MBA2163 Extended Interview: Michele Hansen – How to Build The Product and Business You Want by Deploying Empathy

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Your personal guide on your business journey with you every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is an extended interview, one of our longer format episodes that we've been trying and delivering on this podcast today we have Michelle Hansen, who is the co founder of Geocodio and the author of Deploy Empathy and this chat. This discussion is all about how to create a product and business you want by deploying empathy. By learning about your potential customers, what their problems are, what their needs are and how to build a solution they actually want to buy. And there's practically nothing worse in business than spending time, money, energy on an idea, on a business, on a product, then launching it and nobody wants it. Building a product that people actually see value in and actually want and need is really half the battle in business. If you nail that, your life is so much easier. And that's what Michelle's expertise is is learning from your customers, even with existing products and services, how they work, what they want, what they don't want so you can craft a Better sol give them what they're happily going to pay for. They're willing to throw money at you because you create an experience where they feel like you read their mind. I had the privilege and the delight to sit down with Michelle to learn a little bit more about how she became an entrepreneur, how she created her business, geocodio, with her partner in life, her husband, and why, and how she decided to write her book deploy empathy. And some of the biggest takeaways from that book and her experience writing it in the first place are shared in this convo. I can't wait to dive into it with you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I first learned about Michelle Hansen at a conference, microconf. This is a few years back in Las Vegas. She spoke on stage about how to really get inside the minds of your customers. From that moment on, I followed on Twitter, followed her work, really enjoyed all the great content and insights she shares online. She's also a really good friend of Nicole, my co founder and wife. And over the years I've realized how much value she adds to our community of entrepreneurs by sharing a very different perspective when it comes to how to do product research, how to understand your customers, how to be innovative, but at the same time, listen to your customers. We get into that and a whole lot more in today's discussion with Michelle Hansen. So let's jump jump into the conversation with Michelle Hansen. But I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give a few closing insights. But for now, let's jump into the conversation with Michelle Hansen.

Michelle is so awesome to have you on the podcast. I've been meaning to have this conversation with you for some time. Nicole, my better half has been telling me, gotta talk to Michelle. I've been a big fan of you for so long because I've been following you on Twitter, all the content you put out there in the world. Your book deploy empathy. So much that I resonate with. So I'm really excited to have you.

Thank you so much for having me, Omar. I'm excited to be here.

Awesome. So, as I mentioned in the intro, you've done a lot. You're a really amazing author. I love your book Deployment. We'll talk more about why I wrote that book and why I think for a lot of people it might surprise them and, and we'll talk a little bit about your business and all that kind of stuff. But before we get into all that, I want to know a little bit about you as a Person, where did you grow up? What was your upbringing like? And did you have any entrepreneurial influences as you were becoming who you are today?

Yeah, so I grew up in the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, in the US And I definitely did have entrepreneurial influences. My dad was a software consultant when I was a kid. He later went in house, but. So both of my parents are software engineers by trade, so to speak. And so I was always kind of around that conversation. There was always a conversation about software. There was even a time when I was. I think I was a teenager. And actually he had a contract for something, and it was such a big contract that my sister and I got pulled in to help with QA on some things. And, you know, I normally made like five or ten bucks an hour, you know, mowing the lawn, babysitting for the neighbors, you know, all that kind of stuff. It was like 15 or $20 an hour. And I was like, oh, my God, like, what is this? Yeah, I was. I was babysitting from the age of 11. That was pretty much my job and kind of, you know, sort of hustling all of my parents, friends, and friends of friends for babysitting jobs on the weekends. And my mom was a professional artist, and so many weekends I would go to art shows with her on the weekends, setting up her booth, talking to customers, learning about sales. You know, I was a Girl Scout too, so I had to go door to door selling cookies. You know, now when I look back, there was actually, I had a lot of opportunities to learn about entrepreneurship and sales, really.

And I think one of the things that you highlighted, I think a lot of people might gloss over, is the fact that you earned money from a young age. Like, you have a concept of, like, I have to do something, do something to earn cash, and then I'm saving up for something to buy something when I'm a kid. You know, that. That idea of, like, you earn money rather than it's given to you or, like an allowance or something like that. So did you save up for something or are you just kind of just looking for pocket money?

Oh, yeah, I just blew it at the movies and, like, at the mall. I didn't have any goals. I was saving towards. Actually, I did have an allowance. I remember it was $7 a week. $5 was pocket money, $1 was savings. $1 was saved for buying presents for people. But, yeah, if I wanted stuff, I needed to, you know, get out and work for it. I mean, you know, my sister and I had a lemonade stand, and she's not in business. But I think she was the real child business genius because she set the price at, you know, 67 cents for a cup of lemonade, knowing that people would just round up to three quarters. And, you know, we probably thought we were such geniuses and that the adults didn't realize it. And I'm sure they, they did and humored us anyway. But no, I don't really remember anything big I saved for. I loved being able to go to the movies and buy as much candy as I wanted or go shopping at the mall. In retrospect, I could have been much more responsible with my money as a kid. I have friends who, I remember they invested in certificates of deposit and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, no, I was not that responsible.

That is crazy. That is crazy. When I was growing up, I. I used to save for things and then when I bought whatever, saving for whatever was like a game or a toy or something. And I remember vividly when I would go and make that purchase in the store, I would have like this sense of depression. Like, I don't think I'm happy that I bought it. Like, you know, like now my money's gone, you know, like, and. And it's funny because a lot of my friends make fun of me because retail therapy doesn't work on me. Like, I just, I don't like, like I like buying gifts for other people, but I just, I. Maybe it was something I picked up when I was a kid. Has your relationship with money changed as you grow, as you grow older and as you now have a business and things like that?

