How Feedback Can Transform Your Business | 10 Key Methods

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We've had this tradition for, I don't know, probably 7 or 8 years at the company where every week we have a Q&A where our employees can come and ask me any question that they want about what's going on and what the direction of the company is, or questions or things that they read about in the press, or that their friends who use the product, what they're asking them. And it's been this really important tradition for us, both because we really believe in openness and communication, and that's kind of what Facebook is all about. But it's also really important for me and for running the company to be able to get feedback, right? And to be able to learn what's on people's minds. What our employees and folks who are part of our team are thinking about. And just kind of, a lot of the time there are good questions that people ask that change the way that we think about what we're building and what we're here to do in the world, and that often make us go think and reevaluate how we should be approaching different problems.

I think one of the reasons that Steve and I have been as successful as we have is because we like the movies. We like to go to the movies, we enjoy movies, and we want to make movies like the ones we enjoy. We want to be able to entertain the audience, we want to be able to startle the audience, we want to be able to blow the audience away and say, have them walk out of the theater saying, "Whoa, that was fantastic. I was really moved by that." That's where part of the fun of it is. And, you know, you want people to think, you want people to be emotionally moved. There's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It's been around for thousands of years, and that's where something like live theater or live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience, and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work. That's the advantage that the Greek storytellers had and Shakespeare had. That us in the film industry are harder to come by, which is, you know, to be able to see an audience reaction and then adjust to what works. So you have to use your experience of sitting through a lot of movies. I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people because I want to know what works. I want to know where they laugh. I want to know where they don't laugh. I want to know what they think about it afterwards, because in the end, that's the art that I'm working with is trying to communicate in a way that is effective and people react to.

We have direct access to our customer because I'm into social media and I want to hear feedback from parents, how they like our products and what they would like to change and how they would like to innovate on these products. To have a brand that's for parents, that is made by parents, and then we're start listening to parents on how to change and grow and evolve.

One thing I think I do well at VaynerMedia is I make everybody feel safe. And so that's really important to me because when you make people feel safe, they start telling you the truth. Right? So if you were able to go home right now, if you're struggling to figure out what you're good at, if you're able to take the 10 to 20 people that are closest to you, siblings, wives, husbands, partners, friends, the 10 to 20 people you would consider the closest to you in the world, and if you were able to talk to them and make them feel safe before you ask them the following question. If you made them emphatically for 20 minutes and said, look, I need, this is the most important question I will ever ask you in my life. You need to tell me the truth. My intuition is you're not gonna wanna tell me the truth, but you have to understand I'm okay with it. I'm in the right mind space for this. I need the truth. And then you ask them what do they think you're good at and bad at. It's an amazing, and obviously I put out that post, it really resonated. I'm getting crazy emails of people like having amazing amazing things happen to them. I think the only, if you do not have self-awareness, which is what I do think I have, and I think a lot of people don't have it, the only way you can gain it is by getting other people to give you the data points. But most people won't tell you the truth. So it's on you to create an environment, a very safe environment, for somebody to tell you the truth of what they truly think you're good and bad at, and then gather that data.

You need to get in a community where you can get feedback. You need either a coach who can give you some direct one-to-one feedback, or community of friends who you just go out with. Maybe you go to lunch with them once a month, you share everything you're doing, they give you some feedback. Or you shoot a video, you send that video out to everybody, get some feedback on it. You create a PowerPoint, practice it with 5 people before the big meeting. Like, get back in the game where you have a community of people who are giving you advanced feedback before you release it. Feedback before you do it so that you get smarter at all of this. Because you know what, nothing makes a dream come more into life than when you start getting feedback from other people about your movement toward the dreams. You know, before I shoot a big sales video for one of my online courses, I'll send it out to 15, 20 people and get feedback, and then I'll often go reshoot it again, you know, or I'll put it out into my community and I'll see the clicks, the conversions, and say, it's not, let's do it again. And it's that willingness to get feedback that will keep your dream alive, 'cause look, if it's just in your mind and you're just doing it by yourself but you never actually get a positive community giving you constructive feedback towards it, it will never be that, it will never be in the social realm. And when it is in the social realm, it feels more real, you know? When people actually comment, I mean, it's one thing to be an artist and in your studio painting for yourself all day, that's great. But once you get some feedback on it, and constructive feedback, you become— you get that self-awareness and that social awareness to contribute and create at another level.

The decision to break into episodes wasn't really driven by the story requirements. The story sort of ended up being fit into 3 buckets. Typically in any of these larger arcs, it's not too surprising that you can think of them as 3 acts. I mean, that's a very traditional Hollywood-esque approach to storytelling. The decision to go with episodics was more driven out of the experience we had working on Half-Life 2 where we really weren't able to give anything to our customers for like a 5-year period. And that was very hard on us as game developers because we thrive on the feedback we receive. We get better when we know what people think, both positive and negative. And so with episodic, it really allowed us to tighten that loop up enormously. There are lots of benefits in terms of managing scale, in terms of reacting to what's happening on the hardware side. But one of the biggest reasons is simply so we don't get into a situation where we have to wait 5 years before hearing from the people who play our games about what worked and what we need to do better.

