AMA With Ash Maurya | Bestselling Author of Running Lean, Founder of Lean Stack

So today we are very privileged to have Ashmuria with us for us. We actually always advocate of his work. He's the person behind. He's the author of the Lean Canvas, he's the author of Running Lean, and he's the author of the new book, which is Scaling Lean, that you absolutely must read and you absolutely must follow. His work has been a bliss for entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship is hard regardless. So having somebody to give us a roadmap and give us tools to help us actually have a better chance of success, even if it's a 1%, is awesome. So his new work has actually been helpful and I think it's going to be helpful for entrepreneurs to have even more of a chance of success. So it's great to have him here. I've been locked in a room with him for two days right now doing the Lean Stack mentor program, so he's probably bored with me. The session is going to work like this. This is an ask me anything session. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to ask Ash a few questions and then going to open it up for you guys to get to ask him whatever you want. Okay. So Ash, welcome.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Great to have you. I'm acting like I just met him. So the first question question is you're someone who's an engineer with technical background, you worked on product development and what drove you to make the shift to strategy and helping entrepreneurs figure out how to build companies? How did that happen?

Yeah, so I guess at the end of the day, we all have to build products that people want. And I had been an entrepreneur for many, many years, really loved product. All my ideas started out as awesome ideas, like all your ideas in the room. But as I built them, I began to realize that some of them were not getting the traction, were not getting to be business models that would really make the idea work. After a number of those, what bothered me was not so much the success rate, because we know that successes can be pretty low in the startup scene. You have to search for that good idea. So I was committed to the search process. But what really bothered me was the cycle time. I was spending a year and a half to two years going from idea to spending a year sometimes building the product and then realizing that, okay, it was not the right one, and then spending several more months trying to fix that. That was just too long. So what inspired me to go into all this search is I really wanted to understand what does it take to build a product that works? Why do products really fail? And so I started by diving deep. And where I am today is kind of a result of that search. So life's too short to build something nobody wants became my personal mantra. Because unless someone invents a time machine, we only have a finite number of cycles. A good idea even takes many years to execute. If a bad idea takes just as long, you're going to spend a lot of time sorting between good and bad. So that's what I was really interested in, is how do you find the good ideas from the bad as quickly as possible? So we spent spend more time building what people want and stop doing the things no one wants.

Great. So you started with Running Lean, or you started actually with writing. Was it you started writing blogs first? Yeah, and then Running Lean came, and then Scaling Lean. So tell us about these. Like, where do they fit and should we now drop Running Lean? You don't want us to do that. But is it now like scaling is the thing?

No, they're actually meant to be pretty complementary. They're almost like a sequel. Although I will say that sometimes I find people who read Running Lean, they feel like they haven't gone through it. And don't start Scaling Lean. If I had to rewrite both books from scratch, I would take the first three chapters of Running Lean and the first three chapters of Scaling Lean, put them in one book, because a lot of that is about modeling the idea and then the validation. I would take the three chapters or the rest of the book in Running Lean and Scaling Lean and put that into another book. So it really is rather complementary. But to answer your question, if I look at Running Lean, it's really written for the entrepreneur, for the entrepreneur to customer conversation. The biggest challenge we have is building, uncovering what is it that customers want. The old way of doing things was let's just launch a product, see what happens, and then learn from there. But in Running Lean, you see this process for going and interviewing customers, uncovering problems and then solutions, using the Lean canvas to understand your riskiest assumptions. And that's what that book was about. So how do I go from idea to mvp is the way you can look at that? With Scaling Lean, the challenge that I saw people run into is that once they came back with some early learnings, things got murky. Once you have your mvp, what metrics do you use to measure whether the MVP is really working? When you go to your stakeholders, what metrics do you communicate to them? Because when you go and show them the Lean canvas or you show them the 10 interviews or 100 interviews you've done, they want to see more. They want to see a much bigger story. They want to see that business plan, the forecast, the Excel magic, the traction. So what are those metrics? And so the second book was really more about the entrepreneur to stakeholder conversation. So that's how I look at it. So if you are starting out, you really need to get outside the building, find your first set of customers. But when you're ready to start moving beyond the mvp, that's where scaling lean really comes in and helps you kind of give you a better path.

Let's check in the room. How many of you actually are entrepreneurs? Guys.

Okay. Wow.

Most of the room. Okay. And how many of you are working on like an early stage startup? Early, early stage. How many are in growth right now? Okay. A few of you. That's great. Okay. Why do entrepreneurs suck in talking to customers?

Why do they suck? Well, I guess. Where do we start? I guess the first is the old joke, which is how do you tell if an entrepreneur is pitching? It's because their lips are moving. Right. So that's the first problem is that too many entrepreneurs get into not talking and listening to customers, but rather pitching at them. And we live in a world where customers don't want to be pitched at, they're pitched at all the time. So you turn on the tv, you turn on the radio, you go on the Internet, there's ads all over the place. So what we need to do is really try to build empathy with the customer. So what I find is a lot of entrepreneurs start out with, check out my new idea, look at my new solution. It's all about me and my solution. And you have to flip that around. So a lot of that problem interviewing process is really about understanding the customer's worldview. What are they trying to get done? They are the hero in the story. If you. If you know the hero's journey and you look at and you know the power of stories, we aren't the hero. We are the hero in our company. But what we are trying to do is build better customers. We're trying to get them get the job done. So once you can shift that mindset, I believe it makes it easier. So when we talk to customers, we try to see where are they trying to get to, where are they struggling? That's where you find the problems. We don't ask customers what to build. That's the famous Steve Jobs quote. Customers don't know what they want. If you had asked them the Henry Ford code. If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse in there is a problem that you are really, which is a nugget of that insight is that they are not saying go and build me a faster horse by genetic engineering horses to be faster. All they're saying is that I have a problem today, my means of transportation is not fast enough. Find me some other alternative. And that's where you, the entrepreneur can go and build that. So that is the art of talking to customers. It's not pitching at them in the beginning, it's uncovering their worldview, their problems, and then from there being able to show them something better. And then the conversation is much easier.

It's very interesting that you use that example because I always use it and say, well, if you look at the car, it is faster than a horse and the power is measured in horses. So it is a faster horse somehow. But the key thing here is that when we talk to customers, I've met a lot of entrepreneurs and they read the book, they read, let's say Lean Startup, some of them read Running Lean. But Lean Startup is, let's say what they read and say, well, I talk to customers, I've done 200 surveys. So how is that different from what you advocate as the way of talking to customers?

Yeah, so the challenge with surveys is that surveys require you to know what questions to ask. And most people don't know what they don't know in the beginning. So the earlier stage is about discovery and so it is about the art of having an open ended conversation. And that's what the problem interview scripts help guide you through. It's about knowing how to talk to customers where you can uncover these problems because you don't know what those right questions are. So it's very much of a discovery process. So that's where trying to put a survey doesn't work because you have to ask certain questions. If you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers. You also need to know what part possible answers to put on the survey. Because none of these surveys are essay questions. You don't ask customers to give you an essay response to your survey. They're really multiple choice there too. It's hard because you start asking a bunch of questions to which you know the answers to then that point you're not really learning, you're just validating what you already know. So this earlier stage is really more open ended conversation. It sounds more complex than it is, but it really is meant to be a casual conversation. And being a techie, an introverted techie, I was terrified of talking to customers, as many of you probably in the room are when you do it for the first time. And that's why I devised this metascript. So once I knew what I wanted to ask them, and I even got the conversation started with just having a starter. If you can memorize the first 30 seconds of the interview, everything else becomes easier after that because it's really you talking less and listening more. It's you asking open ended questions like why? Or tell me more. Oh, that's interesting. Tell me, why did you do this? Those are easy things to do. So when you run the interview that way you are really listening more, getting more insights, and then I guarantee your pitches become a lot better because you can use all those insights in your solution pitch. When you're ready to pitch and you're.

Not a theorist, you didn't sit somewhere and think of the book and just wrote something. You're an entrepreneur as well, so tell us what you're working on.