Yeah, I would say I've definitely become much more financially responsible than I used to be. I don't think I was irresponsible, per se. Like, I never got into debt or anything like that. I mean, as a child, I mean, I guess I could have loaned money from my sister or whatnot. She probably would have loan sharked me. So, you know, when I was a kid, I was pretty spend happy. You know, I would just spend my babysitting money on candy at the movies and new jeans or whatever. And I didn't really start saving in a meaningful way until I was going off to college. And you know, I remember I. Basically everything I made in the job and babysitting had before I went off to college, all of that was saved because I knew I would need to buy groceries and whatnot. And then my first week of college or second week of college was the 2008 financial crisis. And so the markets are crashing around us And I remember everybody, myself included, walking around kind of in a daze, being like, my college fund is gone. And I recognize that I went to a private school. I had scholarships, but I went to a relatively privileged school. And I think there was just a massive shock for people who thought that they or their parents basically had done the right things for them in order to be able to go to college. And in a moment, it was gone. And I went into college thinking about studying economics and had always found it interesting. I mean, I just became so obsessed with everything that was going on. And that really solidified my decision to focus on econ and became very financially aware. And I remember we had school that I think it was like thousand dollars that I had saved up over the summer because gas, like now was just sky high. And so there wasn't all that much left over after the summer. But I had $70 a week, I remember, for all of my expenses every week. And I think that experience of when I was in school and when I was just out of school of, okay, I have, you know, I have $50 for, for groceries, like, that's it. You know, I had to, like, count everything up in my head and put stuff back if it wasn't there. Or, you know, when I graduated from college, I, like, couldn't afford heat in my apartment, like, because I had, like, I think $100 left over after I paid my deposit and my first month's rent. So I think those experiences for me were really formative and in how I manage my, you know, finances now and how I run my business as well. Kind of not, not overly cautious, but really just, you know, trying to look three corners ahead for, you know, risks and, and mitigate them in advance.

Those are huge lessons. I mean, like, in the moment, it absolutely stinks. But I mean, going through that really allowed you to become who you are today. And, and, and to have that foresight to be like, okay, you know, maybe my business is going well now, but it's not always going to be the case. Or maybe there are some threats around the corner. So super awesome, like takeaway or even just perspective to, to gain through that tough experience.

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So you graduate college, you're, you're, you're trying to make your rent and trying to, you know, hopefully get heat next, next month and all that kind of stuff. When did you start believing that maybe you can do this entrepreneurial thing? Maybe you can do business? Was there a moment?

Was there a book?

Was there an experience?

So when I was in college, my friends and I had a bunch of little businesses projects going. Even if they weren't making money, we were just always kind of creating things. You know, I remember my, my freshman year of college, we made a version of the Onion for our school anonymously, which looks like a humor blog for anyone's not familiar with the Onion. And, yeah, and we didn't make any money from it, but it went viral around the campus. And that feeling of like, I made something and then all of these people are talking about it and they're laughing, you know, they're getting value out of it. Like, I think that kind of a feeling is the most important roots of early entrepreneurship, is to get this feeling that I made something and other people are using it, other people are enjoying it. Holy crap. This is a cool feeling, right? And just like chasing that feeling and understanding, oh, okay, so they really liked this piece. And this one didn't go as well. Why was that? And then trying things out and seeing, okay, this one hits again. And trying to find some sort of repeatable process. I think that's the kind of, the almost addiction of entrepreneurship is that experimental process of seeing what hits and what doesn't. And so we actually had a variety of sort of blogs and stuff that we made through college, some of which made money from advertising. We started a consulting, social media consulting business at one point. I think I made $300 a month from that one at one point. So that one was pretty good for a college student just to be getting paid 300 bucks a month to be on Facebook. And so, but, but it didn't really occur to me that like I would do that full time. Like that was just a really cool thing. And I added it to my resume, but it was never, it never seemed to have full time potential. And I wonder if that's because I had that kind of traumatic experience of the financial crisis when it was like, you need a job. Like, like it was like from that point on it became your number one goal in college, is to graduate with a job. Like that is the goal. Because all of our friends are graduating, didn't have jobs, like had to move back home, not working in their field. And I was like, that's, that's not going to be me. And so I view those kind of entrepreneurial projects as a way to build my resume to get a job when I graduated.

Right.

And that was pretty much my perspective for a while. I still had little projects going on, but it was always the focus was have a stable job. And it took me a really long time to come around to the idea that I could be responsible for my own income or my, my family's income. Like to take on that responsibility really took me a long time to get used to, which I think often surprises people because people see entrepreneurs and they think, oh, you've been, you know, running lemonade stands since you were four or five. Of course you always dreamt of running your own business and you never wanted to work for anybody else. And like you've always just had good ideas or whatever. And I'm like, no, like I've had ideas that, that failed and it really. And ones that went well. But it really took me a long time to get used to the idea that I could carry that responsibility of my income myself.

I couldn't agree more. I mean, and I resonated so much what you said, firstly with that concept of the magic of entrepreneurship, the idea of creating something out of thin air. I was really mesmerized by this concept. Like, for me, I just saw business as like, just a bunch of experiments, like you like some side projects, try to hustle a few bucks so I can have a better weekend or something, you know. And through that process, that kind of opened the door for me to learn a little bit more about what business is all about. I didn't even think of it as business. I didn't even think of it as entrepreneurship. I have an uncle who's like the entrepreneur in the family and he, he used to come and visit me and give me books every time he would visit. And then the next time he'd visit, we'd talk about the book he gave me and he'd give me a new book. And, you know, he gave me the classics like, you know, Rich Dad, Poor dad, and how to Win Friends and Influence People and all that stuff. But there was one book that I got from a friend called Anyone Can Do It. It's a very not popular book. It's not. Not well known in any way, but it catalogs a story of two people that started a cafe in the uk. And I just got this window of, of, wow, these people are just like me. But they created something, had an idea, and they made it happen in the world. And that really, really intrigued me. And I, I really feel what you're feeling with when you're that idea of like, wow, you're putting something on the world, people resonate with it, people react to it. It's an incredible feeling. But at the same time, it's incredibly risky. Starting a business is risky, not only in terms of finances, but you're putting yourself out there, putting yourself there to be criticized and to fail and to fall on your face and things like that. What was one of those times where you failed publicly and learned a huge lesson from it that turned into a success later on?

