Michael Margolis: preference

Transcript context

…I love this example. Intuitively, it all just makes sense as you describe what you landed on. And this is what people call product-market fit, what you're describing, where somebody has a pain that you are solving and they need it badly. What does it look like when you find that group of... What do you notice qualitatively, just like this tells you this is it, this is the pole that people talk about when you say product-market fit? I avoid the phrase product-market fit with this stuff, and we can talk about that because I think that's kind of interesting. When you find this match, what happens in the qualitative interviews is that you can sense the energy and the excitement and the enthusiasm. It comes across. Especially as you do a bunch of these, you can tell. There's a difference. And so that's what you're looking for, is people who are then like, "Wait, is this available? Is this a thing? Can I sign up for this?" It's that kind of thing, or they're really leaning into it and you qualitatively can just see it. One of the things I thought was very interesting was I was recently speaking to a founder whom I'm doing another round of this with a new set of concepts. We had done a project a while ago and actually killed the project. So through going through Bullseye Customer Sprint with something that he was doing, we did three rounds of it, and finally, he was like, "Yeah, this is not... I'm going to focus on the other part of my business." And he said, "We killed the project." And what he told me was two things that were really interesting to me. One was, "This saved me a huge amount of pain." We ran through this, we had to do some work to the Bullseye Customer Sprint, but the product that he was going to build, it was hardware, it was software, it was this whole subscription model. It was going to be a big, complicated thing to build. We had mocked up a bunch of prototypes and I'd used some free prototypes when we interviewed. It killed the project. That was super valuable to him. He saved a huge amount of time and effort. The other thing that he's mentioned to me was that through going through the process, he learned what no looked like. So he could see, "Oh, I'm getting kind of this neutral, positive, encouraging feedback." And as we did this, he realized like, "Oh, they don't want this." Right. It's not that big of a deal to them.…

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