Well, right now, the big problem I'm trying to. So this company, LeanStack, came as it was not a part of a master plan. It was actually an accidental discovery. So I was running a separate business entirely. As you mentioned, I started this blog. I was really trying to build better products for myself. An audience got started and I fell in love with the problem. So I fell in love with the problem that entrepreneurs run into when. What inspired me is as I began doing research for the book, I started going around doing talks, speaking to a lot of entrepreneurs. And I found that entrepreneurs were everywhere. So tons of entrepreneurs in this room, but everywhere I went, entrepreneurs were everywhere. What inspired me even more was seeing that a lot of these entrepreneurs had near equal access to the same knowledge. They were coming in with the same knowledge about Lean Startup, wanting to. To practice these things. And so it occurred to me that all entrepreneurs are very similar. They might look different, speak different languages, but we all want the same things, we all fear the same things, we all make the same mistakes. And to me, that became an interesting problem to solve. And I sometimes use the football or soccer analogy. Do you use soccer here or football? What's the.

In my country, it's football because we play it with feet, right?

Yes. Where I grew up, it was football too. But yeah, but I use a soccer analogy of how if you look at the game of soccer or football, it is democratized. There is really no superpower. It's like there are these top five countries that keep winning but it can come from anywhere. And that's how I look at the game of entrepreneurship going forward. It doesn't have to all come from Silicon Valley. It should be democratized. It should be something that we can do. And I believe entrepreneurship is a noble profession. It's a problem solving kind of a profession. And there are lots of problems in the world. So the more entrepreneurs we make, the better we make the world. So that's what inspired me to stop doing what I was doing before, which was file sharing, which is all good and interesting, but it was a very techy type of a thing to do something that has kind of a much bigger potential for impact.

And one last question before I open it up to everyone who's here. How people can interact and benefit from your work. What is your recommendation? And one thing I know about Ash, he's not going to pitch you on his work, but I think it's important for people to know how to navigate and what's the value that they can get and why should they actually use it.

Just use what, the books? Methodology. Yeah.

And the product as well. Lean Stack.

Sure. Yeah. So we have been trying to create a roadmap. So what I've seen is a lot of the early stage is just underserved. There's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of lack of clear information. So that's the place that really excites me. A lot of you, some of you mentioned you were kind of in the growth stage. A lot of like growth hacking and growth patterns that one can get into. But you look at a lot of companies like the Facebooks, the Airbnbs, they all struggle in the beginning, some of them less than others. But there is still that flat portion of the hockey stick curve. And that's what I'm most interested in, is how can we make that be a more repeatable and predictable process. How can you take the 10 ideas that are kind of marinating in your brain and quickly find the one that you should really double down on? And so we have built a curriculum, a roadmap, and running Lean was the start of that scaling. Lean kind of added on top of it. The Lean Stack platform is really an online place for you to practice that, for you to track all of that, for you to do all of that. So all those are resources we have put out there for people that want to take that guided journey and apply the process.

Highly recommended, guys. It starts with free. I like to sell stuff, so it starts with free. And now actually before it was like the Training was not available as part of that platform. Now it is part of that platform. So if you're an entrepreneur working on something, absolutely, this is something you want to use. We recommend it to all entrepreneurs we work with. So now I'm going to open the floor for your questions. So here's how we're going to do the questions need to be captured on the mic. I know it still sounds ridiculous because there's no amplification, but so what? I'm going to give the mic to the person who's going to tell the question, and then you're going to pass it along because there's no one that can move around. Okay. So don't speak without having the mic with you. Is that okay with you guys? Okay, so who has a question? All right, so we'll start with the one closest.

Yeah, I'll just kick it off. I wanted to pick up on your point around talking to customers, and I've always believed that, you know, we should start with a business problem and then figure out what the right solution is. But I'm having a tough time convincing entrepreneurs that that's the way to go, because I guess it's chicken and egg. They're concerned about the maturity of the product. We're not ready to go out. We need to get to the minimum viable product before we can really have these conversations. Any guidance on that from your experience? So have timing of the conversation vis a vis the product maturity.

Sure.

So I would say that if you look at the traditional lean startup approach is don't spend a lot of time building a product, get the MVP out there and start the learning process. That's a good. It's better than the alternative because it saves a lot of resources. You can course correct after that. My experience, though, is that a lot of people still suffer from what I call the innovator's bias or the entrepreneur bias, which is they really just want to build their solution. So even when they build the mvp, it's a small version of a best guess at a solution. And if you're off by a lot, you don't get a chance to pivot or change your idea. You just get invalidation. You. You just learn that nobody wants what you have, which, again, is still better than having spent nine months building something that was really big. So what we try to do is actually discourage people from starting with an mvp. We actually try to get them to go find evidence of the problem. So if you look at the lean canvas, most people will start with that solution box, even though we say don't. They'll start with that. They'll come up with problems that they imagine the customer has. And that's still fine because they're still in the scientific world. In the lean startup world, we call those guesses or hypotheses. But let's go and now find evidence that those are real problems. So sometimes the evidence is show me alternatives that they are using that are trying to get the same job done, but they are struggling. So that could be one way to show me evidence. The other way is let's actually go and interview these customers and talk about these problems and see if they get excited. And if they're served well, then maybe what we build is not going to be different. But if they're not served well, maybe there's an opportunity to do more. So we actually try to engage people to find that evidence of monetizable pain up front. Because the danger is that you still build an MVP and it still doesn't get you to refining it to something people want, because it was really just that solution which you thought they needed, but they don't really need. So in our world, we do actually encourage people to start the problem discussion day one. So when you say timing, don't wait for the mvp. Actually our process is don't start with the mvp. Start with these discussions first, because the MVP gets defined in that process.

Next question.

Well, I'm the customer for my product, so there were only a certain number of features that I just had to have. So I've got three features in my app. And. And I built it and I went, yeah, this is good for me. So I built the features. I built the MVP first. But I just, when I came up with the idea, I thought, you know, I'm not the only person. You know, I tried it. I had it out as a website initially and I used it. I went, I have to share this with other people. So just the MVP did work for me. And initially, sure.

But is there a question like, what's. No, no. But I guess I'll add some commentary to that. So the scratch your own itch is a very common thing. I mean, I started by writing a blog because I wanted to solve a problem for myself. At the same time, what I would say is that when I see entrepreneurs say they are the customer, I question that because you aren't necessarily the customer, because you're both the creator and the consumer at the same time. There are tons of people who, if what you're saying is true, is that there are lots of people who have the same problem, they aren't doing anything to fix it. So that's what makes you different, is you are looking for the solution. And by that definition it disqualifies you as the customer because you're too close to the solution. Now, there's nothing wrong, and this is a pattern that a lot of people use is that they will run into an issue. Uber kind of had that same thing. They run into a problem, they'll say, this problem is called the grumpy customer or the grumpy entrepreneur. Is you find a problem, you can't tolerate the problem, so you build something for yourself. And then you start seeing, are there other people who have this? That's the place that I see you as being. If the MVP works for you and you want to build a business around this, you have to find other people that share attributes that you do where you can give them that MVP and measure that adoption around it.

Okay, well, I am doing customer interviews. Not, not as strictly as you described. And you sent me a solution one time too. So it's not the 15 minute interview, it's like a three minute interview.

Okay.

And so I'm getting positives and negatives and trying to tailor it as impartial as possible. Of course, sure. Another comment.

Okay, next question.

Do you have any advice for the people that work in a larger company.

And is trying to drive adoption of.

All these principles when most of the people around are still working on the old way?