You know, I look back and there isn't one large failure as an entrepreneur, per se. It's more so, I think smaller ones that I look at. You know, I think, I mean, yeah, one actually that comes to mind now that I'm thinking about this. So my husband and I, we started building apps together. And the first one we built actually did decently well. We got a lot of good local press, and it was an app to help you find grocery stores and coffee shops and convenience stores that were open in the middle of the night or weird hours. Our use case was if you need coffee at 3am or milk at midnight. Because back in 2012, you couldn't just put those into Google and it would tell you, you would have to remember, like, okay, there's this grocery store over here. Let me go to their website, let me type in my zip code, let me figure out the hours, and if you're tired, you can do that. Anyway, that one was a success, but that's not what we're talking about right now. So the next one we did, we're like, you know what, we can use the same concept where it's an app that people pull up a map and then it shows them things. And my husband is very attuned to hygiene, and he Found out that there's smiley ratings on restaurants for their hygiene. And he's, and he's like, oh, like what if as you were walking down the street you could see what those ratings are? Because I think at the time in D.C. i think this might have changed. They weren't posted on the window. Like the health department had these ratings. Yeah. But they weren't publicly posted. But you could get them all online. And so it was like. And I think actually a restaurant down the street from our office had just had a rat infestation issue that he had eaten at. So he was very motivated. Yeah, very motivated at the time. And we're like, cool. We'll basically just use the same code base. Like we already know how this works. We already know the people in the area like this kind of a concept when we make it. I have some contacts with journalists, you know, let's do this. And so we did it. And the day we launched the app I had, you know, I had sent it to journalists. It was on blogs and everything. And then there was a bug in the code that the map, instead of showing your location when you pulled it up, it was actually stuck on a location which turned out which was one of the, just the testing locations. And because we lived right near that spot, we didn't catch this when we were testing it. And so we had all of this press for an app that basically didn't work. And the thing with consumer is that if you don't get it right the first time, people are just going to forget about it and leave, you know, and so all these people open this up, doesn't work and then they just left. And so there's comments on like Reddit and local blogs and stuff that's like, yeah, I tried this and it didn't work. And we were actually, we were also on vacation at the time when it launched, which was another terrible idea.

Of course.

It's like we picked the launch date and we picked it for a time when we were like in flight without wi fi for eight hours and then would be exhausted and jet lagged. So we didn't even like find all this, all this stuff until like two days later. And by that point it was just too late and it was kind of a waste. And that I think I really learned a lesson about first of all, testing before you launch something and planning and just double crossing your T's and double dotting your I's when you're launching something. And quite frankly also how fickle consumer is that you've just You've got such a short amount of time to make an impression on a consumer and if you trip, they're never going to look back. I think that's why I tend to like B2B use cases more often. But yeah, that, that was, that was rough.

Yeah.

Thanks for sharing that. Being vulnerable and sharing that. I mean, all the things I was laughing because all the things you mentioned, I've experienced, I've done them. Especially the scheduling a launch during a holiday or scheduling a launch when like, this is the worst time ever. Why would I choose this? And it's, it's hilarious because I forgot which stand up comedian said this or. But basically it's like when you schedule things that are far in advance, you're like, oh, sure, you say yes to everything. And that's future Omar's problem. Right? Like, whatever, you know, just put it in the calendar and then the time comes. And the big lesson I've learned over the years is that like, you gotta learn to say no. You gotta learn to like, give yourself more time. You gotta like, you know, put your life in as a priority. Like one of my favorite books is Derek Sivers book Anything youg Want. And he talks about like, building your business is like building your own utopia. And like you make the rules. And I think we have to learn that sometimes the hard way because we're not used to that. We're used to like, you know, having to abide by a boss or a standard or the way things are. And you, you don't realize, actually I can just choose whenever I want to do anything in my business, which is just pretty empowering.

Yeah, you're making the rules. And it's, it's a, it's, it's something you have to remind yourself of.

Yeah, totally. I got to know you at microconf. I think that was 2019. This is when I first saw you on stage. By the way. You're a fantastic public speaker. I loved your speech. I really was just like, who is this Michelle Hansen woman? And my kind of like entry into getting to know you is through Twitter and the conversations you have there. And then your book Deploy Empathy, which I think is probably the best book I've ever seen when it comes to understanding your customers and doing customer interviews and really having a dialogue to learn more about what to build for these people.

Right.

And I want to talk a little bit about what motivated you to write this book. Because a lot of people think about writing a book and they're like, one day I want to write a Book. And what made you say, you know what, I'm going to write a book on this topic and actually publish it and put it out there in the world.

Yeah. So I was introduced to customer interviewing and customer research when I was a product manager. When we were going to look at how do we get our metrics to move, how do we move our KPIs, how do we get more people to do the things that we want them to do, we would look at all of our data, we would maybe talk to customer support, see what they had heard, see how people were engaging with things, and then make educated guesses about which features we should build or which we should improve. And after doing that time and time again and the metrics not moving was introduced to the idea of customer research and doing so in a structured way. And it was absolutely a revelation for me. I went from a total skeptic being like, we don't have time to think, talk to people. I've got important stuff to do. Don't bother me with this, to it being an absolutely indispensable part of how I made decisions and actually getting towards those metrics that were really meaningful. And so when I went full time on Geocodio, so this is five years ago now, I finally got the opportunity to start doing that research with our own customers and becoming part of the entrepreneur community, started helping out other founders, became somebody who was known as somebody who knew things about doing research and could give other founders advice on it. I got to a certain point where I realized that whenever founders were coming to me for advice, I didn't really have anything good to send them. I didn't have one solid place I could send them. It was like, okay, read the three chapters from this book here, and then the first chapter, this book over here, and then this book is really good, but it's written for people in corporate environments, so don't feel bad if it talks about all these resources you don't have. And then this blog post is really good. Listen to this podcast. And it was like, it's just like such a jumbled mess. And I wish I had had a book to give them that was both approachable for people who don't come from a UX background or aren't working within a big corporation where they've got a team of 50 people who can go out and do this research for them. So it's approachable to a beginner with no resources, yet had the same rigor of the books that professional researchers, UX people, product people, would use and then I was like, I should write a book. And then the next moment was, I should not write a book. Because everybody I've ever talked to about writing a book told me how lonely it was and how long of a process it was. And this is in the middle of a COVID lockdown winter. And I was like, I do not need any more loneliness in my life right now. So I was like, you know what? This newsletter thing, I've seen people writing substacks and stuff, and Twitter just acquired this company review that does newsletters. Maybe I'll just write a newsletter. And I was like, you know, I'll just start writing out stuff that as I'm talking to founders, as I'm talking to my own customers, and realize there are these gaps and things, I'll just start writing this newsletter. And maybe it turns into a book, maybe it doesn't. But worst case scenario, I have a central place to send people when they ask me these questions, where I know that there's somewhere that they can go that has all of the resources they need, that is rigorously grounded in solid methods, and then it's just a newsletter. I'm not writing a book because I think that felt very intimidating to me, the idea of writing a book. I think if you had told me a year and a half ago that I would end up writing a 322 page book, I think I would have been too intimidated to start the process. But instead, writing it as a newsletter both broke it out into chunks. I just wrote about things whenever I was excited about them, not when the table of contents told me that that was the next thing I was supposed to write about. And it also made it a social process, which meant that as I was going, as I was writing each section, I was getting feedback from people who were reading it, who were telling me they liked it, telling me, oh, I should add this thing. Oh, they have this anecdote from their life about something similar that happen from their experience. Like every time I wrote something, I was getting feedback from people. And that really kept me going because I wasn't just locked in a closet with a typewriter. I was writing this for people and seeing in real time how I was helping them. And that in turn motivated me to keep going and keep writing. I don't think I would have gotten to the point of it being a book had I not started it as a newsletter.

