5 ways 'Get out of the building' gets misinterpreted
Popular startup advice, misinterpreted #1
I’m doing a series on how popular startup advice gets misinterpreted.
This week’s mantra: ‘Get out of the building!’
🏢 Advice: ‘Get out of the building!’
Steve Blank coined the ‘get out of the building’, sometimes summarised as sillysounding GOOB. Who has time to sound silly when you should leave the physical premises in which you currently reside?
“Now get out of the building and talk to customers. You will get more information if you start by reminding your audience what problem your product is designed to solve.” - Blank, Four Steps to the Epiphany, 2007
The mean idea is that your customers are not in your office with you. You should go to them. Sounds, simple, right?
Well, if people have bitten the bullet, there are ways that you can screw up.
⌛Misstake 1: Only talking to customers once.
“Yeah we talked to five potential customers three months ago”.
You what? You want to talk to five potential customers per week (given your market size allows that).
Only when you stop hearing new things, you can tune it down a bit until you have something new to show.
👨🔬Misstake 2: Talking to experts instead of customers
A sneaky shortcut to ‘go out of the building’ is to talk to experts on the topic instead of potential customers. Many startups I’ve seen go to technology expert or scientists on their topic.
Result: The 3D printing researcher says their 3D printing idea is really cool. But this expert would never buy it as he owns 12 3D printers already. Landing expert talks is not market validation.
The scientist on the topic is happy that finally someone picks up on their ideas, and really is supportive for their journey. Often they are not a potential customer. However, if this professor is really a fan, make them your ambassador, because being able to flaunt a university logo or this professor’s name on your website increases your credibility.
💬 Misstake 3: Phone calls instead of ‘out of the building’
This mistake is especially important for hardware and service oriented startups, but applies to software to.
Some founders are only doing IM or email with their customers. It’s great if you are communicating with your potential customer. You are already miles ahead of your competitors who don’t do this.
However, the reason you talk is you want to learn a lot. Compare these types of ‘talking to people’:
Survey
IM / Email
Phone call
Video call
Physically visit customer at their job where they use your product
Which of these will offer you the richest data? The physical visit, duh.
People often hide behind the fact that this costs a lot of time. However, building something people don’t want also costs time.
Sure, it doesn’t scale. You don’t need to visit everyone. You could start by visiting one customer per month.
🚪 Misstake 4: Only talking to customers that visit you
A founder proudly shows me his dashboard. He tells me: this is where I monitor all app usage. ‘How often do you talk to them on the phone?’, I ask. ‘Sometimes I do that’, he says, ‘when people come with bugs. But mostly I handle those over email.’
This guy was stuck in a Build Measure Learn loop and didn’t seem very invested in getting to know his customer deeply beyond bug reports.
His startup was killed last year. (Dramatic, iknowright?)
Don’t wait for people to get to you, or for serendipitous encounters of (potential) customers. Take control. Be assertive.
👩💼 Mistake 5: Only sending the CEO out of the building
What is understanding, in essence? Could you summarise all you know on paper? There are some intuitive things that words can’t capture. If you visited a potential customer, you will share about 10% of information you took in with your team.
The other 90%, if not documented, gets lost. Taking more people on these visits is important. Everyone spots different things. Everyone has different questions to ask.
I’ve seen a founder outsource customer discovery to an intern. The horror. Customer discovery should be done by everyone in the founding team.
Some startups choose to not let the developers talk to people because…they are developers. Load of BS. I’m okay with not having the developers do customer discovery full-time. But, what if you say that they join one in five interviews, so they can get a sense of who these people are themselves?
Developers make a lot of decisions that require detailed insights of customers, and this will speed up their process and make more user friendly decisions.
🔥 Get out there!
Many founders struggle with going out there, that is normal. Here’s some tips
Don’t know who to talk to? Tips on crafting an outreach plan
8 Myths you tell yourself it’s too early to talk to customers
So early stage, don’t know what to ask? This might help