Dan Martell - October 02, 2017


Question Logic： 3 Frameworks To Use For Product Development

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Buffer Clayton Christensen Will Lance Schroeder Ryan Levesque Steve Blank Sean Ellis Bob Mosta Hootsuite Bucket
How To Map Your Content Marketing Strategy To The Buyer's Journey The Scaling Credo for Bootstrapped Startup Founders

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

194.35

Word count

2,075

Sentence count

94


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about how to overcome your biggest challenges when it comes to building a software company. From not knowing what to build next, to finding the right customer for your solution, or maybe it s making sure that the feature or product you build is a must have, not a nice to have? In this video, I share with you the 3 frameworks that have transformed the way I build and scale my companies.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.160 On the phone, boom.
00:00:01.920 In person, boom.
00:00:03.320 Level three, even better.
00:00:05.400 At their office watching them work.
00:00:06.960 What?
00:00:08.000 You would do that?
00:00:09.000 Abso-ing-lutely.
00:00:18.700 How to overcome your biggest challenges
00:00:21.720 when it comes to building a software company.
00:00:23.680 I know that's a big promise,
00:00:25.040 but today I'm gonna talk to you about
00:00:27.020 how to overcome the challenge
00:00:28.160 of not knowing what to build next.
00:00:29.840 or who's the right customer for your solution,
00:00:33.880 or maybe it's making sure that the feature
00:00:36.720 or the product you build is a must have,
00:00:38.480 not a nice to have.
00:00:40.480 In this video, I'm gonna share with you guys
00:00:42.820 the three frameworks, I call it the question logic,
00:00:46.860 that's really transformed the way I build
00:00:49.360 and scale companies.
00:00:50.660 I really believe that questions are extremely powerful.
00:00:54.300 For example, when I'm working with a founder
00:00:57.400 on their product, I always suggest
00:00:59.340 they ask their customers, what do you do three minutes before
00:01:02.100 or three minutes after you use our product?
00:01:04.980 Because that gives you the breadth of what information
00:01:08.320 do they need before they come into your product
00:01:10.220 and what are they doing with the result
00:01:12.160 of using your product afterwards.
00:01:14.520 And I think that's just one example out of hundreds
00:01:17.620 that I use to kind of guide my thinking strategy
00:01:20.700 and product direction.
00:01:21.960 You know, I remember I was building a product called
00:01:24.060 Timely, which is a simple premise.
00:01:26.000 You schedule your tweets and then we analyze
00:01:28.160 your Twitter account for engagement
00:01:29.660 and figure out the best times of day to tweet it out
00:01:32.460 so you didn't even have to think about that.
00:01:33.700 You just queued it up and we would do the rest of it.
00:01:35.760 Kind of like what a Hootsuite or a Buffer would do today.
00:01:38.740 This was even before Buffer.
00:01:40.540 So the challenge was is we got a ton of people to sign up
00:01:44.440 but nobody actually tweeted.
00:01:46.220 So I looked in our backend system,
00:01:48.220 all the accounts started emailing people and say like,
00:01:50.020 hey, I noticed you signed up for Timely
00:01:51.320 but you didn't schedule a tweet.
00:01:53.060 The scheduling of the tweet was critical to getting them
00:01:56.720 to what I call a kind of core value in the product
00:02:00.360 because the analytics, the data,
00:02:02.560 the more engagement they got on the tweet
00:02:04.760 than sending it at a different time was the aha moment.
00:02:08.400 So if I couldn't get them to tweet,
00:02:09.840 then they were never gonna receive that.
00:02:11.460 And I asked them and all the responses were the same.
00:02:13.640 Oh, awesome product, love it, totally gonna use it.
00:02:17.240 And I'm like, but why didn't you?
00:02:18.580 They're like, you know what,
00:02:19.740 I just didn't have anything to say.
00:02:21.440 And I was like, hmm, that's interesting.
00:02:23.940 I can understand that.
00:02:25.640 If I sign up for a product that made me send an email
00:02:27.700 and I didn't know what to write an email,
00:02:28.840 I would just be like, I'll come back to it later.
00:02:30.740 And that was the overwhelming response I was getting.
00:02:33.480 So the question I had to come up with is what could I suggest
00:02:36.880 or share or help them with to get a tweet out?
00:02:39.860 And for me, I'm a big fan of powerful sayings
00:02:44.200 and quotes and life beliefs and I just thought,
00:02:46.300 you know what, for my target audience,
00:02:48.020 what are some of the beliefs that I could go find
00:02:51.800 incredible quotes on that I could suggest
00:02:54.700 so that when they sign up it'd be like hey, try it out.
00:02:56.600 Try one of these quotes, right?
00:02:57.900 These are the top quotes from people in your industry
00:02:59.800 or whatever it is and we added that prompt
00:03:02.400 right at the beginning on the onboarding experience