I love. I love the breaking it down, but also the mindset of, you know, understanding that this doesn't have to be the way I imagine it of writing a book, sitting down and writing page to page, you know, cover to cover. It reminds me of something that one of my favorite authors, Ryan Holiday, has said, and his mentor is Robert Greene, who wrote the 48 laws of power. And Robert Greene's advice to him is like, hey, you want to be a great writer? The first thing you need to do is not write, is actually to have a great life, is actually to have great experiences. So all the experiences you had before you wrote this book, including the newsletter, including the stuff that you learned and put into the newsletter, is actually a part of the process of writing a book, which is a great mindset hack, which is kind of a great way to look at it, that, like, when I have, you know, experiences, these are part of what's going to influence who I am and what's going to get into the book, you know, in some way. So if you want to write your second book, you know, one of the ways to look at it is, you know, have some interesting experiences, and those. Those are going to kind of inform whatever that becomes. So I want to get a little into something that I know that you have talked about before and kind of gets you fired up. I've did a little research before this interview, weeks before. There's a quote by Henry Ford. If I had asked people what I've what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. We've heard of this a million times. You know, if I ask my customers what they wanted, they don't know what they want. They're going to tell me, just give me a faster, make it easier, make it look nicer, give me a few buttons, give me a few features. What's the problem with this quote? What's right about it? What's wrong with it? Why does that not really hold up in the real world?

Before I answer that, can I add something to be added into our previous question right there? We were talking earlier about how when you're an entrepreneur, you make the rules for how you work. And I realized going into the idea of writing a book that I was assuming the other rules that people have also applied to me about you need to go and lock yourself in a closet for a year and a half, get up at 4am every day, bang out three hours of writing every day. And I just knew that didn't work for me. And my initial response was, then, I can't write a book. But then I remember that entrepreneurial ethos of, wait a minute, no, I can just do this my own way. I can do this in a way that works for me. I can write this book in a social way. I can write it in a piecemeal way. I can write it whenever the motivation for a particular topic strikes me. I have adhd and I'm quite open about that. Which means that sitting down and looking at a table of contents from chapters 1 through 15 and writing them in that order, that is just not going to work.

Right.

I needed to write this as I was interested, as I was excited. And so I applied my own rules to writing the book. And that was the breakthrough for me of remembering that I got to write the rules.

That's inspiring. I love that. So good. So Henry Ford.

Henry Ford quote. Okay, so anybody who has ever suggested the idea of doing any sort of research, talking to customers in any way, taking their feedback into account, has probably gotten the retorts that, well, if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And to which you're supposed to just stand there and tell this person how brilliant they are because they're quoting Henry Ford. There's a lot of problems with this quote. The first one is that it assumes that Henry Ford invented the car. And he didn't.

No, he didn't.

No, he didn't.

I'm a guard guy.

I know that Daimler and Benz invented the car, right? Daimler invented the engine. Benz invented the first car. Actually, his wife was the first user tester and she drove it like 80km or something to visit her mother. Like invented like brake pads in the process. Like, amazing story. Anyway, but that was like the 1800s. So first of all, Ford didn't invent the car. So second of all, people would not have wanted faster horses. So around the turn of the century, cities were knee deep in horse manure. Actually, you know, the sort of old gentlemanly tradition that the man walks on the left hand side of a woman on the sidewalk. You may have heard that's to prevent the woman from getting mud splashed on her. That is a Victorian euphemism for manure. Because cities were piled high not only with manure, but also with dead horses. Because when the horses died from being carried through the streets, they would just leave them there. And there were cities that had streets, New York, London, big cities that were impassable because there was so much manure in, in the cities. A massive percentage of U.S. agricultural production, I want to say it was something like 30 or 40% just went to feeding horses. Around the turn of the century, people used to be able to Used to work that the cities would sell the manure to the farmers. They would grow stuff for the horses. And then there was kind of this cycle there. But there were so many horses around the turn of the century that they couldn't even sell the manure. So it just piled up in the city. So then you've got all of these diseases. You have the. Just the disgust of it. Right? Yeah. Like, cities were used a lot grosser than they are now. And so, if anything, if he had asked people what they wanted, they would not have said a faster horse. They would have said, a horse that doesn't go to the bathroom as much.

Yeah, that's really what they wanted.

