Michael Margolis: belief

Transcript context

…The point you made about how most people after this are like, "Wow, this is not what I expected and I want to do this more," I know that feeling so well. Every time you're like, "No, I don't need to talk to customers. I understand what we need to build," and then you do, you're like, "Holy shit, why aren't we doing this all the time? What are we doing?" That's such a powerful feeling. Yeah. There's this other thing that I think is worth mentioning that I've come across, which, when we do this set of predictions, so again, it's across all different kinds of businesses, all different kinds of domains, there's certain patterns that I've noticed that show up over and over about mispredictions. There's a pattern of the kinds of things that show up over and over that I think of as these common blind spots, and I think it's attributed... I can attribute it to this, there's this concept of the curse of knowledge. So I'm working with lots of teams who are deep experts in their space. I'm not. I'm always showing up as the noob, like, "Okay, what is your business? What are we doing?" But they have deep expertise. And when somebody has deep expertise, it's very difficult to imagine that other people don't know what you know. It's very hard to put yourself in their shoes, right? And you just think, "Well, doesn't everybody know this?" And so what that leads to is these key blind spots that are very common, which is there's an overestimation of how much your customer knows about the thing, maybe how big a problem they even perceive it to be, how much they're willing to pay for it, which is connected, and where they are on their journey to be ready to buy this thing. Like, "Oh, wait, they're not ready yet? Wait." Right? They're not there yet, or we haven't figured out who the right people are who are the bullseye, but people overestimate those kinds of things. And it's really common blind spots that we find over and over across a lot of businesses with expert teams. That makes sense. Most startups realize what they're trying to build, nobody really cares about. So I get why that happens often. Okay. Is there anything else in this step of the interview that you think is really important to mention? Otherwise, I want to hear what you find are some common pitfalls and mistakes people make.…

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