When you look at new technologies and you look at— there could be, you know, think of wild claims. But you look, what are the, quote, theoretical limitations, but not theoretical à la Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You know, there's a lower theory that says beyond this it's just, you know, it's not going to make it. And then where is the technology? And then you say how much space is there between that that realistically you can get there in 5 years? Okay. And that actually helps define things and focuses the mind on what you should be thinking about, what you shouldn't be thinking about. So there are many things like that that I think successful innovators do all the time. The constructive feedback, the honest feedback, is exactly what we were establishing in ARPA-E that's now being, in fact, in the rest of the Department of Energy. You know, if you hear an idea that you don't really agree with, instead of politely sitting there and being polite, you say, "No, you know, I don't think that's right." No, this is why, you know, you're wrong. And then, and then you sit at a table and you talk about it, and that's where you figure out, are you right, are you wrong? And then you have a deeper understanding of what's going on.

We have this, this Tell Dell process that we use internally where everyone in the company anonymously participates in a survey, and that gives us great insights into how well is our strategy understood, Are people getting the right feedback about their ability to advance? And do they believe they have opportunities inside the company? And it gives us a lot of insight into the effectiveness of our leadership. That kind of mechanism is incredibly important in having open feedback about how we're doing.

I've had flight attendants come up to me and say, I have to wear Jessica Simpson shoes because they're the only ones that are comfortable never made a stand on the whole flight. You know, I mean, I have— and I listened. I think that that's important too, is like really just listening to your customer and to the people that are giving you the feedback, whether it's criticism or, you know, like honoring and being people like, thank you so much, I met the cutest guy last night because of that dress that I wore. You know, I listen to all of it.

Let's say you have come up with a compelling value proposition. Let's say you are absolutely truthful, you truly understand it, and your pitch is truthful and all of that. What I have found is that basically whatever you come up with, and you've come up with it in your lab and thinking about it, talked to a few friends, looks great, the service or product looks great. The real litmus test of that is when you put it in front of customers, right? So when you go out and make your pitch or create an ad or whatever else, and a very, very important thing for an entrepreneur to do is when they put that out there, be very, very, pay a lot of close attention to the feedback you get from the people who are listening to the pitch. And this is very important at the front end because what is probably the case is that whatever you came up with is off base. It's not exactly what your market wants. And, you know, I'll give you an example. There's a friend of mine in Chicago and he started this company called InstallShield. And many of you might be familiar with the company when you're installing different Windows products, InstallShield comes up. And Varesh basically was like, I think, 19 years old or something when he came up with InstallShield. And he said, you know, he went to a trade show, he was going to go to a trade show, some software tools trade show. And he was trying to do a whole bunch of different things. He was trying to do Google Maps 30 years ago, you know, when there was no way that computing could support that sort of thing. But he went to a trade show and he had created this kind of trade show booth with the different products, and he had 7 products, 7 different tools that he was pitching. And it wasn't balancing on that booth, because he wanted to put 4 bullets on one side and 4 bullets on the other, and he was like, 4, and 3. So it was really bothering him, and so as an afterthought, this little tool he had, which was to install software, for installing software, was his 8th bullet. He just put that in the end, at the bottom, the 8th bullet was install software installation tool. And throughout the whole week was, I think a couple of days he was at this trade show booth and all these people are coming by and all this stuff going on, and there was a guy across down the aisle from him who spent 2 days looking at those 8 things because he was in the software business. And after 2 days, he came up to him and said, you know, that product, I have an interest in that product. And this product did not exist. It was in Vireesh's mind. And so, this was one of the only leads he picked up at the show, so he went back and created the product and gave it to the guy, and then he found that other people wanted it and so on and so forth. Okay, so bottom line is that if you study startups, you will find over and over that what actually works is not what you actually came up with. What actually works is, you know, some tangent or some kind of— you mentioned something to a customer in passing and then they grab onto that and say, you know, I want that. And you say, oh, he's unusual, he wants the unusual thing, I'll still keep my core pitch. No. So what you really have to do is pay really close attention to what is going on.

Feedback has always been really important to me. As an example, I'm writing my book right now and I had to cut half of the pages out. And the way I did it was I gave it to people in my audience and I gave them each a copy of the book and I said, underline what you like, underline, you know, the points that make you think, put stars, mark up the book, and whatever you don't like, just skip. Feel free to skip the page, don't feel obligated to me to have to read through it. And I took my book from 120,000 words down to 60,000-65,000 words, all based off of the feedback. Where my publisher, she said, you know, I'm gonna read it with a beginner's mind and I'll tell you what I think will make the most sense. And it's great, and I value that opinion and that advice, but ultimately what I care about is that people are gonna buy the book. And now I have ammunition to say, hey, if there's a page that she doesn't wanna include, my publisher, But everybody that I gave it to really loves it, and there's a few key things now that I'm really fighting for to make it into the book because the audience loves it, right? So it's all these people's opinions versus one person's opinion. And so without that ammunition, without that feedback, I wouldn't have as much of a leg to stand on. So I think it's really important that before you go too far in on something, that you get feedback from your customers, from your audience, to see what they like, what they don't like, and adjust. To make a product or service that will win and give you a lot of success. So thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know your thoughts on getting feedback, how you do it, what your favorite method is. Leave it in the comments below and I'm going to join the discussion. And I have a personal goal to try to make this channel hit 1 million subscribers, so anything you can do to help me get there— leave comments, add to playlist, share it on Facebook, spread the message, tell some friends— I'd really, really, really, really appreciate it. Really appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.