And if they had said a faster horse. The average speed of a carriage going through central London, I want to say, in the turn of the century was eight miles an hour. The average speed of a car going through central London right now is eight miles an hour. So those weren't the problems they would have asked for solutions to. Indeed, by the time Ford came along, cars already existed, and they were basically a rich man's toy at that point. People probably would have wanted a car. And I think, you know, and not to discredit Ford, you know, he was the basically the inventor of the modern assembly line, which he observed after, I believe, walking through a slaughterhouse in Chicago and seeing how that process was going, realizing that could be applied to cars and make cars cheaper, because at that point, they were built bespoke, you know, they were in batches at a time. Yeah, right, exactly. So he is a brilliant inventor in his own right. He did not invent the car. But the irony of this quote is that Ford indeed did not believe in the value of customer feedback. And his great innovation at the beginning was every Model T rolls off the line, it's the exact same. They're all black. They all have the same features. And that was what allowed him to sell them so cheaply. But he was also obstinate about those things. So they were all black. So even when other carmakers allowed people to have their cars in color. What an indulgence. He said no. GM introduced the idea of financing. Ford wanted all of the payment up front, which limited his customer base. Instead, GM figured out that you can just allow people to have a down payment and then pay it off. All of these innovations were happening around them to the point where, I believe it was in 1915. And Henry Ford, very successful at this point, was off on vacation in Europe. And his top engineer, who was actually behind a lot of the Innovations that also get credited to Ford. For example, I think he was the first one to use Velladium steel in cars. Anyway, he and I believe it was one of the Dodge brothers, completely rebuilt the car with all of these things that they had learned, you know, that people wanted from the other car manufacturers. You know, it had things like a windscreen. And Ford got back from his vacation and they were expecting their boss to be so excited that they had, you know, this brand new car. He took a sledgehammer to it and destroyed the car. And he said that the Model T was the perfect car and no other car needed to exist. And he was able to ride that, though, for a while. But by the early 1920s, GM is picking up steam. There's colors, there's windshields, there's more doors. People can roll down their windows. They can pay with financing. And by the early 1920s, Ford's market share starts to tank. And indeed, Ford went from having basically 90% market share to completely cratering. And Ford actually, throughout the rest of the 20th century, never recovered the market share that they lost to GM in 1928. So if Ford had actually listened to people or observed what they liked or experimented with what they liked, he would have been able to retain that dominant first mover position that he enjoyed for the first 15, 20 years of mass automobiles. So it's actually, it's a really terrible quote to give someone, but I think it's important to think about why someone might say this. And it's probably because they're scared of doing something differently. They're probably a lot like I was, you know, almost 10 years ago, saying, I'm trying to get this business going. I've got all these things, metrics I have to hit. There is money on the line. I don't have time to sit down and talk to people. I thought I was innovating, but I was like, the customers aren't going to tell me what, that they don't have anything to add to this. All they need to do is just buy stuff. That's their job. I'm doing my job of being the brilliant product leader who's got all the ideas. That's my role here. Their role is to just be thankful and buy, right? No, actually, when you bring customers into the process and you learn about what their process is, what are they trying to do? What are the constraints that they're living under? You can learn things that allow you to either sell a product that better suits their needs, so it's ones that they're going to keep using for a long time and keep paying you for. For a long time. You learn what their situation is. So you can see, oh, they would buy the car, but they don't have all of the money right now. They do have a good job. That would allow them to pay it off later though, Right? The customer wouldn't have come to you and said, I would like to be able to give a deposit and then pay in 20 installments. Right. But they would say, I just can't pay for all of it right now. Right. And then it is up to you as the entrepreneur to take that need that they're expressing, that situation that they're in, that process they're going through and those goals that they have and turn that into a business and turn that into the product. So actually, I think it's a cautionary tale because if Ford actually had observed and listened to customers, he could have retained his dominant market position. Instead, he just completely surrendered it to GM totally. If you, your parent or spouse served in the military, you could join our family. Our members saved an average of $70 a month on auto insurance when they switched. Tap the banner or visit usaa.com join today to check your eligibility restrictions apply.

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I love the fact that you broke down that his inability to see that there are maybe things you can learn from your customers, things you can learn from even your competitors is what causes downfall. And a lot of people kind of take this quote and they also, like, say, well, you know, Steve Jobs is the same way. And Elon Musk is like this too. Like, no, if you ever read anything about what of Apple or even Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, you know, Steve Jobs, his brilliance was being able to take ideas and from different markets, from different products and bringing it into Apple, whether it's Xerox or whether it's, you know, the Palm Pilot, whether, you know, like he, he didn't really invent anything new. He just took the good of different products and brought them in. And he definitely could. Like, when we say, listen to customer feedback, it doesn't mean just following them blindly like you're mentioning, like, but you have to take it in consideration and make your decisions based on what you're hearing. And what I've learned from your work is that Those interviews, those discussions, at the very least, what I get out of it is incredible data and information for marketing. Like, I know exactly the language to use when I'm putting my sales pages together, because I can just look at the transcript of the video that I. The video call I had with one of my customers who was struggling with a problem and was able to solve it with my software, and I. The words I would use, I'm too much in the weeds. I'm too much, too close to the product.

Right.

I'm using the terminology, I'm talking with my team and things like that. But then, you know, I hear from my customer and I'm like, yes, it's exactly how they articulated it. And there's a good chance other people are thinking about this problem. So at the very minimum, what you're going to get out of this is great copy for your sales pages. So I want to thank you for that. It's huge.

Yeah. I mean, at the very least, I think, because we are so. We're like, we're in our products and services every single day, and we know what we're selling, we know what we're building. But that's not always what people are buying. Right. They have their own set of goals that they're trying to accomplish. And I think only by understanding the process that they're going through and the goals that they're trying to achieve, can we write something or build something that resonates with them in a way that they really understand, that makes them feel like we understand them and have a product, have a service that is going to help them with those problems they have.

And I want to give an example of the application of what you're talking about, because sometimes it's not super clear. So I want to give an example. So our software webinar Ninja, you know, Nicole was applying a lot of things she read in your book, doing customer interviews. One of the things that customers were telling us, because we saw customers leaving and we had a bit of a churn problem, and we wanted to fix this problem.

And one.

