Patrick Campbell: belief

Transcript context

…Love the rant. Maybe one follow-up question. Why do you think it is that companies don't do this? I love the point you made of the retweeting, "Yeah, research is great." Writing blogs that research is use useful, "We've got to do research." Why do you think companies don't do it? And then what's one thing that maybe they could do tomorrow that'll bring them closer down that path? The one thing you can do, put a number on a whiteboard. You're going to have 10 customer conversations a month, just 10 non-sales conversations. You're just going to talk to 10 people. Or you're going to send one survey. And people are terrible at sending surveys. Surveys are actually great. You just have to be good at sending them. And good, it's not a high bar, it just means that you have 30 to 45 seconds of someone's time unless you're compensating them. And don't send 45-question surveys by email where the first question is, "What's your email?" Don't do that. But just put a number on the board. I think the reason we don't do it is because it was, quote-unquote, "easy" to get away with not doing it. If you really think about a funded environment... and some products are so paradigm-shifting that the biggest misconception about customer research is I have to listen to them. You don't have to listen to them at all, you just have to understand where they are, and then you're filtering all of that with all this other data and then you're making a decision and you're earning your paycheck as a product person. Typically, it's the product person, but also in marketing. So I think it's just one of those things where you could get away with not doing it. Now though, the way the market's going, you're just starting to see this more and more, you're starting to see more tooling. The reason you're seeing more tooling is because they're starting to connect it to actually being useful rather than you having to set up your own customer development program. I think the other reason typically people haven't had to do this is because there's a lot of brute forcing that's done in startup land and it only lasts so long. So all of these companies that raise a bunch of money, get the $100 million dollar exit, everyone's clapping because it's a big number, but cap table screwed, everything's bad. It's a win because it's a win, but all of those companies are ones who were able to brute force to a certain level and they never learned how to actually understand their market or their customer. And I think that that kind of story will continue to happen as long as we have a lot of capital flowing in the market. But I would rather not be that company. I would rather be the company that gets the $100 million, 200 million exit with bootstrapping, or builds the billion-dollar annual revenue company because I know my market, I know my customer so well. Talking to customers is good, you should do it. Great reminder. People are going to listen to this like, "Yes, we should do this," and then we'll just move on. And then-…

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