Yes. So I guess it's really a question of where you are on the Org, like if you have. There are many bottoms up stories that I can share where at the end of the day, even if you look at your stakeholders, they too want the same things that everyone does, which is let's build products that our customers want. They think the way to get around that is by doing lots of analysis, business planning, doing a lot of rigorous testing. But some of the counter examples I'll give, and these are from companies like Cisco, which are big companies. A bank in Finland, the third largest bank in Finland. I'll use a bank example first. So in the bank example, there's a group of developers who had an idea for a new mobile app. So they wanted to build a better way to solve a problem, let's just call it that way. Rather than going to their managers and say, please give us permission to go and build this app and apply running Lean or Lean Startup, whatever that is, they just said, we know that where our customers hang out, they hang out in front of the bank, let's just go and talk to them. So on their breaks, lunch breaks, they went down to the local bank, began doing some problem interviews. At some point they said, yes, people do struggle with this thing. Let's show them some wireframes and some mockups. They went and showed them to people. They pretty much got. People get super excited saying if you built this, we would definitely use it. And they had some real actionable insights. They then went to their managers and the smart thing that they did is that they recorded these interviews. So they didn't go to their managers and say, give us permission to build this thing. They said, we took the liberty on our break to go and talk to these customers. And, and here's what they're saying at that point. Those guys didn't get fired, they actually got more resources. They're like, we should go do this. So the bottom line in that story is that again, depending where you are in the org, you want to go and bring the customer voice into the conversation. If you can show demand for an idea, I would say it would be a strange manager or a strange executive who would want to kill the idea. Most of them would want you to explore it even further. At the same time, where you do get into trouble, and these are maybe some other things to think about, is that if you where the politics come in and big companies are designed like bodies, they have antibodies to protect the business model. So if you are coming in with a disruptive idea where you are going to potentially challenge their business model and move revenue away from one department to the other, that's also where you get lots of resistance. So that's where you need to play a bit of the corporate hierarchy game, which is you need to find a safe sponsor who is going to give you ground, shelter and all of those types of things. But the easier place to start is if you go to a executive or manager and saying we're not going to move revenue around, we're just going to create new business. We think there's a new market, new opportunity. We went and talked to these customers, they seem super excited. That is usually one that's a no brainer. If you go to any big company and say rather than cannibalizing our product with this new thing, we're just going to do something new. New customers, new revenue, those are easier things to also sell. So hopefully that gives some guidance. But I would say, and the other last piece over here is this notion of ask for forgiveness later, don't ask for permission first. And that's a bit of that entrepreneurial intrapreneurial DNA is that if you can, if you do it in a smart, safe manner, like these guys did on their lunch breaks, they just went and talked to customers. If the customers had invalidated their idea, they didn't have to go back and tell their managers anything. But once they got some validation, they did. And so they didn't even have to ask for forgiveness. It was more like, hey, we did this. This is what we found out. Should we do something with it? And the answer was, yes, let's do it.

Perfect. I'll do next.

Sorry, you mentioned earlier that about democratizing entrepreneurship and how it's not only in Silicon Valley. From your experience, what has been different, what's so specific from Silicon Valley, and what are things that are outside of Silicon Valley that you think are advantages for those of us that are not in Silicon Valley? Yeah, so I mean, so I'll first talk about the advantage of Silicon Valley. One, they've been playing the game much longer using that football soccer analogy. They are like professional sports teams. Right. So when Lionel Messi is playing for Barcelona and they lose the championship, they don't say, oh, you're a terrible soccer player, you should just quit the game. It's like, okay, we'll get up and we'll try again. So in Silicon Valley, they live with success and failure as two sides of the same coin. Even seasoned entrepreneurs will launch an idea and completely at a failure, but they will launch the next idea and maybe do better with it. So it is this idea of it's a game. It's not so much about your ego. There's no taboo around this notion of getting one failure and you're out type of thing. So that's one thing that Silicon Valley has, is they really play it like a game versus playing it like a life or death type of thing, like a lot of other places do, with a lot of reputation and ego attached to it. So that I think is just more maturity with these new methodologies. We are even trading big wipeout types of failures with fast learning, what we are calling continuous learning or continuous innovation. And so if you're continuously learning and every two, three weeks, you are even changing your idea a little bit at a time. Sure. Where you start is not where you're going to end up. And if you look at it in a grand scheme, it's like, wow, I didn't think these things would actually work. And this is what has actually happened. But because you're doing it so quickly, it's not so much failing, it's really more learning. So it's this idea of learn fast.

So.

So that's kind of what Silicon Valley has an advantage. Their disadvantage of course now is that they have had too many of these successes. There's too many expectations, there's too much competition. We talk about just talent. Many companies, and some of the bigger companies like the Ciscos of the world don't even hire people anymore in Silicon Valley because it's just so expensive. They all want to work in Facebook or Google and even there the tenure is very, very low because people go to Google just to build up their resume for nine months sometimes and then they leave. They actually quit. They'll then go to Facebook, do something similar and then quit and then they're each time getting a bump in their salary. So it's just a very, it's not a very good place nowadays to really build a company because it's so expensive. Talent is very hard, lots of competition. So this is where there's an opportunity, there's an opportunity for others to build companies in other places. And, and you can build the right type of company in other places as a result of that.

So you mentioned earlier the scenario in a larger organization where you have asked for permission later. Right. So have you seen. Because I haven't seen many. Right. There's success stories there because if you do that and you succeed, you succeed in spite of having broken the rules, which is kind of strike against you if you fail. Why, it's of course because you broke the rules.

You.

So have you seen successes in actually pulling that through?

Yeah. So I will in this case use Cisco as an example because that's a company we are working with firsthand. So we also had a very ask for forgiveness later kind of personality in that company. He had started reading the Running Lean book, had invited me over an email for some advice and we just started talking. He went and built this idea which got the internal attention of even the CEO. They got an award just last year for Innovation of the year. So in their cases they broke the rules. But as a result, what happened was the executive saying, let's systematize this way of working. And Cisco has this culture. So Cisco has this culture of growth by acquisition. They have a very startup culture type of mindset. They right now have a startup Cisco initiative. So that helps because they do want to encourage more of that kind of thinking. And so in this particular case they said what this one person did, which is this, bottoms up innovation. We want to encourage more people to do it. So they've actually created, they've had these crowdsourcing of ideas. And a lot of companies know that innovation needs to come bottoms up, they are bought into it. The question always isn't the how. The question is always in how do you systematize it. And so we have been doing some work with bigger companies and we have this jumpstart program and that's what we use. With Cisco, we can promise you business model results at 9x the return so we can get you the same business model return, the same business model outcomes three times faster with one third the resources. And so that's a challenge we put out there and kind of built on these models. And if we can show success in those early projects, then why wouldn't the company want to invest in more of those kinds of things? So it is one of those things where I would say that again, if you go to any big company, they are not anti innovation because they know that the pace of disruption is increasing. If they are not disrupting themselves, disruption will happen, it's just somebody else will do it. So it's like the famous, there's a security company that actually gives bonuses to employees when they break into their own security. They don't fire them, they give them bonuses because now we can make our security stronger. So that's the mindset that people need to have with the business model is that give people permission to disrupt your own business model and reward them for it instead of penalizing them for it. So it is a bit of a mindset shift. But I do think that there are some companies starting to make that transition and taking those steps.

Ask a question and we'll go for you.

So I'm a software developer and entrepreneur, so I'm a tech guy and I found that doing MVP interviews early was very easy with you and your co founder. You're both on the same page, but working in a larger company. I found that it's usually a varied group of people that do the interviews. You might have a product guy, a design person and a developer. And I found the technical people usually fall into the trap of asking, do you want this feature? Do you want that feature? And I've always thought, you know, if I asked if I want your car to make coffee, you're going to say yes, but you're not going to pay for it in the end. But what I've found in pushback is that they say, well, what are we supposed to report if we don't report a new feature that we build Or a new thing. And I wanted to wonder, I'm wondering, what's your advice on reporting the intangibles in these meetings, in these customer interviews?