One of the biggest reasons why they were leaving is they would say, I'm just not using the software right now, but I'm going to be using it next month. Or, you know, and it was kind of like, well, how do we fix this? Maybe like, you know, we can't add a feature. We can't. You know, how do we solve this problem? But we just kept on hearing the same thing over and over, and we realized, oh, maybe there's a Seasonality to this. Maybe we can fix this with, with a pricing plan. And we, what we did is we actually implemented a pause plan so when people cancel, they can pause their plan so that way they don't have to upload all their data and all their information is there and all the recordings and things like that will save their data. And they pay $5 a month just to save their data, which is reasonable for them. That makes total sense because they're gonna, they don't want to just hang on and pay every single month if they're not using it. And at the same time, for us, it helped us curb the churn because we still have a customer, we're still collecting cash, and we're still being able to kind of let them know of new features that we're releasing and promote other expansion revenue options. So just the idea of listening to your customers, even if you feel like, well, I can't solve it, well, maybe it's not a feature problem, maybe it's an offering problem. And you really allowed us to unlock that just by going through the reps of just listening and looking at the notes and just hearing the same thing and just saying, like, okay, maybe we gotta look at this in a different way.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, there's so many different ways that you can apply what you learn from listening to your customers. Whether that's implementing a new, a new pricing plan or new features, or saying, hey, maybe, maybe we're going after the wrong segment here, right? Like if you talk to five people and four of them say, yeah, we canceled because we didn't need it right now, maybe we need it in the future. But then you talk to one person who needs it all the time and you say, hey, what are we doing in our marketing that we're attracting those four people who have this kind of on again, off again need for us versus what is the use case this other person has that needs it all the time? And how can we go out and find more people with a use case like them? And we can shift our marketing because maybe we're attracting the wrong kind of customers.

Very, very true.

There's so many different things that you can do with this across different areas of your organization. I think of customer feedback as a free resource that most companies overlook. It is such a valuable raw material going into your company that you can use in marketing, in sales, in your pricing strategies, thinking about how you structure your business. What are the opportunities we're going into, what is our strategic direction, what is our market positioning what are the competitors we should be worried about? Are those companies or are those people doing it themselves can really help you everywhere. From the nuts and bolts of writing a better subject line on an email to thinking about your overall strategic positioning.

You're right. And the interesting thing is that when we interviewed all these customers, some of the customers, I say 50% of the customers, that said, I'm just not using it right now. When we would go inside their account, they didn't create a single webinar. They didn't even actually create their first webinar. Like they have the demo webinar that they go through the onboarding, but they don't have the one that, that actually has attendees. So that triggered our a hire for us. We're like, oh, let's get somebody who will get an onboarding call and set up their first webinar on a call with them so that there's no excuse. And we saw, you know, the slipping away in intercom, like drop dramatically when we started doing that, which helped obviously with the churn as well. But again, it's just using data and, and just digging in and hearing what their customers are saying is what we found. And then just using all the other resources you have to figure out, okay, how can we verify what they're saying and really understand what they mean by what, what's behind that statement, which would never happen if we never had that conversation. So super helpful, super helpful. I want to get into Geocodia in a moment, but before that I just want to ask a quick rapid fire question. What advice would you give somebody who is listening to this is sold? I want to talk to my customers, but I don't have any customers yet. Or maybe I have two customers. What advice would you give them?

Go talk to people who experience the problem you're trying to solve and you can find these people on Twitter, on Reddit. My favorite way to do this is if you've got a list of say five competitors to what your company will be. Go find people complaining about those companies on Reddit or on Twitter. And this applies even if it's B2B software. People often think that's only people talking about consumer things on social media. Oh no. You can find out tons of information about B2B companies. I mean, even like enterprise pricing that's not public. You can find all sorts of stuff on Reddit because if somebody is experiencing a problem frequently and painfully enough, they're already paying a company for it and then they're still upset that it's not Solving their problem, they're gonna be talking about it somewhere. And if you say, hey, I'm trying to build something better, would you be able to hop on a half an hour call with me just so I can understand what you're trying to do? Then you just listen to them. Nine times out of 10, they will get on the call with you.

And some people are just so surprised that a founder of any company would talk to them, which is, which is always a hoot. But yeah, and I love the fact that people are like, wow, you're on the call. And like. And I'm just like, what are you talking about? Like, this is all I care about. Of course I'm on the call. Like, you're, what you're giving me is gold. And the other thing is, is that I just find that when you talk to customers and find out like what their pain points are and you can actually come up with a solution and even just the promise of a solution, it's so much easier to sell that kind of product. There's something magical about offering something that people are just like, I'm dying for that. Thank you so much. Like, I've been screaming top of Reddit to for a solution. So you, it's such a competitive advantage. Great point that you just made. Okay, let's talk about Geocodia, which is your business and you, and you do with your partner, your, your, your husband, Matus. You guys have an interesting dynamic, your Charger product and he does the engineering side of things. And I think you do some of the marketing too, right? The marketing and the sales and all that kind of stuff, which is really cool. How would you describe Geocod to, let's say your 70 year old aunt? Like, how would you say, what would you say to her? Like, this is what I do.

Yes. So the short answer I give to people before investing them in a longer explanation is that we make software. The longer explanation is that whenever you pull up your phone for directions, for example, you pull up your favorite mapping app and you type in an address. What's happening in the background is that a computer doesn't understand an address. It only understands the latitude and longitude coordinates. And so what we do at a very basic level is turn addresses into coordinates and coordinates into addresses. Now, our niche in the market is when people are not only trying to make maps, but also because there are a lot of pieces of information about a location that you can only get if you have those coordinates. So they're kind of like the keys. So for example, if you want to know what someone's time zone is, you actually have to have the coordinates first. If in the US Or Canada, you want to know what their political district is, you have to have the coordinates first. If you want to know census data about a location, you have to have the coordinates first. So the coordinates are sort of that central connecting key. And so what we focus on is that data enrichment side for the North American market.

That's amazing. So can you give us some examples of some of your customers?

You know, this is what makes it so fun for me as an entrepreneur who loves listening to our customers, is that we are truly horizontal. I mean, our customers range from everything from college freshmen making their first map and using Geocodio because their professor told them to, to major banks and insurance companies, to products that you probably use every day. It's such a range, and that makes it so fun. A really common example for us is fleet management companies. So, you know, trucks driving around the country with goods, picking them up from ports or train stations, you know, driving them to warehouses and to stores. Those trucks usually have GPS on them. And that GPS is sending back information about the truck back to a central place. Everything from the driver's speed to simply where they are. And that might be sending a ping every hundred feet. And so that's tons of data that they're getting back. But if somebody back at headquarters looks at that and it's just a string of numbers, they're not going to be able to say, oh, okay, they're in Albuquerque. Right. So you have to turn it into an address so a human can understand it. Insurance companies use this to understand the risk of a various property. Researchers will use this kind of data to understand, okay, looking at all of these addresses, which of these addresses are of places that are low income or are they in food deserts? What is their access to community services? And you have all of that hinges on using census data. So is everything from just making a map and helping someone with, say, building an app that helps salespeople see which customers are in their sales district.

