Expert Advice from Oz Nazilli: Validating Your Startup Idea

Everyone, how's it going? My name is Ian Isaacs. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for taking the time out today for our weekly global webinar. I know everyone's calling in from different parts of the world. I'm based here in Dubai, UAE. We have another great— I say this every week, but I kid you not, I'm always genuinely super excited when we do these events because I get to hear from some great speakers and just learn from them, learn from the audience as well. So today we have Oz. He was my product manager instructor back in Toronto. He's generously given us his time today to talk about startup idea, startup idea validation, and, and how people adopt new products. So I'm sure there's a lot of new content for some people here to pick up on and just learn from him. Um, well, we'll get started here in a few seconds. Just want to do some quick housekeeping. As you can see on the right-hand side, if you are on a desktop or tablet, there's a chat function. Please use the chat function to communicate with the rest of everyone. I see people already putting in where they're calling in from. So yeah, throw in your location. I see South Africa, Vancouver, Germany, Nigeria, Atlanta, New York, LA, more South Africa, Karachi, Toronto. Perfect. So pretty international crowd. We had about 500+ people register, I would say. We're expecting about 150, maybe 200 people live. So really, really excited for today. If you, as you can see below the chat icon, there's a Q&A button. Please use the Q&A button to feed us questions. What we'll do towards the end is we'll do some Q&A with Oz. We'll use that function to bring up the questions to the stage, but you can also upvote other people's questions so that way we can prioritize questions. Last but not least, you can see at the bottom of the screen there's some emojis— up emoji, heart emoji, all of that stuff. Please use that as Oz is speaking so that, you know, we can see what content is resonating the most with you. I think that's about it. Let's kind of— sorry, I think— all right, hopefully the folks can still hear me. For some reason it's connecting to my phone. All right, let's bring up Oz. And while Oz is coming on, yes, there will be a recording, will be available in 48 hours. He asked me to run this poll, so let's click publish and show on stage. So it'd be great to know who you folks are. If you can just click some of that voting. So let's give a minute here. Perfect.

Hey folks, how's it going?

Good, good. Yeah, so can you— you can see the—

I can see the poll. Yeah.

Can you see the results as well?

Uh, no, I can't see the results.

I have the actual poll, so we've got to send them that product spec, man. Um, okay, so I'll just summarize it. So we've had 24 votes. 54% are they've done validation— so 60% now validation solution testing. 40% have gone out and be like, hey, I really know my market. So you have a 60/40 split, right? Hopefully that's helpful. Awesome. I'll let you share your screen and then Oz, maybe why don't you, you can self-introduce yourself. We have about 100 people live, so people are slowly trickling in, but yeah, you can get started whenever you're ready.

Sounds good. Let me just find the right window. I have a self-confessed problem of having too many tabs, so I found the right, right window, so I'm happy about that. Hey everyone, thanks for joining today. So I'm dialing in like some of you from Toronto, Ontario, and we'll be talking about startup idea validation today. I'm gonna just jump in, but please do throw in your questions, your comments, concerns. Also, I love these sessions to be as organic and informal as possible, so I might jump into the chat and read some questions I feel— if I feel like other people might learn from it. So we'll, we'll go through it at a good speed but still make it enjoyable, hopefully. So So today's topic is around startup idea validation. How do people adopt new products? So we're gonna talk about a few frameworks on both how people make decisions and how can you do discovery the right way. And I will talk about my background a bit to give you a sense of who's talking to you today. But today's topic can also be thought of as how to build better than 90% of startups out there. Commonly people just jump right in and do the assumption of if you build it, then they will come. Me from being from a product background, I'm a big proponent of doing more validation and de-risking assumptions. So we'll be talking about that a bit today. So quickly about myself, just to give people a bit of context on who'll be talking through the content today. So I've been a product manager for a long time. I've done B2B, B2C, web, mobile. I've done about 5 years or so at product companies, and then I've actually spent quite a bit of time in product consulting. And product consulting is really not just going away and coming up back with a sexy PowerPoint presentation. It's really working with the client to make sure that they're building the right thing for the right people in the right way. So in Toronto, I led a group at TWG, great growth, great success in the market, both in the US and Canada. We've done lots of really interesting projects, worked with companies like Shopify that most people would know about. And we got acquired by Deloitte Digital, I think it was in 2021. I also do some investing myself, so I have a sense of how people think at the earliest of stages. I'm not a venture capitalist, I'm not a professional institutional investor at all. I really go by idea, problem, and the team. But I've also spent time both advising startups and doing more formal product management instructing or teaching. Right now I run a company called PMF Studio or Product Market Fit Studio, and we work with C to Series B startups on product discovery. So a lot of the things we're gonna talk about today, product strategy and growth. I see someone commenting about connection and buffering, comment there if there are any issues with my video, but I'll keep rolling in the meantime. So why is this an important topic? As you all know, given that you're on the call today, doing a startup is hard. The most recent Startup Genome report has it at 90% startup failure rate. And there's a really interesting study from University of Oslo in Norway that shows that using the right methodology significantly increases the chance of success. So they've studied 47 startups and looked at utilization of things like the Lean Startup methodology or proper product discovery. And they found that even though a lot of the companies that do the right methodology fail, so it's not a guarantee of success, uh, almost no one succeeded without following the right process. So this means that if you do things right, things can always happen. Interest rates change, markets change. There's no silver bullet to make sure that you're successful as a startup, but doing things the right way significantly increase your chance of success. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. And I see someone asking about the hyperlinks. I'm gonna have my email on here. Just send me a note and I'm happy to send you the deck and I'll share it with the Founder Institute folks too, so you can read at your own leisure. And there are a lot of like tactical tips in here. So don't worry about trying to write everything down, 'cause I'm gonna be sharing questions, et cetera, that you can use yourself. So just shoot me a note in my email and you'll be able to get the deck. So what are we going to be talking about today? We're gonna be covering methodical ways of validating ideas. Some people might have heard about Double Diamond Discovery. We'll talk about that a bit. We're gonna talk about a framework that I really like called Forces of Change. So we're gonna cover how you can do the process the right way. Our goal is gonna be to make sure that you're building something that people want. That's the, the surest way to be successful, address a real pain point. We will explore how people make decisions because if you understand the mind of a decision maker, you're more likely to build something that resonates with them. And we will talk about the Double Diamond process as we mentioned. So let's, let's talk about the how. As I mentioned, we'll be covering 3 topics: forces of change, first on the various forces at play when someone is making a decision to change something about their life, Double Diamond for validating ideas, and then How can you decide when it's good enough to start building? Because as startup builders, I'm sure you're all interested in getting to that build stage and creating something real. And as I mentioned, you can email me at oz@pmfstudio.com, or I'll share the slides with the Founder Institute folks too, just so that you'll have a copy of them. Alright, so let's jump in. Forces of Change. I don't know how many people are familiar with this model, but it's a model from someone called Bob Moesta. And he's actually one of the co-creators of Jobs to be Done. So we obviously know about Clayton Christensen. Bob is not as famous, but he was one of the co-authors of Jobs to be Done framework, or how people hire products to do certain jobs. This is his lesser-known framework that I think is almost more valuable. And it talks about this. So think of this black bar as the individual looking to make a change. Maybe they're looking to adopt a new product, Maybe they're looking to buy a home, maybe they're deciding between credit cards, whatever it might be. There are forces at play when someone's making a decision. There's the push of the situation. So they have a reason to try and change things up. Maybe they're not satisfied with the current options anymore. So there's the push to move to something new. There's the pull of the new solution. This could be the marketing copy, the benefits that the product promises. So there's something pulling them towards the new way. There's the habit of the present. So inertia, we all know about this. A solution has to be 10 times better than what's in the market, we say in product management, to overcome this inertia because people are busy, people might be lazy. So there's some resistance to change. And then there's the anxiety of the new solution. So when someone's adopting a new product, there's an anxiety that comes with it. What happens if I give up my current product and the new one is not as good enough? Am I gonna be able to learn the new tool? Is this gonna really make my life better? So there's some anxiety that comes from change. So when you think of these forces at play, the business as usual, the new behavior, all of these forces have an impact on the decision maker. So you have to consider all of these to be able to move someone to where you want them to go. Presumably that's adopting your product. So two forces that promote a new choice and two forces that slow things down. So I covered a lot of concepts there. To make it a bit more tangible, we can talk about an example, and I'll share with you my most recent purchase. That's a bit of a silly purchase, I admit, but something that I recently bought because I do commonly work from home and do presentations like this. I don't know how many people know about FlexiCam. I don't know if anyone has has one of these or knows what it is, feel free to put it in chat. But this is basically a product like right now I am looking at the screen, but hopefully it looks like I'm making eye contact with you because I have a giant 43-inch monitor that if I was to put the camera just above, I just look like I'm looking like this. So it's not a very engaging way to talk to someone. So I was like, okay, I have a big enough monitor. This is not going to block my view, and hopefully it's gonna feel more engaging for the person that I'm talking to. So let me make a change to my home setup, was my thinking process. And in this, there was a push. The push was the desire to have the best video setup possible because I spend a lot of time on camera having important conversations. There was the pull, the pull from PlexiCam's marketing, the most natural camera setup, the ease of use. It's literally Honestly, it's a very basic product, but that's where the genius comes in. It's a plexiglass piece that you attach to the top of your monitor