
Here’s what I learned hanging out with Jason Fried - vanwilder77
http://danshipper.com/heres-what-i-learned-hanging-out-with-jason-fried
======
edw519
_But the human brain is very good at talking about specifics. Questions like
"can you walk me through what you do everyday" or "are there any repetitive
tasks that you do day-to-day" will lead you down a much more interesting path.
You’ll find problems that your software actually can solve._

Great advice. I like to take this even deeper:

    
    
      - What is the next thing you do?
      - Who do you call / talk to / pass this to?
      - Show me that form with real data on it.
      - What's the worst thing that happens? 
      - How often does that happen? (hourly, daily, etc.)
    

And my 3 favorite questions (which are often _very_ revealing):

    
    
      - What % of time does that happen?
      - On a scale of 1 to 10, how good is that?
      - What is the #1 thing needed to take that to a 10?
    

Also, I try to ask these questions to > 1 person. The discussion of 2 or more
people coming up with the answer is often more educational than the answers
themselves.

I have at least 10 years of real work in my pipeline thanks to these
techniques. I never worry about "make something people want".

Great post, Dan and Jason. Thank you!

~~~
isnotchicago
As far as getting into specifics, how have questions like "How often does that
happen?" worked compared to questions like "when is the last time that
happened?" In other words, having the user speak about a particular instance
versus generalizing about a "typical" day.

~~~
jasonfried
"tell me about the last time that happened" is better than "how often does
that happen?"

How often doesn't tell you much. Plus it's unlikely to be accurate - people
just don't keep track of things closely enough before you ask a question like
this.

But "tell me about the last time" is specific and someone can tell you a
story. Then you can dig into it.

------
BobWarfield
Talking to people who just bought or just quit is great, but if that's all you
do, a lot of key insights will be missed:

\- Talking to people who didn't buy, but instead bought a competitor.

\- Talking to expert users who've been with your product for a while to learn
what they're doing with it you never even considered a possibility. Or to
learn what they thought they'd be able to do, but could never quite make work
well.

\- Talking with all sorts of people to refine your elevator pitch and figure
out how to secure the earlier parts of the funnel. Just because someone bought
doesn't mean they're the only oracle of why people might buy. They could
simply be early adopters after the latest shiny thing.

These are all things I've done with success.

#1, talking to competitor's customers, is what led me to invent spreadsheet
notebook tabs on Quattro Pro at a point when most everyone thought the world
wanted 3D spreadsheets instead of formula linking across sheets. By talking to
folks who had bought Lotus 123 and asking why they wanted a 3D spreadsheet, I
quickly discovered it had nothing to do with summing along a z-axis and
everything to do with grouping multiple spreadsheets together as a single
file.

I've gained all sorts of insights from #2 by talking to power users. This is
particularly true of products that have programmability through scripting and
API's. But it's also true when you hear about someone doing something amazing
you'd never dreamed the product could do, and then you hear about how many
flaming hoops they have to jump through to get it done. Yet, solving the
problem is so valuable that even making it a little easier makes them thank
you. Suddenly, you see how to make it a lot easier and a lot more accessible
to a broader audience. Depending on what you've discovered, you might even
open a whole new sub-market this way.

#3 just comes from the realization that the more you pitch an idea, the more
you learn about how to present it. It is extremely helpful for the people
calling the design shots to get to go through the full two way interaction of
trying to sell the design. Engineers, especially, quickly learn that prospects
aren't going to give them a blackboard and 2 hours to prove that the laws of
physics insist they must buy.

~~~
jasonfried
Dan didn't go into detail about this, but the reason to talk to people who
just bought or just left is because they are very close to that specific
moment. Decisions are still fresh in their mind. The information is cleaner,
less embellished (people tend to embellish when recalling something a long
time ago because they can't remember actual specifics).

Someone who's been using your product for years can't tell you why they
bought. It's been too long. They may think they remember, but the reasons are
often so tied to a specific event - often emotional - that it's too far in the
past to remember the specific timeline that lead up to the purchase.

Yes, talking to power users can be helpful for other reasons, but it's not
helpful if you're trying to find out why people buy or quit.

It all depends on what kind of information you're looking for. You have to
know who to talk to and when to talk to them.

~~~
gvb
Another thing recent customers can give that is very valuable is _useful_
feedback on the product's usability. They are still discovering where buttons
are and how to use the product, so they can tell you "I was looking for X, and
could not find it" or "X was in page Y, but I was looking for it in page Z."

Experienced users end up trained (in the Pavlov sense) to do some pretty
obscure clicking to accomplish a given job, but they know exactly what to
click and where, and don't give it a second thought. I think of this as the
"Microsoft Windows Syndrome" - Windows has pieces of it stuck in really
unexpected places if you stop and think about it, but everybody "just knows"
to right-click on e.g. "Start / Computer" to get to certain Windows features,
even though _most_ configuration is accessed through "Start / Control Panel".

The unfortunate irony of "Windows Syndrome" is that, if you move an existing
item from an unintuitive, but "everybody's been trained" location to the
intuitive location, you will break everybody's mental model of the software
and they will scream bloody murder. The Office "Ribbon" is an example: when it
first came out, the people that operated via memorized click-sequences were
lost and _very_ upset.

------
ChuckMcM
_"When a lot of people think of marketing or sales they think of tricks that
fool people into buying something. But great marketing doesn’t do that. Great
marketing comes from understanding exactly what the customer needs on an
emotional level, and showing how your product will satisfy those needs."_

This is so true. The difference between knowing your product and not knowing
your product is knowing why someone needs to have it. That is why the question
"Why would anyone buy this?" is so revealing. It is also why so many startups
blow it.