To.

Research and insurance and mortgages and seeing, you know, how your tractors are doing standing out in the field, like, it's just such a fun breadth of use cases. And honestly, every time I get off the phone with a customer and I've interviewed them so often, I'm like, wow, I didn't even know that that was happening. And they're using my product.

Cool.

That is so cool.

It's just so cool.

Yeah, I mean, I would imagine you're Learning so much about so many different kinds of industries and businesses and use cases and that's incred.

Oh, it says a business nerd. It's so much fun.

One of the things that I find incredibly impressive about your business is how lean you are in terms of your team. You have a fairly successful business and last I checked is just you beta and maybe you just made a hire.

One.

One hire. So I mean, we talked a little bit about earlier about finances and risk and things like that. Making that first hire, what was the motivator of saying, okay, I gotta hire somebody and how has it gone so far?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we. For the past eight and a half years since we started it, you know, it was just my husband and I and earlier this year we hadn't really been thinking about hiring, but we have had a, a problem, so to speak, of that. We moved to Denmark a couple of years ago and serving the North American market, you can imagine that gets tricky with time zones and customer support, talking to people, all those kinds of things. And so we had kind of had this friction for a couple of years. I hadn't really thought about solving it though, and. And then earlier this year, my husband saw that one of his old coworkers who had been leading the support team at a startup he used to work at, had gone through coding bootcamp and was looking for developer jobs. And we're like, oh, hey, this would be great if we could just bring him on as a consultant and he can get some experience. He can write some tutorials for us, go through our product, see how it is for beginner developers especially, which is very much like our customers, or they might just be handed a project by their boss and told to just do it. And then as he was working with us for a couple of months, we were like, you know what, there's more he could do. And if he went out and got a full time job.

He would feel.

Like we lost something. And so we made him an offer to come on as a content and support engineer. So helping with support, especially technical support, and also writing those tutorials for our website, which are helpful for marketing and for simply helping our customers get started. But we still keep it as a really lean team. We don't have any other plans to hire at this point because we focused on efficiency. And to what we were saying earlier about how you're an entrepreneur and you structure your business for what you want it to look like, you have that, you know, ability to do that, you know, we intentionally don't do Outbound sales, for example, because, you know, as me, as the primary salesperson, we just don't have time for that. So instead we have a freemium model where people are coming to us and, you know, even big enterprises, they'll try it on the, on the free side and then maybe ask for their boss's credit card. And a couple months later, I get a message saying that we need to negotiate a contract and, you know, get this into a PO and get to go through procurement and all of that. So there are decisions that we have made that influence how we structure the business to be run efficiency, efficiently and lean, which for us in a highly competitive market is really important.

Yeah.

And one of the things a lot of people don't realize is one of the most time consuming things for me and for anybody who runs a team is dealing with people. Dealing with people is the.

One of the most.

There's so much communication over communication you have to do, whether it's verbal or written or on video or in meetings or whatever it is. It takes a big chunk of my week. And I'm not complaining, I'm not saying that it's not necessary. But the more you grow your team, the more hires you make, the more communication you're going to have to do, the more time it's going to take, the more time it's going to take you away from the things that you're doing now that are probably going to contribute more to your bottom line, contribute to bringing in the dollars or bringing in customers, improving your product. So there is a sacrifice. You know, a lot of people don't realize that there is a sacrifice every time you make a hire. So hire wisely, only when you need to.

And of course, I mean, sorry, I should say, you know, for us, like, some people love being managers. They love leading people, they love helping people develop in their careers. And that comes naturally to them. Or it's something that they came a little bit naturally to them and then they focused on being really good at that. We love building product. We love making things that make it faster for people to do things that it brings me so much joy when somebody tells me that their previous data enrichment process took them a whole day to do, and now it takes them 15 minutes because they just upload it to our service. That brings me so much satisfaction. And that is really where I find my joy. And the same with my husband. And that has influenced how we build our business. Right. Like if you build a business and you have a lot of people working for you, but you don't actually love leading people, then that's not going to be a fit. But also if you build a lean product business, but what you really love is helping people grow and develop, then being a two person team is also not going to be a fit for you. And I just think it all comes back to you have the autonomy to structure your business in a way that works for you both in terms of your life and your personality and where you find satisfaction in work. And I think it's important to listen to those things within you rather than looking at, okay, well this is what a real company does. So I should go out and do this, I should have this thing in my business. No, it's like what brings you satisfaction? What are the things you really enjoy doing? What are the things that you're meant to bring into this world that's different for every person and in every business. And there is a way to structure your business so that it brings out the best parts of your personality and your, your strongest skills rather than constantly forcing you to do things that you are weak in or don't enjoy.

Huge, huge advice. Because it does take a sense of maturity to have that self awareness that you just described to know that hey, it's okay for me to want something different and go after it. You know, at the end of the day that's it's your life, it's your, it's your business, it's your venture, it's your time that you're spending on earth. You know, why spend it doing something or building something or creating something because you think that's how it's done or you know, it was interesting because I had a similar kind of thought or conversation with Laura Roeder a few days ago when I was speaking to her and earlier on her career she did a lot of things where she self admitted, she admitted like hey, I just did it because I thought that's what you're supposed to do. But it's a good reminder for everybody listening and myself and you that hey, every time I make a decision I gotta remember like I gotta live with this decision. I got to live with the consequences of a hire or you know, changing my business or a product or, or who I'm going to be serving. These are the people I'm going to work with every day. So that's a, that's a great note to end on. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, Michelle. I feel like this is so long overdue. I think that our listeners are going to love it as they're listening right Now. But Michelle, as we wrap up, a lot of our listeners are in a business. They built a business, they have some success. They're trying to balance that work, life, you know, struggle, where they're like, hey, my business is hungry for my time. What advice would you give to them that, you know, because you have a family, you're trying to balance things every day. How do you, what are some of the strategies you use to kind of balance your life and balance your business?

