Michael Margolis: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's too broad. And I think that's an important point here is this exercise, you get more narrow to do this research, but that's not your actual ICP, as you described. Okay, so I understand what you're saying now, more and more of the difference between bullseye customer and ICP. The bullseye customer is for research to help you identify a broader ICP, your business targets. Yeah. And I think this actually touches on another important point, which is that this is a learning exercise. So that's what I'm describing, is how do we learn more faster? And this is different from selling, right? So what I hear a lot is people are like, "I'm on customer calls. We're selling all the time." And obviously, you can learn a ton from selling and pitching and meeting with companies and potential people who seem like maybe they are customers. But that mode is very, very different from what I'm describing, which is to learn, to run these experiments as fast as you can. And there's something, just even a mindset in how you approach the conversations, that's fundamentally different. So there's this term that I love that Ed Schein coined, which is humble inquiry. And so he frames it as humble inquiry is the gentle art of asking instead of telling. To me, that's this fundamental way that I think about even just conducting these interviews. So if you're in a selling mode, and I encountered this over and over with heads of product and founders, is that if you're... They're very good at, and they're very used to, and they're required to just sell all the time. And they're pitching their VCs, they're pitching their customers, but that's very different from learning and being... In humble inquiry, you basically have to be vulnerable. And I can always do it because I'm not the founder, and I've always present myself as like, "I don't know the space. I'm an idiot. Can you explain it to me?" But asking questions and being vulnerable and giving the person you're asking the higher status is a difficult thing to do as a founder when you're selling, because you don't want to be vulnerable and express that you don't know. And people I come across, they're very nervous about that. So there's something that's very distinct here about a learning mode versus a selling mode, selling and telling versus this idea of humble inquiry. So I think that's actually an important distinction here. I love that. And I think it helps that you're finding randos on User Interviews that you don't have to worry as much about versus finding great intros through VCs that you do worry about.…

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