Right, so there are two types of interviews. So there are learning interviews and then there are what we would call like throughput interviews, types of interviews or throughput experiments. So in the learning experiments we are really there to learn. And that's the classic example is problem interviews. So there you're not. So what you're coming back is you're really reporting on. What evidence did you find that there are problems? What evidence did you find that people are using things, they're paying money for certain types of things. And that's really more of a fact gathering type of expedition where you're running those types of interviews. And that's one kind of interview. So that's not. But in both interviews I would never ask leading questions ever. Like, will you use something in the second interview? We test for those types of things, like are you using this feature or things. But we don't test it by asking people what they might do in the future. So lean is not about what people say they'll do, but measuring what they actually do. So we only want to look at the past to see what have they done and actually have evidence for that. Or we want to go into the future and measure what they will actually do. So in that interview, if I was doing, if I was launching a new feature, instead of asking will you use this feature, I might just give it to them and do a usability test with them. I'm like, okay, use it in front of me and let's see you do this task. And if people struggle and can do it and can't figure it out, they don't even have to tell you anything. It's just evident. The evidence is that they don't understand what you've given them. If it's not a usability test, if you just give it to them, I wouldn't call that an interview. I would just say we have given them the feature. Now you use metrics, analytics, follow up calls to then test what have they done with it and is that the result that you expect? So again, don't measure what customers say, measure what they do. That to me is ultimately the key here.

Hey Ash, my name's Alex. Just curious if you have any good rules of thumb or back envelope numbers like ratios you can share with the room that we can walk away with and sort of use as good key, you know, good key market points for us to Consider when we're here, we should be thinking like this is. Customer discovery something you continually do through the growth of a business? And if you're sort of at 100k a month of revenue, do you continually do customer discovery and survey your customers or do you go into periods of sort of let's knuckle down and focus on just getting it right and then you go out like those sorts of metrics. I'm just interested in what your thoughts are there. I hope that's clear.

Right, so I'm a big fan of using. So in the beginning, most of the learning tends to be qualitative. So obviously there's a lot of discovery happening. So it's a lot of interviews and again it's that I don't know what I don't know. So you're really kind of kind of building that picture. But even when you're at scale, so even if you look at the Facebooks of the world, the Googles of the world, they spend quite a bit of time still doing qualitative learning. And that might be usability test, that might still be talking to customers. And that's because when you only rely on the quantitative, even if you're at scale, the challenge with metrics is that metrics can tell you what's happening, it never tells you why it's happening. So you might be able to tell, hey, no one's engaging with this feature, but it could be something as silly as no one even knows where the feature exists, you just didn't do a good enough marketing push, or the feature is kind of hidden between many different layers, people can't even find it. So unless you know that, it's hard to really fix anything. And so a lot of people just look at the data and start throwing out a bunch of solutions again. And some of them might stick, some of them just go nowhere. So the advice that I give people is that you have to do both. So we always have this notion of continuously talking to customers. You're continuously talking to customers, sometimes with no agenda, and you're talking to them at different stages of the life cycle. So to give you an example, we have an automated system built on this stage based approach where when people sign up to Lean Stack, for instance, they get a welcome email from me, I ask them a few questions and at different points in the life cycle we will invite them to have a conversation. So when people buy, we will talk to them. When people cancel, we will talk to them. When people do something interesting like finish their first Lean Canvas, we Will talk to them. And all this is automated. So what I mean by automated is we set up these interviews, they respond and if they want to be interviewed, it gets on the calendar automatically. And when I show back, when I show up to work every single week, that's a key activity that we do is we're constantly talking to these customers, sometimes without agenda. But what we see is that we get a very good sense of how are our customers thinking, how are they changing, how are they evolving? Because our early adopters, which now goes back seven years, was that blog reader who was a lean startup practitioner, wanted to get good at what they were doing. Typically a tech startup today we have got all kinds of people. We not too long ago had a fisherman in Chile using Lean Stack having a question. And my big thing was how do you even find us? Who are you and how did you even find us? So the markets change where your audience changes very quickly, your customer segments change very quickly. And if you don't know who your customers are as you grow, then again it's very hard. If you keep optimizing the same solutions, it's not going to work.

Sorry, do you have some of those ratios that you can share? Like any back of the rules of thumb that you use that you hear like in the scale up stage, you're sort of talking to 150, 200k a month. What are the numbers you think of for businesses that fit into this book? Into that category from a revenue standpoint?

Yeah. So obviously because there are different revenue like so I guess for me, as.

You'Re going to a series A, for example, series A.

And so what ratio are you looking for? Is it more like the stages, product, market fit? How do you know?

It's probably not defined. I'm just, I'm probably more interested in how you look at it. How would you consider it? What do you need to be looking at?

Well, so I'll answer it a bit, not in terms of ratios, but I will say that the challenge a lot of people have is that I talk about three stages of the company goes through. There's problem solution fit, which is the early stage, product market fit and then scale. And each one has a very different goal. The first one is how do I find my first early adopters. The second one is how do I build a product that makes the business model work and then finally how do we grow this? And at each of these stages there's a different strategy, there's a different emphasis, different kinds of experiments that are run. And so it's important for a startup to know when they are crossing from one stage to the next. And that's where I thought your question was going. And where I was also headed is that revenues are not always the best thing because again, there are different sizes of business. I could be in product market fit with a $10 million business. But if you look at Facebook, that to them was just getting started. That may not be product market fit. That's kind of earlier stage in their journey. And so in the Scaling Lean book, there is this new model attraction model that I encourage a lot of people to build. And it starts out with trying to define what are those milestones. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to end up with a perfect model, but it gives you some guidelines for what might be product market fit for you, what might be problem solution fit. And that allows you to have some guidance on what those milestones will be.

Because for each business, it's different.

It can be different. Yes.

So how did that fisherman find you?

Yeah. So this is a good example of how customer segments change. And you have to be aware of it. It changed our whole stre strategy on the product. So as I mentioned before, our customer was that lean startup practitioner. They had read the Lean Startup. Many of them came from our workshops. They knew running Lean. So when they came to our site, we were just giving them lean startup lingo. It was like, here's experiments, here's how you do all this stuff. He was completely confused. So he was on the side saying, I just don't understand what this stuff means. I'm staring at a blank canvas. I don't know what to do. And so rather than dismissing that that user, I said, let's get on a call because I want that question answered. How did you find us and what are you trying to do? And he told me that he is trying to get more. He's trying to get a loan from a bank, and the bank was forcing him to write a business plan. And he didn't want to write a business plan. And he was at a networking event the night before, over a few beers, he was grumbling to people about how he had to write this business plan. And somebody literally told him, don't write a business plan. Go to leancanvas.com and that's how we ended up there. Now, when you have this information, you can do one of two things. You can say, well, that's not my customer. Let's not serve them. But for me, that became an interesting opportunity because it became an Opportunity to say people were coming with the job before of how do I get better at lean startup. And we were doing that well, now the audience is changing and we began to talk to more people and we got more stories like his, which is, I want to get funding, I'm being asked to write a business plan. People are saying I can do a lean canvas instead. And so rather than dismissing that customer away, we actually build content around that. So we said, if you're looking to raise, if you're looking to write a business plan, here's how you could get to that same end goal without all the headaches of a business plan with a lean canvas. If you're looking to raise funding, here's how you might pitch that to a banker. So those were things we built as content pieces and that was the insight there. So it's not only that your customer segments change, but sometimes their jobs, their outcomes, what they're looking for changes. And again, you have a choice. You can say, I want to serve them, I don't want to serve them. But if you want to serve them, how you serve your early adopters is going to be very, very different from how you serve those latter stage customers.

Thank you, that's awesome. Who's next? I would like to go back to the way you looked at kind of embedding customer feedback in the way you operate. And my question is, you meet the customer, you connect with them, you collect the feedback. How do you capture this feedback redistributed within the organization to, to make sure that it's moving from input and feedback to action and changes to develop your product and go on.