You know, I wrote a book about empathy and I think sometimes people might think that that's about having empathy for other people, which it is. Understanding that where they're coming from is valid. Right. It's also about having empathy for yourself. And I feel like we can't talk about empathy without talking about boundaries. And I think it's really important for us to have empathy for ourselves as business owners so that when we have those moments where life and business are really butting heads and you're feeling like you're not the business person you want to be, you're not the parent you're not the spouse you want to be, having empathy for yourself and say, you know what? Yes, okay, I should not have snapped at my child yesterday. It makes sense that I did because I was really stressed from that call that I just got off of about that contract I'm negotiating. Right. It makes sense that I did that. And maybe the action I took was not okay, but it's okay that I was feeling really frustrated at that moment. Right. Having empathy for yourself and then allowing yourself to have boundaries. You know, I mean, something I really had to learn the hard way is that when you work in Europe, the best time to have a phone call with somebody in California is going to be 8, 9, 10 o' clock your time. And for the first year or so of living here, I did that every night. I was just having calls from like 8 to like 10 or 11 o' clock at night. And a certain point I got to, you know what, I am waking up exhausted every day. I am really not in my best shape when I'm on these calls. I need to set a boundary here that I'm not going to do them past 7 o'.

Clock.

It needs to be during my workday. And I'm just going to have to ask people to have a call with me at 8, 9, 10 o' clock their time if they're in North America, because this is not working for me and I'm not being the business person I want to be or the person person I want to be. But the only way I got to that was by having empathy for myself. I think there is sometimes a, the overarching mood of a lot of advice for people who are, who are struggling with that kind of work Life balance is often a form of toxic positivity that's like, you can find a way to make it work. You can get up at 5am for yoga. You got this, like you can do it. And it's like no man. Like, you don't have to push yourself more. You don't have to tell yourself you should be grateful. You don't have to tell yourself you should be happy that you have to have a call at 8 o' clock at night because it's good that your business needs sales, right? You don't have to force it to be positive. It's okay to say it makes sense, I'm tired, it makes sense, I'm frustrated. And then to put a boundary, which often means making other people a little bit uncomfortable, right? And putting yourself and your family or your business first before accommodating or assuming you have to accommodate other people. And so if you're struggling with that, which, I mean, I do too, every day I struggle with that kind of balance. And what helps me move forward and what helps me over those humps is saying it's okay that I'm tired, like it makes sense. And, and once I find that, once I say to myself it's okay, it's okay that I'm frustrated, it totally makes sense based on what happened. Once I have that moment, then I can move forward to say, okay, how can we do this differently, right? Because that feeling has to be acknowledged first. Because if you keep shoving it out the window that you're tired or you're not the parent you want to be or whatever that is, it's just going to fester, it's just going to grow. And so exercising self empathy is, you know, it's like putting some antibiotic ointment on that wound, right? It's going to help it heal. It's not going to be healed right away, but it's the first step in finding a solution, right? There's a reason why the bandage goes on top of the antibiotic, right? First you have to deal with the wound and acknowledge it. But I recognize for a lot of people that's very, very hard. And if you find it difficult to exercise self empathy or you think what I'm talking about right now is ridiculous and out of touch, I will bet that you probably have not been on the receiving end of a lot of empathy in your own life, which most people have not. And in which case it can be really helpful to get a therapist because their job is to show you what empathy is and how it feels to be on the receiving end. That will make you a better business person. In fact, actually, I have a lot of friends who say that they end up talking about business with their therapist because they go in saying, oh, I'm so stressed about this. Right. It'll also help you in your customer interviews because you'll know how it feels to be on the receiving end of empathy and how powerful that is and how open it makes you want to be. And it will make you better at talking to your customers.

Great advice, Michelle. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today to share so openly and being so vulnerable about your struggles, your successes, things you've learned along the way. I think this is a dynamite episode. Thank you so much and I can't wait to see you in the next conference.

Likewise, thank you so much for having me.

What a great discussion with Michelle Hansen. If you want to look into what they do over at geocodio, go to Geocode. That's COD IO. And if you want to pick up a copy of Deploy Empathy for Yourself for your team members, I highly recommend it. Go to deployempathy.com it comes in paperback, it comes in a Kindle version, it comes in hardcover. You even can buy some notion templates as well to go with it. One of my favorite insights from this conversation was that discussion around that Henry Ford quote about building them a faster horse instead of a car and how that's actually a cautionary tale. You could be innovative. You can be thoughtful. You can be the thought leader in your industry while listening to your customers. You will only gain, not lose, by listening to your customers understanding what their needs are. Even understand the language you're using to describe their pain points so that you can use them in your marketing materials, in your sales copy so that you're speaking directly to the customer. You can then gather all that data that you have gathered through your interviews and make the decision with your team what you should build next. It doesn't have to be just following orders from the customer. It could be what do they really need? This is what they're complaining about. But what is a solution that would be innovative? You might sit down and review all the comments and say, okay, I don't have to follow orders directly, or maybe that's not the direction we're taking but let's think of an innovative way to solve this problem. Maybe in a way they didn't see coming, but really makes their life easier. I know that we've done this in our company. Nicole took a deep, deep dive in studying her book Deploy Empathy and has used it in our company to do our company interviews, or customer interviews, I should say, and crafting the branding and the language that we need to use, but also crafting our next products and features. In fact, our latest product that's in beta, Course Ninja, is a product that was born out of these interviews with customers that we've learned how to conduct through the book Deploy Empathy. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app right now. By subscribing or following, you get access to over 2,000 business lessons in our archives. So go ahead and do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Michelle and her husband run the business on their own. They just made their first hire and they do over a million in revenue. You don't need a massive team, you don't need tons of funding to have a successful business. They're doing it and they have a life and they have a child. They built it at their own pace, in their own scale. And yes, they'll have some challenges as they continue to grow, but that's business. But my point here is, is that you define success. You can build the business you want. There are no gatekeepers and boundaries as we may imagine in our head. These may be just limiting beliefs that we told ourselves. Build the business you want that fits your needs and wants and lifestyle. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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