and bring down your camera. So there was the pull from their marketing, from review websites, etc. There's a habit of the situation. I did feel like, hey, this works well enough. Like, do I really need to make a change? It's a bit of a silly expensive product, to be honest. I think it was over $100 US and it's just a Plexiglass, like piece of plastic, basically. So there's a bit of that, bit of that resistance to change. And there are anxieties in that, like, is it wasteful to buy this? Does it really work? Well, I'm in Canada. Can I easily ship it and return it if it doesn't work? So these are all the various forces at play when I was making decision to change my home setup. So hopefully this makes it a bit more tangible for you. Obviously, at the end of the day, I went with it. And as a bit of a spoiler, I am happy with it. If you have a small monitor, it might be hard because it might be blocking a meaningful percent of your view. But for me, it's great. And hopefully it makes it more engaging for folks like you as I do a presentation. But these were the various forces that I had to consider when making this decision. So hopefully that's a good way to explain this framework. I'm also happy to take a suggestion if anyone has another example that they wanna cover. We can quickly talk through the 4 forces at play to again really hammer home the value of this. Is there a recent change someone made that you wanna cover? Feel free to put it in chat and I can read it out. Anything maybe you bought recently, maybe a work decision that you made, anything that changed your situation, we can have a quick chat through. Okay, Pranay said using ChatGPT versus Google. So let's, uh, I'll simplify the example. Thank you for suggesting that, uh, because I want to compare it to the current state. So maybe, uh, uh, to your point, we have ChatGPT as a way of answering questions, and historically for the last 20 years we've been using Google to answer questions. So push up the situation feel free to everyone comment on each of the forces so that we have more thoughts on it from chat. But the push of the situation could be, hey, Google is taking too much effort for me to get to the answers that I want. Maybe there's an easier way for me to get to the answers that I need. So that could be the push of the situation. The pull of the situation could be, hey, I'm seeing really great information out there. I'm seeing examples of people like me getting a lot of value from ChatGPT. I'm seeing the growth figures from ChatGPT themselves. They're the fastest product to reach 100 million active users. So there's something from ChatGPT pulling me towards that solution versus Google as the status quo. The habit of it might be that you spent the last 20 years Googling stuff. Googling is literally a word that we use to look things up. So there are really strong habit barriers built in. There's inertia created by Google's dominance of the information market or the search market. And finally, we have the anxieties, stuff like, will ChatGPT lie to me? Will there be hallucinations that make it so that I don't actually get the answer that I'm looking for? Will the results be in-depth enough as what I get from Google? Will I be able to get the same kind of value with the same speed? And that might be the anxiety that's at play. So hopefully this is all useful for you and makes it very, very tangible for you as we talk through this example. But the reason why we're covering it is really the stages of the buying or product adoption process. So when you think about in terms of the jobs to be done timeline, people go from left to right, right, in this process. They might have the first thought, maybe they have a mattress that's not comfortable. So they're like, ah, maybe I should do something about it, but it's at the passive looking stage. Maybe something happens, maybe they wake up with back pain, and they go from passive looking to active looking. At this stage, this forces framework that we talked about is really applicable. Depending on how strong the forces are, this stage can take a very long time, a very short time, and this might even derail the purchase. Maybe the habit is so strong or anxiety of having to go into a mattress store and buy new mattresses is so large that people say, forget it, I'm just gonna stick with the current solution that I have. So every step of this way on the buyer's journey, we have to think about the Force of Change model so that in your marketing, in your sales efforts, in the way you build your product, you really have to think about how do I minimize the anxieties? How do I maximize the pull of the situation? And how can I get people to start using my product as quickly as possible? So that's kind of why I wanted to cover this framework. I find that in my work, not a lot of people know about the Force of Change framework. It might intuitively make sense, but more people are familiar with the jobs to be done framework in why people adopt new products, like what problems they adopt them for. But it's also important to keep in mind all the forces at play as they make decisions. Cool. So if you have any questions, please put them into the Q&A. I'm happy to answer them at the end. Again, also you can shoot me an email if you wanna have a more in-depth conversation about this stuff. But hopefully this gives you a good overview of the Forces of Change model. The second concept we're going to talk about is the Double Diamond Discovery Process. So you might have seen this before. It's talked about in the world of design. There are design sprints that go through this in the world of product discovery, but we think of proper discovery in two phases. They're two diamonds side by side. So you start with the problem space. You don't wanna focus on your own solution 'cause you might become too myopic or too narrowly focused on what your solution does. So you wanna start with what does the market need? What problems do people have in the market? And you wanna go broad first, diverge, and look at all the solutions that exist for the target user you're going after. You don't wanna limit yourself to one problem just yet because