were saying earlier that, you you make a certain amount of money and you have six people to support with that salary. You think about money a lot. Is it because of your ego gratification or is it because you need the money and want the money to support your family? Yeah.

Speaker 3:

See, it's not narcissistic to think about yourself and what you need. It's narcissistic to think that everything's about you. That's different. Yeah. I think about what I need all the time, but I wouldn't I don't ever lose track of the other people on the equation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And that is where it gets twisted, isn't it? Like, there could be a parent saying, Man, I really need to support my kids. But then when they go to do the thing, like the right thing that they should do to support their kids, they start they get selfish, you know? And they start making mistakes because they're not they know what they should be doing, the right thing, but often when it actually gets to doing something hard or whatever, that's when that narcissism really kicks in.

Speaker 3:

I think even when it's not hard, I think a lot of people, and this is not to criticize parents because I think this problem is universal and not specific to parents or even the situation. But we're talking about parenting. Obviously, I get to weigh in because I don't have a kid. But I've seen this a lot. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

People think and they say, I want my child to have everything I didn't have. But they don't ask themselves, why? Because you didn't have it, you want your child to have it. But what difference is it going to actually make for that child? Especially if you spend a lot more time working to achieve it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It's like, what does the child actually need and want to be happy? And I was reading this great article the other day about how Americans are so obsessed with their children's intelligence. And all I could think was most of the most intelligent people I know are miserable.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

That's not what makes a person happy. It's not fostering intelligence that makes someone happy. It's fostering social awareness and understanding how to love and to put other people first and to have ongoing connections. That's what makes people happy and to have perspective. Not intelligence.

Speaker 3:

What we see is on intelligence without really thinking about it. Yeah. Like, of course, I want my kid to be smart. I mean, I would too. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

But is that really what matters to the child's happiness?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I saw a study that said, you know, because people spend all this money on, you know, organic food and special classes and activities and then they researched and then twenty years later they asked kids as an adult what they remembered, what were their best memories when they were a kid. The only thing that mattered out of all these things that new parents do, the only thing that mattered, the only thing they remembered was when their parents showed love to them. That was the only thing they could remember from their childhood that was significant.

Speaker 2:

They didn't say, Oh, I remember violin lessons. It was actual just care and relationship. That's all it came down to.

Speaker 3:

Right. It was like I was saying before, if you know the outcome won't change whether you do or don't do something, why do it? Yeah. If people are going to criticize your product for being too high priced no matter what you price it, then that feedback is irrelevant. Or if you do all this, you bake, you know, break your back doing stuff for your kids and they won't even, you know, remember it.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, we're not talking about, you know, hauling your child miles on foot to safety.

Speaker 2:

If you

Speaker 3:

don't remember that, well,

Speaker 2:

you should still do it. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

If you're in imminent danger or you need to, like, you know, scrounge up money for a heart operation or something, that matters. But other, a lot of the other stuff doesn't matter at all. And that, that is what I've, one of the, like, biggest lessons I've learned in my life is that most shit doesn't matter.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. If we're going to apply this to software, this is interesting because, I'm a big fan of sprint.ly. I talk to people about it all the time. I share it with other people. They're obviously I convinced them to sponsor this podcast.

Speaker 2:

But the funny thing is, what really sold me on sprint.ly was Joe Stump actually reached out and talked to me and was willing to talk to me and was genuinely interested in helping me as a product manager. And he would spend like he spent a considerable amount of time answering my questions that had nothing to do with sprint.ly at all. But I remembered that and his software is great and there's lots of good things about it. But there's definitely if I have an emotional connection to sprint.ly, a lot of that is because of Joe's cared for me in the past.

Speaker 3:

It makes total sense. And I think that I mean, I'm a big proponent of people creating their own businesses because I think it matters. I think it matters. I think that we're all happier when we can go to the local coffee place staffed and owned by someone who's local. And, you know, we can know the person who delivers our Chinese delivery and, you know, just have these kinds of connections with the people we do business with.

Speaker 3:

I think that that makes life better. And that's something that I lacked a lot in Austria and that really brought that into the forefront for me. I never really had it in Maryland either because where I grew up was, like I said, terrible. Yeah. But, that was a huge part of the reason we moved to Philadelphia is because we were able to form these connections with people we just saw on the street or who worked at a restaurant we go to a lot or who turns out to, you know, who owned it, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2:

Mhmm.

