Seth Godin: evaluation

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the developer platform for building native customer-facing integrations with third-party apps. Our native integrations on your product roadmap, whether it's to ingest context from your user's external data and documents, or to sync data and automate tasks across your users' other apps, integrations are mission-critical for B2B software products today. But building these integrations in-house cost and average of three months of engineering according to the 2024 State of Integration survey, which results in difficult roadmap trade-offs. This is why engineering teams at Copy.ai, AI21 and over 100 other B2B SaaS companies use Paragon so they can focus their efforts on core product features, not integrations. The result, they've shipped integrations seven times faster, all while avoiding the never-ending maintenance that comes with rolling your own integrations. Visit useparagon.com/Lenny to see how Paragon can help you accelerate your product's integration roadmap today and get $1,000 in credit on their pro and enterprise plans. That's useparagon.com. So let's talk about your book. You wrote a new book. It's called This is Strategy. I've been reading it over the past week and I've been so into it that I actually left it at my mother-in-law's house. I don't have it with me. So it's called, This is Strategy. It's about how to build strategy and develop a strategy. There's a lot to love about the book, but the section in the middle that is what most stuck out to me that I want to spend a little time on. You have this four sequence of advice that I love, so I'm just going to read it real quick. Choose your customers, choose your future. Choose your competition and choose your future. Choose the source of validation and you choose your future. Choose your distribution, and you're also choosing your future. Can you just talk through these four insights, these four steps that basically determine what your product and life is going to be like outside of actually building the products directly? Yeah. And for a product person, these are the critical choices and you probably have glossed over them. You have probably assumed it's a given and you've sacrificed your agency over the four most important things you should be choosing. So the first one is picking your customers. If your motto is you can pick anyone and we're anyone, if your hope is that you have to win SEO to get anything, you're not going to succeed. When you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have, what problem they're trying to solve, what their technical facility is, whether they're short-tempered, whether they're kind, whether they're going to stick with you, you have chosen everything that's going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like. And so the Humane Pin people, whatever it was called, made a mistake when they picked their customers because they showed up like they had a finished Apple-quality product and they were trying to appeal to the kind of people that would buy on pre-order a finished Apple quality product. When they shipped something that wasn't that, and they knew it wasn't that, they're doomed. Whereas if you say, here we are in Product Hunt, we're only looking for 400 people. We're looking for people who like the Raspberry Pi. Who wants to wonk with this thing? Now you can dance and you can have all these other things happen because you picked a different customer. If you decide to be a wedding photographer in the Hamptons, well you better expect to have some very spoiled, cranky brides and grooms, and grooms and grooms, and brides and brides, that you have to deal with because you picked your customers. Okay, so then the second one which comes with that is who's your competition? Because if you're competing against Walmart, why are you surprised that they keep lowering their prices? That's what Walmart does, right? That way you decide which space that you're going to operate in. You've built an enormous set of boundaries around what you do. The third one is validation. If you are trying to please your boss, that's what you're going to do. If on the other hand, you can have one difficult conversation with your boss and say, can we agree that I'm not trying to match your taste, I'm trying to match the taste of these 400 people that we've agreed are our customers? Every other meeting is going to go way better from now on because you've made it clear who you're trying to please. And the last one, choose your distribution matters a lot in the software business. For example, a video game, which is where I started, we were in Target and Lechmere and mass merchants. Our competitors were in Ziploc bags in computer stores. Well, when something like Steam shows up, when something like downloadable shareware shows up, everything about your product changes. So again, these four things are choices, and if you're glossing over them it's because you're afraid. And I think it's important to note, it's not like you can just change these at will and just like, okay, cool, we'll change your distribution. These are intertwined. But the important point here that I hear is just make sure the product you're building understands this is how you'll be distributed. This is who you're selling to.…

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