Christian Idiodi: commitment

Transcript context

…That's amazing. I see this unraveling of the most interesting man in the world is happening a little, bit by bit. We learn more and more about you. Okay, amazing. So just to kind of summarize some of these- Okay, amazing. So just to summarize some of these points, which are really great and I've never heard it described this way before. So basically, a really effective way to understand how to build something people actually want and solve real problems is this idea of pick reference customers. And I really like this word reference, which is not just they're going to help you build a thing, but they're also become a reference to future customers because they end up loving it because you built it for them and they love it. Your advice is find six to eight in B2B space, 15 to 25 in B2C. And the reason there's a number here is if you find just one or two, you never know, they might be just the one or two that have this really weird problem that no one else has. And I think that's usually the flaw in this approach is you end up building it for a small number of people and nobody else really wants it. And it sounds like in your experience, this is a good kind of number where probably a lot of more people will have this problem. Yeah. There've been studies to validate some of these numbers. I think early, IBM, kind of struggled selling those supercomputers. And if you're buying a million dollar computer, someone says, "Hey, do you want to buy?" And you're like, "I don't know. Is there anybody else that has bought it? Shall I be the first?" And there was this common question of what would it take for you to buy it? And someone says, "Hey, if I see five or six people that look like me already have this, then I feel confident making the argument to my company, we should jump on it." And it's like, so how do I create the first five to six? And you can see a lot of the validation on B2C in some of the things you might see in the App Store on Yelp or those places. My idea here is if you found a steakhouse with 25 5-star reviews, you are likely to adopt this. So in every app I have ever put on the App Store, on the day I launch the app in the app store, they are 25 5-star reviews. I will never launch an app and be like, "Let's hope Lenny loves it. Let's see who the first person. " On the very first day of launching the app, there are 25... so I will know I am not ready until I have achieved 25 people that have told me, worked with me and said, "I am now ready to put my reputation the line. " Sometimes I might need to work with 30 people or 50 people because the output is 25 reference customers. Because if Lenny is like, "I don't love it enough" or "I don't feel comfortable," I'm not going to customize for Lenny. I'm going to find my single target market, talk to more people. If I get 25, I have achieved product market fit. So interesting. It basically kicks in this word of mouth flywheel that everyone's always looking for is how do I get people to talk about it. Build it for them, solve their problems, tell them that it exists. You mentioned a bit about how you understand if it's actually, let's call a product market fit, if you have product market fit with these people that you ask them if they're going to leave you a 5-star review for example. I guess what do you consider this is good, I got one more person that's really happy with this? What tells you it's got product market fit with a person?…

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