Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…I love that. Yeah, I hadn't heard that phrase, but I love that. Yeah, comically narrow is exactly what it is. And there are times that teams will just be like, "Oh, for God's sakes, Margolis, this is too much." The reason that I do that is I'm pushing them to identify a person who they all would agree, "This person, if we present this value prop that we think we're going to build and this problem we think we're solving, we are all convinced... Or it's our best guess." It's fine if you're not sure, but, "We are pretty convinced that that's the person who will say, 'Yeah, I need this thing.'" I'm kind of running an experiment, right? It's a way to reduce variables for me and then to get that specific, and then I recruit a bunch of the people who match that very particular set of characteristics. And they're people, so there's still some variation, but it's a way for us to test that. If there's too much variation, then what happens? At the end of the day, you're like, "That was kind of a mush. I'm not really sure what we learned. Was it because it was just people had mixed feelings or was it because there was just not enough consistency? We had too many variables in there. I don't know what we learned here." So I think what's nice about this is this initial list you're making of bullseye potential customers and attributes is not exactly going to be who you go after. Once you figure this out, you want to be very confident these group will absolutely love what you're presenting, because you're trying to learn as much as you can from the people that most love it. And then from that, you can get a little less narrow to actually pitch your product. Right. And most often what happens is we do this, we define it our best, right? It's our hypothesis. It's our best guess. The team is always very expert. I'm not. I'm always showing up as the noob in whatever this business is. The team is expert, and so this is very informed. It's not like we're guessing. But we go through this, and by the time after we've done these interviews, the goal is to figure out, "Was this right or not? Or in what ways do we need to adjust?" That's a big piece of the outcome, is adjusting that definition of your bullseye customer. And often what happens is through the course of that Bullseye Customer Sprint, you learn, "Oh, it turns out there's actually this other distinguishing characteristic we didn't realize, or maybe it validates what we knew." But often, "We didn't quite realize that. This other thing is popping up where we're seeing heat from people. Oh, wow, that's interesting. Let's dive in a little more." I mean, I can walk through an example if you want.…

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