So again, if the team is small, then it's again, not much of a problem because if you're a three person team, you can all just go to the interviews or you can all kind of share that learnings amongst yourselves. What you're describing is more kind of in a larger, maybe larger company setting. So there too I think being able to, and this is another example from a big company where they had hired a consultant to do some interviews for them. The danger with consultants is that if the consultant brings back bad news, nobody wants to listen to it. They dismiss that person saying, you probably don't know the product well enough, you're asking the wrong questions. And this person was getting all of those types of things. So I advised them to again bring the customer voice into those meetings. So he was summarizing the learnings with, with his voice and the developers were saying, all that is not true. The product can't be that hard to use. You're probably not asking the right question. So they were just dismissing the learning. And so I said, go and record some of these things. And so he actually took his iPhone out, got some permission from people to record them and they were fine with it. So they got recorded. When he came into the next status update that following Friday, he didn't show them 30 minutes worth of interviews, he just showed them clips. He's like, I went and interviewed people, but this time I asked for permission to record them. Here are some of the things they were saying and he played these things and they were carefully assembled but they were all really bad things. People were saying, this product is horrible, I can't understand how to use it. And at that point, the lead tech engineer didn't say a word. He just got up and left the room. He was speechless. Didn't know what to really say. It's a bit more than what you asked, but I think finding ways to capture that customer learning and bringing it back in its raw form because there's always going to be somebody who's going to challenge it. So this is where, going back to another lean startup principle, we talk about how metrics are people too. And I even go further and say metrics are people first. So if you just come back and say bad things are happening, that's not good enough. They need to be auditable. So you need to be able to say, here's the learning that I have. If you don't believe me, look at the transcripts yourself. So if you have that evidence, then it's easier to back your conclusions and back your learning as a way again to systematize it. I often say, even when you've got a cross functional team, sometimes you do this in big companies where the developers say, it's not my job to do interviews, I'm just going to stay inside the building. We try to find them to go along in the interviews as well. In the beginning they're very uncomfortable because they don't want to speak. And we're like, you don't even have to talk. You can just go and sit in the corner. There's just observe. And that's very powerful because when they observe, they usually talk because they will find something, they will ask a question. If anything, it begins to change their mindset because they're now hearing the customer firsthand. So we find ways to take customers along and under the guise of just be passive, just observe so you can see what we are doing. It's not rocket Science. And at some point they realize that they can ask even better questions than the interviewer because they have a different perspective. So bringing more people into the interview process, I think is very key for us. We have a key activity, as I mentioned, is we have everyone in the company talk to a customer. So when I work with big companies, I always start my workshops with this little short story or this joke, I should say. I tell them that startups die because they struggle with finding enough customers to learn from. Finding enough customers to talk to. Because channels are hard. They don't have access to those customers. That's why they die. Big companies die because they stop talking to their own customers. They create so many layers between them and the customer and the people who are doing the talking. By the time that information gets to the developer people doing the building, so much is lost in the translation and the handoffs. So the solution to that is that you have to find ways of getting everyone in the team to be part of observing, at least at the minimum, and ideally participating in those conversations. And it's a skill. It's not really that hard. Even developers, I was a developer, you can teach yourself to talk to customers. Not that hard. Just following up on just what you said about finding a channel to the customer. If you're just starting and you basically just want to validate the idea before building mvp, like how do you find those channels? Let's say you define a Persona, you know, like what kind of people you are looking for, but there is nobody in your like first circle who match that Persona. And especially that's the second part of my question. Especially like being technical person, obviously not very social, open. And how did you approach that problem? Yeah, so it does go back to this definition of the early adopter. Sometimes not having a clear definition means you don't really know who you're looking for. And that is hard to find. But if you do have a target in mind, then the question to ask ourselves is, where do these people hang out when they encounter the problem that I'm trying to solve? Where are they going? Maybe looking for solutions. And even if you don't have a way to reach them, one way is to go and put some hooks there, like put some offers there. It could be just a simple value proposition. So you may do a Facebook ad or something like that saying if you are running into these kinds of products, problems, here's a potential solution. You drive them to a landing page, there's a bit of a teaser, maybe a description of the problem, maybe a solution. Maybe collecting your email address and then trying to follow up with them. So they're raising their hand saying, I want to learn more. It makes the conversation a bit easier. You may go a bit further and use what we sometimes call the free cookie offer. So you want to actually give them some value. And that's kind of how I started. So I reached a lot of. A lot of people that were strangers because I was blogging, because I was writing content that was resonating with people. So people felt like they have this problem. And here is someone who is describing a problem I have better than I even can describe it. And then they are also providing some solutions which seem like it worked for them. Maybe I should pay attention to them. And so that's how we used. I used the blogs and I very quickly started building an email list around it. It started off like all email lists with just one person, but. But in a few weeks it was hundreds of people and then thousands of people. And that gives you a place to start. So for anyone today, content marketing is a very powerful thing. So if you can talk about the problem, if you can talk about problems and also start talking about solutions, you may be able to attract people who are your potential future audience. So that's one way to start. Hi, Ash, my name's Ben. When you're going through the process of the traction model, trying to validate the business model, how much should you rely purely on the metrics of whether to kill or continue versus other intangibles, like what it might do to the brand or just perspective about your instinct as to whether the product's going to work or not? Yeah. So to me, unless you have traction, the brand almost doesn't matter all that much. So when you say, when you say brand, I'm trying to understand what you mean by that. Is it like purpose or. It's. So maybe for some context, if it was one product within a large organization, so that product may not be financially successful, but it might do other things for the business as a whole. Yeah. So if you put it that way, I mean, there is. So not all products have to drive revenue. Some of them are really there maybe to drive leads or to drive awareness or to reinforce the brand. As long as you're crystal clear in what that outcome is, those are not really failures or a problem. That's what they were designed to do. And sometimes maybe they didn't start out that way, but that's what they end up doing and that's perfectly fine as well. So being able to define that clearly is okay. But where I was also going with my earlier questioning is that if you are a startup with just that flagship product, then at the end of the day, the metrics do have to make the business model work. The intangibles don't matter as much because the intangibles are not going to save you. You can't build a brand on no traction was the point that I was making. So you think it's a kill? It doesn't make sense with the metrics if it's a single product to start with. Yeah, if it's not growing. So the whole idea with attraction model is that we create some kind of a roadmap and just to further that a little bit, it's even a minimum success criteria roadmap. So it's not what do I need to do to make this idea be a killer idea, but is what is the smallest thing that I need to be able to achieve where I will deem this project tolerable or a success? And if you don't hit that criteria and you've thought about what that minimum is and people have bought into it, then yes, if you don't hit it, you should kill it. So to give a very simple example, when I was writing the first book, that was a side project for me. Writing a book was, I knew, was going to be a massive undertaking. So I asked myself, I said if I was going to spend two years writing this book, I need to sell at least 10,000 copies. And that was my minimum success criteria. And then I ran some experiments to generate leads to make sure that I had enough leads to convince myself that that was a possibility. And until I got enough leads, I did not write a single word in the book. So that's the kind of discipline that one needs to have because it's too tempting to just start the product and we'll figure it out. But six months into it, when you only have five readers, you begin to realize and question, should I finish this book or not? But I think it's too late because you've already spent all this time. Great answer. All right. Hi, Ash. I actually want to hear more about the decades of journey that you have taken to get to where you are now.

You're the Ash Mario. I mean, you didn't see that coming, right back then.

