Christian Idiodi: preference

Transcript context

…The holy grail of product walk is really a reference customer. This is somebody that has used your solution or your product, loves it enough to tell people about it. I kind of described the work of the product team is to solve problems in a way that customers love and a way that works for our business. The ultimate definition for me today of the love that somebody has for our product is they're willing to put their reputation on the line by telling people about it. And for me, if we think about you do a lot of interviews with founders and entrepreneurs and you're going to have people that they find a market with an idea and they jump in. But if you think at the core of some of these founder-inspired businesses where the founder will say, "Well, I had a problem and it was their problem and they focused on solving the problem and then they got their friends on it." And so it's almost like this idea that if they were their own first reference customer. They were so close to the problem, immersed in the environment of the problem, solved it in a compelling way enough where it was like, there are more people like me. And it is like if I said to you, "Lenny, let's go to a steakhouse. Find me a new steakhouse around you." You might go online and Google and you see a steakhouse with one review. How do you feel about that? I don't know. Maybe other people don't want to try this. You see two reviews, you're like, maybe it's the chef and their spouse or something. The question is how many positive reviews would you have to see to jump and say, "Let's go try this one." There are some things inherent in, if you look at Geoffrey Moore's adoption curve and those kinds of models in here, most people don't want to be the first to try things. But you are likely to try things if other people that look like you have accepted it or defined it as good. And so the whole essence for me of this technique is to create those first people, those reference customers. If you think about how companies make the shift to becoming sales-led or operations-led, almost all companies start product-led. The product is first. You kind of build something and it's like, yeah, it's going, let's hire salespeople and marketing people and operational people to do it. What's really happening is that the product team created the first customers. And now a group of people have to capture the value that was created. So what's happening here is that it is constantly the job of product teams. The reason they lose influence is because salespeople are having to sell a product. You see? So they're like forcing back, "I need this and I need this." But if you came to me and said, "I want to buy steak," and I say, "Let me show you 20 people that look like you that recommend this steakhouse," my job as a salesperson is very easy. I'm just like, "Hey, you should eat here. Everybody that loves steak, they all eat here." e show you 20 people that look like you that recommend this steakhouse," my job as a salesperson is very easy. I'm just like, "Hey, you should eat here. Everybody that loves steak, they all eat here." So product teams feel, at this contract to an organization when they don't create powerful reference customers. So it's by far my favorite technique. And the way this technique works is you want to discover and deliver and develop who has the problem, the customer. I want to discover who has the problem. At the same time, discover and deliver a solution to this problem. The idea here is that if you really want to solve a problem, you need to get out of your building. Go spend time with someone that has the problem and don't leave until you solve the problem. People talk about why we had such a record time to the Covid vaccine. Sure, technology has improved, our research has improved. But if you think about it, we had the highest number of volunteers for vaccination in the history of any vaccine in the history of time. Why? Did we have to look for someone with Covid? No, they were literally all around us. The research was immersed in the environment of the problem. They could study... and so this is often what I call, it's almost like a pressure-cooked discovery in some ways. If you truly, truly want to solve a problem, get out of your building, get out of the assumptions, get out of your opinions. Immerse yourself, find someone who has the problem, stick with them until you discover a solution for this problem. And you're going to do that. The part of why I love this technique, the two biggest reasons I think, the first is if I cannot find a certain number of people that have this problem, my goodness, it might not be a problem, but solve it. I have never had a product failure using this technique. If I were to credit... goodness, I think last count, I'm up to like 205 products I have worked on or participated in creating in my career. And I tried to build a new product every year from scratch. It's kind of a crazy thing about me. My friends know what I want for my bad day is a problem worth solving. And I like to go from idea to revenue, and the setup, and I test all of these techniques in this way. And everybody knows my favorite technique is if we find a problem worth solving, we need to uncover a solution for B2B, I want six to eight references, for B2C, I want maybe 15 to 25 references as an indication that we've achieved product market fit. Just to be clear, you said you still work, you build products yourself and you practice this and you've built... okay, what's like every recent product that you've built? I didn't know this.…

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