Speaker 3:

And I don't see why we shouldn't be able to have that kind of connection with people who do our software, at least to know that they're there. Like, I'm not going to personally interact with almost any of the customers of Recl.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I just don't I just can't. Yeah. But, they can kind of know me through the writing and if they write in something specifically for me, I will read it, you know, and respond if possible. Mhmm. And, you know, through teaching or through, like, webinars or what I write, they can know who we are

Speaker 2:

and have that

Speaker 3:

kind of personal connection to a lesser degree than hours of conversation, of course.

Speaker 2:

But the

Speaker 3:

way that manages this, I hate the word, but scale a bit.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly. Let's do one more listener question because she was pretty eager to have you answer this one, and then we'll wind our time down. Crystal Belruth wanted you to delve into your iteration process for Freckle and was wondering how you balance adding features while maintaining a simple UI.

Speaker 3:

That is a good question. We don't do iterations. Mean, We we don't. We believe that, Thomas and I believe, that most of the programmer, like, developer processes and ideologies are not useful in many different situations. So, we do not do iterations.

Speaker 3:

I mean, obviously, software evolves, but we don't do iterations. We don't do a lot of stuff. People would be surprised. Because it's all about what impacts our customers and our bottom line, you know. So, if it doesn't actually help our customers and doesn't make us more money or make things go faster, then we don't do it.

Speaker 2:

And so how do you do, like how often would you add something new to Freckle, for example?

Speaker 3:

It's very hugely over the while we were running Charm, trying to run Charm, we almost stopped feature development except in short spurts. We do not have regular ongoing feature development. Well, we haven't until recently. Now, it's much more regular. Right now, we're working on the back end, but we have somebody who's consulting for us working on a new feature for recurring budgets and goals.

Speaker 3:

But it's You know, we'll go several months without doing anything new, and then we'll do a bunch of new stuff and, you know, on and off. It's not worth Is doing it in any

Speaker 2:

that one way to keep things simple for the user? Sounds like just a slow down the process, like not be so addicted to adding new things?

Speaker 3:

I just question it's not like, oh, we're doing fewer features to keep things simple. Although, naturally things have to cut the mustard for us to add them. Mhmm. But, I don't see that it would be a benefit for us to be constantly adding new features. I think that's some kind of treadmill and I don't want to I have interest in being on any treadmills whatsoever.

Speaker 3:

Mhmm. Mhmm. I don't have We don't have to add new features to compete. Compete with who? Harvest?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. They're technically probably our closest competitor.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

They make a lot more money than we do, but we have radically different approaches.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

There's no feature that we're going to add, I don't think, that's going to persuade people to use us over harvest if they didn't already like what we were doing. So people frame it as competition. Don't even think of it that way. Yeah. Keeping things simple, that's on a case by case basis.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. You just

Speaker 3:

have to really think through what you're doing and whether it's worth the trade off and how to integrate it and there's going be mistakes and you're going have to refactor the designs and whatnot. It's just I don't it's it's difficult, but I don't stress too much about it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. One of

Speaker 3:

the things we've done to simplify the interface is we're switching our sort of magical tagging to hashtags.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

For all new accounts already and older accounts, you know, longer term customers can have it switched on if they write us right now, We're rolling it out. That'll reduce a lot of confusion. Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Well, Amy, thanks so much for to taking the come and chat with us. This has been really great. Where can people find you on the web if they want to learn more?

Speaker 3:

Unicornfree dot com is my blog and if you liked these rants, you'll love the rants that I do on Twitter. AmyHoy, it's H O Y. So I rant about this stuff all the time. Yeah. Especially the emotional sides of things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Well, thanks again.

Speaker 3:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Hey. Thanks so much for listening to the show. We really appreciate every listener that tunes in each week. If you haven't already, whenever you give us a review in iTunes, really helps the show get noticed. It's as easy as searching for Product People in iTunes and clicking five stars.

Speaker 1:

Like I said, you can join our email newsletter at productpeople.tv/newsletter, and you can follow us on Twitter at productpeopletv. I'm Justin Jackson. You can follow me at MI Justin, and I will see you later.