And I was wondering if you have some decisions that you have made along the journey that has really change the course of where you're going and that made you get to where you are now. That's a big Question. But first of all, I'm only Ashmoria, I'm not the Ash Moria, because I still fundamentally think that I'm a beginner in all of this whole process is about. It's like a martial art. When you look at a black belter, that's when the learning really starts because you begin to realize, ok, I've learned the basics, but there's still so much more to do. And so there's going to be a third book, there's going to be probably a fourth book, because this process never really ends. So it's a continuous learning process. But for me, I think the biggest thing that I just give anyone is again, this notion of continuous learning. I started out being an engineer, going to school for electrical engineering, teaching myself software, learning enough marketing to just get by. But it's constantly this idea of understanding what you want to achieve, like what is the thing you want to build and what are the constraints holding you back and then not falling victim to them. Because I find too many people say, I wish I had more time, money, resources, all the above. And they don't get started as a result of that. But if you look at a lot of the companies and Southwest Airlines, you can kind of look this up, are good examples of how they hit. They hit a snag. But rather than falling victim, they innovated, they found a creative solution to a constraint. And I think that is ultimately what entrepreneurship is about. It's about not looking as constraints as blockers, but many times they are even gifts. So even a startup has an advantage over a bigger company because they can do whatever they want. They don't have to get permission, all the things that you guys are talking about. So they can do what they want, they can talk to customers as they please, they can promise them what they want, so they've got all that freedom. They don't have resources, but they can turn that into a gift. They have other constraints, but you have to just learn how to deal with that. So I would almost say to me, it's this idea of the constraint mindset. Even when I go into big companies, the way we make big companies act like startups is we create those constraints artificially. So time boxing for me is very important. It's so easy when you get into flow state, when you start building product, your weeks become months, months become years, and you don't even realize it and you're having fun, but in the end you still have to pay your bills. And that's when you realize, I can't Keep doing this. So to me, time, boxing, deadlines, very, very helpful, very important. So when we go to big companies, rather than saying give me a lot of money, a lot of resources and a year to go test this idea, we challenge them and say the whole notion of that 9x jumpstart program is give me a third of the resources a third of the time and we will get the same results. And we find that that pushes people to drive for better outcomes. So hopefully that somewhat answered the question.

Can you hand it so to Keith? Yeah, just pass it along guys.

So give it to anyone.

So actually V. Ash Moria is my fault and our fault because we. Lisa was one of our Leap alumni and she's also one of our top volunteers. So in our, we have a lovable, like, what do you say a nickname for you. We call you the Yoda of Queen. So you're the one, like so everybody is a Jedi, you know, learning from you.

Okay.

Hopefully there's not a lot of Star Trek fans in the crowd that be annoyed by that. Just as an aside on the constraint, another good example is there's a TED talk out there called Embrace the Shake. And so if you want to see someone, in this case an individual, overcoming a specific constraint and really getting liberated by it, I think it's another good example. Hussein and I have worked with a lot of companies and we would probably both agree that we see entrepreneurs get bogged down in the midst of customer discovery. And that can happen pre or post launch. So early on they get bogged down often because they're not seeing clarity in the feedback and patterns. And then post launch, of course, customers often better telling you what they don't want than what they do want. They'll launch. Customers aren't acting or reacting in the way we expected. And then in that follow up, customer discovery again get bogged down. Some tips and tricks for how people can get unlocked from being bogged down in customer discovery.

Well, so in the beginning it really comes down to finding what is similar or dissimilar about customers. So if you talk to a bunch of people and if I use the conversion, you know, let's say getting trials started or buying something. I talked to 10 people, but only two people bought. I want to look for those patterns. You know, I may think that they're all the same cohort, they're all the same group, but obviously there are two that bought and eight that didn't. What were some of those patterns or what are those distinguishing characteristics? And that's the search and that's the struggle and that's the challenge is that in the beginning we're not trying to sell everyone because not everyone's going to want to buy it. We're trying to find those early adopters and the early adopters buy rather quickly. And so if you're not finding, you know, people talk about product market fit, it should be obvious. I find problem solution fit is obvious as well. So if you get to a offer where you say here's a problem and here's a solution and someone isn't grabbing you by the collar to say, when can I try out this mvp, then you don't yet have problem solution fit. Now getting to that is going to be that journey where you said there are going to be people with loop, lukewarm response, all of those things. So you have to be searching for that early adopter. But it's really a function of trying to pattern match. Sometimes you are changing who you're talking to. So simple example, sometimes you get guidance along the way. In the running leanbook, I had a photo sharing example. It was targeted at parents. So I said busy parents with young kids was my early adopter because we can all appreciate that as the kids get older, you know, maybe not many pictures being taken. Being a dad, I started talking to all the dads and very quickly they steered me to the moms. And so that was my first, first realization is that it's not dads but moms who are doing most of the sharing. So I came back to my canvas and revised that. As I began to talk to more moms, I got all kinds of responses. But I did observe emotion. And that's the power of the interviews is I did see that there was a lot of energy with first time moms and it's because their world has just turned upside down. They went from having no child in the house to having a child. And so there's a lot of emotion in the story. And so I came back and said it's not just moms, but it's first time moms. I also found that the ages of the kids mattered. When the kids were three years or older, there was more sharing fatigue or the kids were not as cute. There was not a lot of sharing going on. But when they had a newborn in the house, it was like constant. It was like constantly pictures all over the place. Baby was changing very quickly. All these moments were being captured. So I came back and revised that even further to first time moms with kids under the age of three. And when I went with that new targeting I just saw all the patterns line up. So all the answers were very similar. And that is a discovery, that is a search process that one has to go through. You do cast a wider net, but you are looking for. With every interview, you want to ask some questions at the beginning where you think these are the distinguishing characteristics. So I ask for things like what are the ages of your kids? How many kids do you have? And that's the way I pattern match to. These responses seem to align more with my early adopters. And these were the distinguishing characteristics. So that's what you're doing in the beginning. In the latter stages, it gets more complex because as you get more customers, they start asking for things. Sometimes they start asking for features. And our new mantra is love the problem, not the solution. Even customers suffer from that, so they start asking for solutions. When you give it to them, they themselves don't use it. So we have a new process and this is some new work. You can find it on the blog. Right now, the Customer Forces Canvas is something that we've been using ourselves internally. After the Fisherman from Chile example, we use this canvas to try to understand it's a backdoor approach to uncover covering problems. So we don't ask customers what problems they have, we don't ask them what features they want. We instead ask them what are they trying to do next? So once you've done your lean canvas, what's keeping you up at night? That could be kind of a very simple question like what's holding you back right now? And from there we then explore to what might we build that helps them do something better. So if they're trying to pitch it might be building them some features to tell a better story. They're trying to raise money, maybe some content to do do that. So those are the types of things we end up doing. Instead of just getting bogged down with customer feedback and them telling us what to do, we're really trying to understand what outcomes or jobs are they trying to get done and where are they in that progression. And that's what we try to improve or prioritize our features and development around. Sir.

Just hand it over to someone.

It will come down. Thanks.

You actually just started to answer my question. So I was going to ask if you're familiar with jobs to be done theory and how you see that potentially fitting into all this. And I'm guessing that maybe you learned about it in and around or maybe after you were out running lean and if you had the chance, would you try to Put some of that into Running Lean.

Yeah. So how many of you know, jobs to be done? Show of hands. Not that many people. Okay. I guess what I expected because it is something that's been around for a long time. The basic idea, first of all, is this simple concept that we hire products to do certain jobs. Sounds very simple, doesn't sound very useful. When I first heard about it, it again sounded like a cute little way to think of things. But as I began to dig a bit further, as I ran into certain problems and when I wrote Running Lean, a number of people came to me and said, if I'm doing a desire driven product, how do I fill the problem problem box? So if I'm building a video game or if I'm doing fashion or I'm doing a movie, what problems am I really solving? You could say it's boredom or stress, but those are not really things that you market around. That was an interesting dilemma. And I was like, okay, how do we solve this? And then maybe two years ago now, some of the guys around Jobs to Be Done approached me, Bob Moesta and others who are part of the original Milkshake study, from those who know the Job Done Jobs to be Done. And they came up to me and they said, we really like your work. We are struggling with Jobs to be Done. It's a powerful framework. We have used it in all these different instances, but we really don't know how to explain it. And when I even asked them, can you define a job? Even to this day, I don't have a very clear definition of what is a job, because it is one of these things that is still in its early stages. It's not very clearly defined. But I worked with them, we did a workshop together, and I kind of found that the interviewing process was interesting. So we have developed this new canvas, the Customer forces canvas, which takes a lot of ideas. So rather than starting with problems, we start with outcomes. So we try to understand what are people trying to do today, what are they using today. So the existing alternatives in the Lean canvas, and where are they struggling? And there are these forces, we call them inertia and friction. So again, if you read that blog post, it will make more sense. But it's all kind of inspired by that work that we did as a collaboration with the rewired group. And all that kind of went into some things we tested internally. But we have become converted. And that is a much better approach than even the Running Lean problem interview process. Because in the Running Lean process, we start with problems And I throw out a bunch of problems. And if those aren't the right problems, the customer may tell me what is a better problem to focus in on. And that works sometimes, but sometimes you just get invalidation. So if I guess at my problems and I go to you and say, I have this problem, do you have this problem? And you say, no, well, that's the end of interview. It's like, I don't know what else to ask you. And so I've been shut down with many interviews before. With the jobs approach, you can still navigate around that. So people don't get shut down. They can still explore for problems and have a pretty meaningful conversation. So I do find that we are, maybe there's going to be a third book. But in that third book there's already an updated problem interview script that I posted on the blog. And that's what that blog post is about. And we will just develop that further. We also look at lots of places that can be injected. So yes, if I was to rewrite the book, I would inject some of that in there. And I may not rewrite the book, just write a new book around that.