I asked an engineer who was talking to me about their product that question
and he said, "Why not? Its free!" I pointed out that going over to the side of
the road and picking up rocks is also "free" but people don't do that
everyday. Certainly not so often that municipalities feel a need to secure
their landscaping from theft.

Understand what people need, and solve that.

------
greenwalls
The most shocking thing for me was that people drink milkshakes for breakfast?
No wonder this country has a health crisis. Does anyone here drink milkshakes
for breakfast?

~~~
blakesmith
Isn't that why Starbucks has done so well with their frozen drinks? They're
basically milkshakes, but people feel ok about drinking them early in the
morning because they're "coffee based".

------
tobiasbischoff
There's an 12 year old notebook right on the front of firefly's homepage. It
instantly makes this product look like it was from 2001. why do you do that?

~~~
jpadvo
The text right below the image says "Firefly is a great way to help our less
technically savvy users navigate our product."

They are trying to evoke the kind of user who provides the hardest challenge
to support, and who would benefit the most from screen sharing during support.

It might be more clear if they had the text overlaid or above the image, so
that the instant you see that filthy beast of a machine you know what they're
saying. Instead of the momentary confusion about "what the heck is this thing
doing here?"

Who knows. With a/b testing, probably them. :)

~~~
larrys
"They are trying to evoke the kind of user "

Way to obscure. It's not a indie film being analyzed in cinema class. It's a
website image. It needs to not leave practically any chance for
misinterpretation.

------
rsync
"When we make a sale, we want it to be because the copy addressed customer
pain and offered a solution they could connect with on an emotional level. We
don’t want to make a sale because a customer is smart enough to swim through a
list of features he doesn’t care about, and come up with a reason to pay money
on his own."

I completely disagree with this.

From day one, we've eschewed all of the little tricks and the mind games. We
have no time for users that pull the trigger based on our font sizing or our
color scheme.

On a deep, gut level, I just know that this monkey business ends up being
zero-sum.

Ask yourself this: as an end user ... as a consumer ... do you think you
should be trying to make yourself more or less susceptible to this kind of
work ? And then what does that say about practicing it on your products ?

~~~
nateberkopec
Seems to be working well for them, and they've got a lot of happy customers.
You could hardly call 37signals a "bait-and-switch" company.

~~~
rsync
I'm not sure if you responded to the wrong comment, or ... ?

I'm not talking about blatant dishonesty (bait and switch).

I have no idea what 37signals does.

~~~
cpher
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but how is it possible that you've had an HN
account for 172 days with 229 karma and you "have no idea what 37signals
does."?

~~~
djt
to put it more politely ;)

Maybe you should do some research to find out about the article before writing
comments. If you don't know who 37 signals are then its extremely easy to find
out and would probably allow you to frame your argument in a way that other
people will better understand.

------
munroe
I always thought about comparing products as the direct competitor. Very
enlightening to think of it by taking a step further to figure out what the
real problem being solved is. Then, it is much easier to understand who the
real competitors are. The Clayton Christensen paragraph's were the highlights
for me.

In theme of the post, I typically catch up on blog posts over lunch while
eating at work, so if someone is building a product for me to use while eating
lunch, your competing with the likes of Dan's posts.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Christensen is incredibly smart and has real research on businesses. For more
see _The Innovator's Dilemma_ and _The Innovator's Solution_ , which IMO are
the two best business books on the market today.

------
davemel37
Great Insight. I think the information problem is much larger than people
realize. So many times I found myself trusting feedback from the wrong people.
Dan Kennedy says, "The only people who have a vote are your customers, and the
only way they can vote is with their wallet." As Jason Indicated to you,
customers just buying or recently cancelling have the only vote.

I would maybe add that many times people don't really know why they behave a
certain way...or more importantly, they are afraid to admit the real reason
they take a specific action. Most people have a deep rooted emotional reason,
and a logical justification that they would share with you. This is why you
are much better off getting them to recount a specific story or experience,
not just answer broader questions that they may not even remember. A classic
example is why call tracking is so important for offline conversion tracking.
Asking customers where they heard about you is almost never accurate. Asking
them which phone number they just dialed, is almost always accurate, using
call analytics is even more telling... but overall... getting the right
information is SO IMPORTANT...thanks for bringing these insights to light.

------
zeynalov
I feel like deja vu. It looks like I've already read this article. Someone
wrote similar blog post about chatting with him and what he has learned.

------
sayemm
"When we make a sale, we want it to be because the copy addressed customer
pain and offered a solution they could connect with on an emotional level. We
don’t want to make a sale because a customer is smart enough to swim through a
list of features he doesn’t care about, and come up with a reason to pay money
on his own."

That's a great lesson and why branding is so important, Apple's products are a
great example.

------
shanellem
"Learning how to sell deliberately."

Easier said than done. It can be hard to not get distracted by "the next big
thing". Especially when the last big thing isn't doing too well. I once read
that it's 20% initial effort and 80% testing and optimizing.

Great read!

------
tombot
If your interested in more answers to the "What are people switching from to
use your product?", would recommend you checkout a few episodes of Jobs to be
done radio <http://www.therewiredgroup.com/tag/jobs-to-be-done-radio-2/>

~~~
vanwilder77
its redirecting to 404 page

~~~
ergest
Just copy/paste the link to a new tab. It seems they don't want HN as a
referrer :)

------
__abc
This is a marketing blog post about his product, not a lessons learned!

BE WARNED!!!

Totally kidding, I think.