00:03:04.720 and we got 30% of the people to take action
00:03:07.320 which meant we activated them.
00:03:09.420 They set the schedule, the tweet went out,
00:03:11.540 then we sent them a follow up, you know,
00:03:13.520 a notification saying here's the results
00:03:15.560 of sending out your tweet and your engagement
00:03:17.020 and that helped us build the product.
00:03:19.120 That is the power of questions.
00:03:21.120 You know, recently I was sitting down with Will Schroeder,
00:03:23.960 the CEO and founder of startups.co.
00:03:26.460 He's the founder that bought my previous company Clarity.fm
00:03:29.800 and we were talking to a group of entrepreneurs
00:03:31.460 and I asked him, I was like, how do you figure out
00:03:34.300 how to build a product suite and try to figure out
00:03:37.240 what core features and or products you should build
00:03:40.240 to kind of expand the value you give to your customer
00:03:42.880 and you know, for a guy that's built and sold,
00:03:46.140 you know he sold his last company with $300 million in cash
00:03:48.760 to building this great huge company,
00:03:51.180 Startups, I think they're 175 employees.
00:03:54.280 He said, well, and this is a secret,
00:03:57.020 he said to a small group of people,
00:03:58.620 I still man the chat.
00:04:00.780 I still talk to the customers.
00:04:02.760 I want to understand what's their reality,
00:04:05.360 what's true for them, so that I can try to uncover,
00:04:08.300 because he said that's the role of a CEO and a founder,
00:04:10.540 it's to uncover their needs, their challenges,
00:04:13.540 the language they use so I can help guide
00:04:15.500 every other decision I make in my business.
00:04:16.980 So, I'm gonna walk you through three frameworks
00:04:19.880 that I think are the best for solving key problems.
00:04:22.820 The first one is pain.
00:04:23.660 How do you figure out what pain to solve in the market?
00:04:27.320 Or if you have a product, what is the specific pain
00:04:30.060 that I could angle or message towards
00:04:32.260 to really get people to hear that
00:04:34.400 and resonate and want to buy?
00:04:35.960 And the first framework is called the Ask Method
00:04:39.000 by a friend of mine, Ryan Levesque.
00:04:41.060 Super blessed to have him as a buddy now.
00:04:43.040 And he wrote a book, New York Times bestseller,
00:04:45.500 called The Ask, or just Ask.
00:04:47.780 and it's all around really uncovering ideas,
00:04:52.320 like what idea do I wanna pursue
00:04:54.280 around a certain pain or market,
00:04:56.160 and figuring out how to sequence that
00:04:58.760 to kind of different segmentations or buckets
00:05:01.300 or pain areas that he calls them.
00:05:04.300 And his framework, if you're thinking of starting a business
00:05:07.500 or you have a business, you haven't nailed the pain
00:05:09.600 that you really wanna solve in the market,
00:05:11.500 it is fantastic.
00:05:13.240 I've actually been helping him
00:05:15.600 is a new product called Bucket that helps people
00:05:18.980 kind of do the deep dive survey in the framework.
00:05:22.280 And it's a series of questions,
00:05:23.540 but the biggest question is the SMIQ question.
00:05:25.680 Single most important question,
00:05:27.620 which kind of follows the structure of,
00:05:30.580 when it comes to X, right,
00:05:32.320 when it comes to scaling your business,
00:05:34.160 what is the single most important challenge that you face?
00:05:37.420 And getting your community, running ads to that survey,
00:05:40.200 getting them to answer that question
00:05:41.820 and looking for the language and the commonality
00:05:44.860 And what perspective do you bring that's unique
00:05:47.760 that you could really attack with the solution?
00:05:49.400 I think when it comes to pain, best framework out there.
00:05:53.460 Ask method, check it out.
00:05:55.040 Number two, when it comes to positioning.
00:05:57.540 Okay, I've got a product, it's working,
00:05:59.340 I have early adopters, I have innovators using my product.
00:06:01.700 How do I get my positioning better?
00:06:04.420 Because I really believe in real estate.
00:06:05.540 It's all about location, location, location.
00:06:07.940 And when software, it's about position, position, position.
00:06:10.880 So how do I position it to really cut through the noise
00:06:13.460 and be valuable to my customer segment.
00:06:16.360 That question framework is jobs to be done.
00:06:19.900 JTBD created by a guy named Bob Mosta
00:06:26.000 and Clayton Christensen who wrote the book
00:06:28.840 The Inner Original Lama.
00:06:29.880 I unfortunately think the framework name
00:06:32.380 is probably the worst name and I'll say it's awesome.
00:06:36.580 It's just JTBD is kind of like, it's weird.
00:06:39.720 Okay, so jobs to be done.
00:06:41.320 The whole argument is nobody buys your solution
00:06:44.660 for the features, they hire your product to do a job.
00:06:48.360 And that is a very interesting reframe
00:06:50.940 of how most entrepreneurs look at their service
00:06:53.100 or their company.
00:06:53.940 So think about what job are my customers hiring me to do
00:06:59.100 to really make sure that I solve that problem for them.