Are you familiar with Anthony Olich's work around like outcome driven innovation? Is that where the outcome statements are coming from or.

No, not really. So I like Tony Ulwich's work on outcome driven innovation. He takes a very quantitative approach to jobs to be done. So it's coming up with a whole bunch of outcomes and then a bunch of surveys and then being able to rank them and sort them. Even though he's an engineer by background, I am too. But I find that I get more value from the qualitative learning than the quantitative because it's more about pattern matching than getting to those. And they have to run, they run like 150 interviews. I usually run 10 interviews and I can get to a pattern match insight that I then act on and I use experiments to validate that. So I think I can get to results faster. And their projects, typically they work with big companies. It's a quarter of a million dollars just to get started. So again, very expensive to do those types of things. So it is for a certain place and they've been successful doing it. But we, we tend to take more the qualitative approach to that.

That's interesting because like I see him and you as both people that basically suffered some failure and felt that pain and basically wanted, went just crazy trying to solve the problem for everyone else essentially and came up with some really, really interesting new ways of looking at these things. But your focus was obviously more on the resource strapped entrepreneur, which is.

Whereas his was more focused on the big cup.

And it's just interesting where your theories and models kind of bump up against his because I think that they're both good solutions just in different contexts.

Yes, absolutely.

Next question.

Hi. Thanks for creating Lean Canvas because I just dusted mine off after two years so I knew it was sitting there.

So that was good. What would you be doing if you weren't doing this? What would be the back?

What's plan B?

What's plan B? I guess right now, I don't know. So usually when I commit myself to an idea, I look at it long term. It's easily a 10 year game. I've already been at this company since 2010, so it's amazing how it's already been seven years, but it seems like we're just getting started. So this is really what I want to do for a long, long time. And so if something presents itself, it will, but right now there is no plan B.

Could I ask one more question? Which company would you say globally does this best on a large scale that you've watched and that you admire and continually go back to?

Oh, in terms of this Lean Startup.

Continuously internally, in terms of scaling, scale, even new divisions?

Yeah, so I guess so there's the Lean startup and we are actually using a new label called continuous innovation. Because like a lot of methodologies before, if you look at agile, while agile was being codified, there were lots of competing similar methodologies like Scrum, like XP that were coming out, that had lots of common commonalities and that's why those thought leaders got together and copied, codified it. I look at Lean Startup also as a new way of working. What's different about this new way of working is that we are more connected to customers than ever before. We no longer need to wait long periods of time to test and validate. We can't afford to do that anymore because when we do, we get total business model failure. That's like the disruption type of story. So if I bring it in that more general sense, some of the companies that you see doing this at massive scale would be the Facebooks and the Amazons of the world. So Mark Zuckerberg recently said that there is not one version of Facebook running at any given point in time. There are probably 10,000 versions of Facebook. That just gives you an order of magnitude on the scale of experiments they run. So any given day there are about 10,000 experiments being run at Facebook. And I would say, at least as far as I know, they are probably running the most experiment. They get the prize for the most number of experiments. But being run, they're also the organization is designed in such a way that there are no teams. The teams kind of dynamically form around problems. The teams get a slice of the traffic, they go and prove it out. And based on that, they go live or they just don't go live. And so that is a extreme kind of company that's really internalizing a lot of the principles that we talk about of rapid experimentation, of learning from customer behavior. And they're not the only ones. But I would just say at the scale level, they are the ones who are probably running the most number of experiments. But short in that order would be Amazon. They do a lot of experiments. Netflix, Procter and Gamble, all those companies, Intuit, they've all been very at that big company scale, being big well known brands that do this on a daily basis. How are they doing it? Oh yeah. I mean their whole product launch has always been bringing the customer voice in. So even if you look at the Swiffer mop, you can kind of look at a case study on it that was actually an accidental discovery. They actually went and were observing a user using one of their products and they were using it in a very different way. They were kind of using it to mop the floor instead of using it the way they intended. And that was their inspiration to say, why don't we build this Swiffer mop thing? So there are some interesting case studies and lessons that they share, but a lot of it has come from bringing the customers and observing them. A little bit of the design thinking type of mindset. And now they're bringing a lot of experimentation into the process. They run lots and lots of experiments too.

Next question.

Could I just slip one more in? Do you get challenged on ethics much ethics? Do you ever feel like customers talk about being tricked or you know, through customer discovery where they sort of feel like, okay, I registered, nothing's happened.

Yeah.

So they just found out they were big part of a big experiment.

Yeah. So there is like the fake door tactic. So the fake door tactic is let's promise something. It's like a fake button, they push it. So just so you see, if anyone clicks on something or does something, I'm not going to say it's an invalid tactic because lots of people use it and a lot of people get value in it. We don't use it because I feel it is Much better to not build a fake button, to actually build a button that takes you somewhere, even if it's just too promising something. So if I was launching in Lean Stack, if you were ever launching a mobile version of Lean Stack, I wouldn't build a fake button saying download the mobile, mobile button. Because then people will just get disappointed and annoyed. I would instead do something like, hey, we are working on a mobile version. If you want to see one, click here. So if they click that, I would take them to a screenshot of what it would look like. I would ask them to vote up and down on what they're seeing. And that way I'm actually finding people that might be interested in this new thing we're trying to do. I would then invite them to have a conversation with us. I would then show it to them. So we don't do fake buttons. We are very clear and up front that even, even in the early stages, we are thinking about this new thing. We'd want to know, is this going to be useful and we have built enough reciprocity. And this is the powerful thing of give and take is that if you. So most people, most entrepreneurs, when they reach out to their customers, it's either to pitch to them or it's to ask for something. And that's where it's just all about you. But if you turn it around, if you actually give a lot more than you ask for in the beginning, then when you do ask for certain things, people are happy, happy to oblige. So because we do this kind of continuous conversations with customers, people love it when they buy a product from us and we just talk to them for 30 minutes. And sometimes I throw in the ask me anything about your business in as well. People will say, I just filled the lean canvas. They'll show it to us, they'll ask me a question and I'll answer it. And you would think, I'm not learning anything, but I'm learning who this customer is, I'm learning what idea they have. I'm learning a lot of things. But in their mind, it's like, wow, this guy got on the phone with me and gave me all this for me advice. Now three months down the road, when I say we're building this new feature, I'd like your feedback, they're happy to reciprocate. So we use that more than fake doors. So it's more in my mind building a partnership with your customers because we are trying to remember they are the heroes. So we are trying to make them successful, not Trying to trick them. So that's just my philosophy on that.