you might miss some meaningful opportunities in the market. So you first go broad and see what kind of problems are in the market. Then you start to do a deeper level of analysis and you wanna converge on one or two problems that you can solve meaningfully. You get into that definition phase, you say, this is the problem I wanna solve and here's why. It's an important problem, it's a big problem, people are trying to solve this problem right now, they're not able to, and I can come in and make a real difference with my startup. At that point, once you're clear on the problem you're solving, you move on to the next phase, which is the solution phase. And you do the same thing again. You diverge and think about all the ways in which you can solve this problem. You don't wanna lock yourself into just one solution for now. You wanna go and explore many different ways of solving the same problem in different ways. And you can ideate on different solution types. You can prototype stuff. You can do a bunch of user tests to make sure that your solution has the best chance of solving. That problem that you've chosen, and then you converge on one or two ways of really solving that problem. At that point, you have clarity on the problem you're solving, you have clarity on how you wanna solve that problem, and you're truly set up for success as you build a solution for this market, for this type of problem. We find that commonly people skip this discovery phase and just jump into coding stuff, and they release it and they're like, wow, this did not succeed. But they don't have clarity on who their personas are. They don't have clarity on what problems they're solving for them. Is that a real activated need or are the existing solutions good enough? So doing an approach like that is way more effective and increase your chances of success over just saying, hey, I have an idea and I'm gonna jump in and build it. What I wanna share now is not just stay at this theory level, but go in deeper into questions you can ask, especially at the problem discovery stage, to get clear on what problems are worth solving. So if we combine the two models that we talked about, the force of change and double discovery, we can think of some questions you can ask at the problem discovery phase, starting with the push forces. So to get clear on what kind of push forces might be at play, what I recommend is go out there and start having conversations to make sure that even if you have a rough idea of what problems you want to solve, you might need to to find that. You might need to fine-tune that. So you can go out and start asking questions to people in exploratory discussions. So in open-ended discussions, things like, what are you struggling with? What's not happening that you want to happen? Where's your frustration? Why are you doing this now? What don't you like about your current product or service? So you can see they're very open-ended questions. I'm not talking about my solution at all at this stage. I am not saying, hey, I have the solution, buy it, this is for your problem. I'm really going in with an open mind to understand what might be happening in their world. The goal is to really understand that forces model and these types of questions and others. This is just a suggested list. It's not like you have to ask all of these and there will be other questions that target the push force. But this is a good place to start to understand the push forces at play. Then we can look at the pull forces. So what kind of stuff they will want to see from the new solution to make a change. And there you can ask stuff like, what are you hoping for? What's going to be different once you got something new in your life? So as you can see, these are from the perspective of the new solution and what might pull the user or buyer towards your solution as you build it. Then we jump into anxiety questions. And to be honest, this is Probably one of my favorite categories. It's often forgotten. We get too excited about building a startup or building a company or building a new product, and we forget about all the ways in which people's anxieties or concerns or things that they're nervous about can derail the purchase process. So we forget to dive deep into the world of anxieties to really understand it. And here you can ask stuff like, what are you worried about? What's your greatest concern about getting rid of the old product or service? Or "What's your greatest concern about putting something new into your life?" Again, change can be scary, especially if it's a more complex or higher investment product category, so we want to get clear on what kind of things they're anxious about. Finally, we have the habit questions. These are things like, "Even though there are problems, what do you love the most about your current product or service?" What are you willing to give up in order to get something better? What are you not willing to give up? And here we're trying to get clear on, with their current state, what might keep them tied to it. Are there things they're not willing to give up? Are there things that they really love that we can learn from? So asking questions like this and listening intently, actively, gives you a lot of clarity on what your target user might care about. And asking these questions might even help you subsegment the users that you're targeting. You might have thought that there may be one or two personas in this market that you're going after, but once you do these exploratory conversations, you might actually find that there are like 5 different subgroups because of their anxieties or habits or their decision criteria. So these are just some questions to get you started. As I mentioned, I'll make the deck available so that you have these to ask as you maybe continue to do validation for your startup idea, or maybe you are already building one product, but you see an opportunity to build a different product, and you can use these questions to really clarify the market. Some things to keep in mind as you, as you go through this. We say that you should look for customer trade-offs because without understanding the trade-offs, without