00:07:02.040 It's called the Jobs To Be Done Framework.
00:07:03.700 There's a whole kind of customer journey discovery calls
00:07:06.180 that you can do to your customers.
00:07:07.420 Go check out the material online around that.
00:07:09.240 I'm gonna provide links and resources
00:07:11.440 for all three frameworks to help you get right
00:07:13.620 to the good stuff that I've discovered and used.
00:07:15.840 I did JTBD a lot when I was building out Clarity
00:07:19.320 because it was a marketplace.
00:07:20.180 There was different use cases and it was instrumental.
00:07:23.380 The third, which to me really solves the product side,
00:07:27.220 you know, you're just trying to build the product
00:07:28.720 and what features should you build
00:07:29.820 and how do you validate it,
00:07:31.320 is using what's called customer development
00:07:33.300 and that was created by a gentleman named Steve Blank.
00:07:37.240 Again, somebody that I've had the fortune of working,
00:07:40.980 not with, not working, but I got invited to speak
00:07:43.620 at his MBA class at Berkeley University,
00:07:46.880 which was a crazy scenario considering I never even went
00:07:49.620 to university myself, to just share our approach
00:07:53.120 to how we use customer development in our technology
00:07:55.800 products, and the best fast track to do that
00:08:00.060 is using a survey, and you'll have to go online.
00:08:03.040 I'm gonna link up the service that I use to do these surveys,
00:08:06.400 It's called the Customer Development Survey.
00:08:08.140 It was actually created by Sean Ellis,
00:08:10.700 who created the whole term Growth Hacking,
00:08:12.740 and it will allow you to understand exactly
00:08:16.000 where your product falls short,
00:08:18.120 what you need to do to fix it,
00:08:19.740 to really turn it from a nice to have to a must have.
00:08:21.940 Those three frameworks will change everything,
00:08:24.480 but I wanna make sure I leave you with a tip
00:08:26.820 that everybody gets wrong, okay?
00:08:28.660 So first, go check out the Ask Method,
00:08:30.720 then check out JTBD, and then finally,
00:08:33.100 Customer Development, kind of like pain,
00:08:35.260 product and positioning, but the thing you gotta do
00:08:39.640 that you can't hide from is you gotta get in front
00:08:41.300 of your customers.
00:08:42.140 I am so done with founders hiding behind their analytics
00:08:46.500 and their dashboards and their split testing tools
00:08:48.440 and their surveys and all this stuff.
00:08:49.940 They're literally acting like the people
00:08:51.620 on the other side of the screen are using their product
00:08:53.580 or not human beings.
00:08:55.180 If you really wanna get next level understanding
00:08:58.180 of what your customers, potential customers want,
00:09:00.980 here's what I'm gonna suggest you do,
00:09:01.980 and there's three different levels of this.
00:09:04.060 The lowest level is phone calls, pick up the phone.
00:09:06.820 I call it smile and dial every Thursday.
00:09:09.200 Try it out and just talk to new signups and customers
00:09:11.740 and ask them how they bought using the different
00:09:13.860 frameworks I shared to kind of guide your questioning.
00:09:16.640 Number two is face to face, okay?
00:09:20.240 The world of B2B software is not B2B,
00:09:22.920 it's H2H, human to human.
00:09:24.880 Get in front of them, look in their eyes,
00:09:26.680 talk about it, create a relationship,
00:09:28.060 understand their world.
00:09:29.360 The third level, which is the top level,
00:09:31.760 which is like ninja status,
00:09:33.920 is in their office watching them work.
00:09:37.160 That is the fastest way, the most potent way,
00:09:42.160 the most impactful way for you to go from,
00:09:44.440 I really don't understand how they think about their work
00:09:47.540 or problems they have,
00:09:48.680 and how you can understand how to build your product.
00:09:50.700 Watching somebody actually solve the problem
00:09:53.340 your product does in their environment,
00:09:55.340 using their tools, talking to the people on their team
00:09:59.100 is incredibly valuable,
00:10:01.320 and I think that most founders underestimate the willingness
00:10:04.220 of their customers, potential customers,
00:10:06.100 to invite them in to show them how it all works.
00:10:08.760 They wanna show you, so take the opportunity and do that.
00:10:12.060 This has been my QuestionLogic framework review.
00:10:16.060 If you have any challenges around pain,
00:10:17.800 positioning, or product, check those out as per usual.
00:10:21.200 I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:10:23.280 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.
00:10:25.680 If you want more videos on product management,
00:10:27.620 be sure to subscribe to my channel.
00:10:29.620 I'd also invite you to join my newsletter
00:10:31.480 where I share exclusive invites, community contests,
00:10:34.100 and other free training videos.
00:10:35.600 And if you're ready to keep going,
00:10:36.660 I got two more videos queued up ready for you right there.
00:10:39.400 I'll see you next week.