Hi, Ash, I'm a big fan of, excuse me, big fan of the lean canvas and that whole sort of validated learning thing that you developed. But I just, I want to bring up, I had this instructor. This would be kind of a tricky question. I had this instructor when I was in school and he taught this business planning course. And I know in the startup culture, we don't like school in the conventional, but this guy was like a retired VC and serial entrepreneur. So I really respect his opinion, but he kind of really pressed the importance of like making a business plan. Like, you know, 40 page, write your plan. And so he showed us a lot of research that showed people, people that they take the time and write the plan, they have a better chance of success because they're more credible or one of the things that I've learned on my own is that when they do that research, they find out and they write that 30, 40 page business plan through that secondary research, they find out things that would benefit their MVP that they're developing, that they wouldn't have otherwise if they had just made it and hit the ground running, that, you know, they wouldn't have had to go back and redevelop it. And so I guess sort of my question is, do you think there's like a happy medium between, you know, going off with the lean canvas and sort of writing a business plan? And I guess for me, looking at those, like the sort of conventional long business plan versus the lean canvases, my own conclusion is that, I guess if you're like a serial entrepreneur and you kind of know your stuff, you know, you can do a lean canvas in a bar, you know, on a napkin sort of thing. But for people that are kind of like. And I guess the lean cannabis, it really sort of counteracts that sort of analysis paralysis thing that a lot of people experience. But then on the other side, you know, making a business plan, you know, it really benefits people because it forces them to do all that research sort of up front. And so I guess, do you think there's a sort of happy medium? And one of the. I run a small incubator and one of the things that I did with the business plan that we make, these entrepreneurs is the very front of the business plan. Like the first page that they're making for us is the lean canvas. But then the business plan, the rest of it is kind of like going more in depth and they have to sort of do that research. And so it's like a lean canvas, but with a long business plan behind it. So I guess my question is, what do you think on the opinions that I expressed about the lean canvas and the conventional? And then do you think kind of what I did with this business plan, is it kind of. What's your opinion on that?

Yeah. So I guess the first thing I'll say is that I'm not against business planning, but what I'm more against is the format of the business plan. So too many people write the business plan. When you say research, that's the part that I would question. Is that, is that validated research or is that just looking up things and telling a story which is fictional? And that's what we challenge in the business plan writing process is that a lot of people write a fictional novel on what they think is going to happen, but it's not necessarily what does happen. And when you write such a big document, sure, writing will change your thinking. And that's the entire goal to begin with, is you want it bring out your critical assumptions. Don't just say, I'm going to build this amazing MVP or this amazing product. You need to kind of articulate how this business is going to work. And then you need to have a conversation with someone. So the other problem I have with the business plan is that there are few people. Many people will read business plans, but I usually have asked with show of hands in rooms before. We can do that here as well. How many people like writing business plans? Not many hands go up. How many people like reading business plans? Not many hands go up. So if you're not reading the business plan, then why are people writing them? So if there's a more effective way to get to the same thing, that's what we are really about. So the lean canvas. So what you also said I would challenge a bit is that we do not advocate starting with an mvp. We advocate starting with a lean canvas, then doing the research. And by research, I mean the problem interviews, the solution interviews and how you capture that. So what you're saying is you're putting it into a document and writing, writing it out. That's great. If you want to write it in one big document, that's fine. We capture that same learning, but it's spread out over many small bits of information. So in the new book you will see we have experiment reports and we have validation plans and we have got ways we are summarizing the learning from the experiments. So at the end of the day, I actually create like at the end of A six week process. If I print out all my one pagers, there's not just one lean canvas. We're going to have almost a business plan. Like all the things you went into the business plan I collect. But I'm not writing a big document, I'm writing them in a span of time. So again, if what you're doing at the end of the day is starting with a lean canvas and then doing research, but by research, not just looking at analyst reports and not just looking at what's on Google and Googling competitors, but going and talking to customers and putting that learning in the document, then that's still perfectly good and valid. Just very quickly, I'm just going to.

Just tie those two together.

Can you talk?

Yeah, I'll grab one for a second.

Just very quickly. What I heard you say, Ash, is that you're going through a set of experiments that start with the lean canvas, then you go through problem discovery, solution discovery. You're doing all of that for you. Right. You're doing that to validate whether or not you're even going to build anything.

Right.

In your case, you were talking about writing one word of the book. So often when people think about business plan and they actually execute on a business plan, they actually think they're writing it for somebody else, for a bank, for an investor, for somebody else. That's when the storytelling gets to be a problem.

Right.

Because you're actually trying to convince someone to invest or convince someone to join the team as opposed to convince yourself that it's a good idea to begin with. So I think with the right mindset on writing the business plan, I think it's makes a ton of sense in support of what you're doing, but you've got it stacked and built based on what you're doing over those six weeks.

Sure.

I want to pick up on your point about incenting the customer. I mean, we're constantly living busier and busier lives and customers also are busy, whether individuals or corporations. So what examples have you seen of incentivizing customers?

So for first contact or when you. So when you say customer to me.

Through the whole cycle. Right, because you're going to have to do continued validation, so you need to incent them. In your case you've got something to offer because you can kind of coach them through their plan. But in general, what examples have you seen of incentivizing customers?

Yeah, I mean, if you look at it, at the end of the day, customers want their problem solved. So the moment you bring a problem worth solving in front of them and say, I'm considering doing this, oftentimes that's incentive enough. So if it's something they're ideally struggling with, and that's even the first, even with first contact, if you can lead with a must have problem, I'll give a very simple example. Let's say I drive around the city of Vancouver. I'm looking at nightclubs. And what day is today? Today is Wednesday. Yeah, and that's what I was going to use, Wednesday. So let's say it's a Wednesday and middle of the week, all the nightclubs are empty. There's nobody in there. That's a problem for them. So I observe this and I may have a solution. So the way I incentivize them to talk to me is I might even cold call a nightclub owner and say, I noticed just driving around that your nightclub is usually empty on a Wednesday, I potentially have a solution where I can fill your nightclub on a Wednesday for the next two months. If you're interested, give me a call back. That's a problem. I nailed the problem that they had and I said, I may have a solution. And I might even add further, say I only promise to take 15 minutes of your time and I promise not to waste your time. And I hang up the phone, there's a high likelihood they're going to call me back. And that's how you get customers to really talk to you, is it's not about what you want. So in that whole cold call, I did not once describe what I was going to do for them. So there's that curiosity gap which they want to kind of close. They want to see what is this person going to offer me that's going to fix this problem. But I gave them a problem and I gave them an outcome. And then I said, if you want to learn more, let's talk. So that typically is oftentimes what we do also with customers is say, you finished the Lean Canvas. We know metrics is a problem. A lot of people drown in numbers. They have the Google Analytics, they have the Mixpanel, they have all these tools. They don't get more clarity, they actually get lost. We are building a very simple metrics modeling tool that helps you do X. If you'd like to learn, we'd love to get your feedback because we are still in the early stages of this idea. We'd love to talk to you about that. And again, if people say, oh, I'm struggling with this, I'd love to see what you Guys have, they would reach out, reach back out to us. Thanks.

Entrepreneurs often get so much advice, and.

I was wondering, what advice do you hear A lot that you would say to ignore?

Not mine. Start your own business.

Well, so the thing I caution, I'll answer a bit differently. So I call it the advisor paradox. So the advisor paradox is you thinking you have to follow the advice someone is giving based on the person giving it to you. So I see a lot in accelerators where they will have a speed coaching session and all these mentors will come and give them a bunch of advice. And at the end of that, the entrepreneurs just want to pull their hair out because every advice they hear contradicts the other one. One says do this, the other one says do something. Exact opposite. So who should they listen to? The one who exited most recently or the one who made the most money? Or how do I really figure out the one who made the most sense? Who do I really listen to? And that's the Advisor paradox. It's not about following advice, it's about applying it. It's about testing it. So the way that I find good advisors in my business is I go and I might show them a lean canvas, I might describe a problem that I'm struggling with, and I just get a whole bunch of ideas. Just give me some ideas for how I might fix them. I might then go and test some of these ideas and the ones that actually give me some results. I go and double down on those advisors. I go back to them because they have some insight that I don't have and they can compliment my lack of, of that knowledge. And that's who I will listen to. So don't just blindly follow anyone's advice, irrespective of who's giving it, whether it's me, Hussein, anyone else, doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it's really your business and the buck just has to stop with you. You have to test your idea and it's you applying the advice, testing the advice, and then maybe going back if it was helpful. But otherwise, that's really up to you.

I think that's a perfect point on today's session because I want to give you time, guys, to, to network with Ash to come if you want to sign your book, if you want to talk to him and tell him how, how great a job he's done, let's first give him a round of applause.