something to compare to, consumers struggle or people struggle to make clear decisions. If I say, hey, do you want, I don't know, stupid example, but do you like pizza or steak more? And without context, that might be a question that's not as obvious to you. But if I say, hey, we're gonna go out for a birthday dinner, would you prefer steak or pizza? That context gives you more clarity in how to do trade-offs. So we say context creates value and contrast creates meaning. Without knowing the context that the person is making a decision in, it's really hard for you to understand the rest of the ecosystem on why the decisions happen. And humans are bad at making decisions in a vacuum. That's why there's a really good book from Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. If anyone's interested in behavioral science, I definitely recommend reading that book Predictably Irrational. And there he talks about, and he's done a lot of research in the space, without a close option to compare to, people struggle with knowing exactly how to make their own decisions. So contrast creates meaning in that sense. We also say that you should really unpack vague words as you have conversations. So for example, if you're talking to a potential Buyer and they say, yeah, this is a good option. What does good mean? Or this is well done. Like what's well done? What makes it well done? So unpacking vague words can really help you get to the core of the decision and how they make their decision. A tactic that they talk about, by the way, all of these concepts get expanded in a book called Demand Side Sales, Bob Moesta is the author of that as well. So go in there if you want to learn more about how to do interviews the right way. And one of the things there he recommends is setting up bad questions intentionally. So if you're having an exploratory conversation, misinterpret what they said on purpose so that they say, oh no, that's not what I meant, here's what I meant. So they unpack it further for you. Setting up bad questions is a good way to get deeper into what people are really thinking. Because people can be polite, people can want to impress you, people may not be super forthcoming if you ask about their future preferences. But if you set up bad questions or even ask about what they've done in the past in a similar situation, you can hopefully get to their motivations in a cleaner manner. Similarly, there are different ways of solving the same problem. So we want to understand the jobs to be done of the customer and the progress they're trying to make. This is why we do the problem discovery and then the solution discovery. The same problem can be solved in many different ways. So we want to get clear on the specific job that person wants to hire the new product for so that we can provide the best possible experience. Sorry, I saw someone asking what's the second book name. It's called Demand Side Sales. It's by Bob Moesta, M-O-E-S-T-A. And then Julietta asked, can you repeat how contrast creates meaning? And sorry, I just jumped in and started looking at questions, but I'll go back and forth. Contrast creates meaning in the sense that if you give someone two options and ask them to contrast, like what's good about one and what's good about the other one, that creates more meaning for you. If you just say, "What do you think of this one thing?" It might be hard for them to give you as much detail. They may not have the language for it. They might not have the right type of experience. But if you give them two options, they'll be more effectively able to say, "Here's what's good here and here's what's good here." But thank you for the questions. Continuing on this list, people struggle. That's what creates opportunity. People struggle in their day-to-day. People struggle in their decision-making, people struggle with the problems that they're facing, and every struggling moment is an option for you and your startup to go in and say, hey, we can help you, and here's how. In research, we really wanna focus on problems and outcomes and not demographics. One of my pet peeves, and I'm sure everyone has seen this, is someone will bring me a persona and say, this person is 18 to 30, 34 and lives in the suburbs. And I'm like, how do I make that information actionable? That doesn't give me anything in terms of their problems. An 18-year-old might have very different problems than a 30-year-old. They may have very different contexts in which they're making decisions. So move away from personas that are purely demographic based and get into personas that are very problems or outcomes focused. Connected to that, people don't buy features. I'm sure this is something that people have heard as well. People like, don't talk about the features of your product, talk about benefits, is a common piece of advice. You can see this very easily in the world of, let's say, computer shopping. How much RAM, how big the screen size is, blah, blah, blah. That stuff is secondary to, can I do my homework on this? Can I easily connect to the internet? Is it portable? Like that type of benefit-driven approach is more impactful when we think about how people make decisions. And we say that there are 3 levels or categories of motivation: functional, which is like very tangible pieces. So this is a laptop, it's portable, it has 5 hours of battery life, etc. Emotional is more at the human level. How do I connect with it? So it has 5 hours of battery life, so I'm comfortable in the knowledge that I'll be able to get my work done. It's not too heavy so that it's not gonna cause me back pain, et cetera. And then social is on top of that. So functional is the base layer, emotional is one layer above and gives you a bit more context in why people make decisions. And then social or identity is the, the top level. So we're all social creatures. We all wanna be part of a community. We wanna be part of a tribe. It's built into our DNA because our ancestors who were more social and part of tribes are the ones who survived and therefore passed on their genes. So we want to always— most people, I shouldn't say always, you can't generalize to everyone, but most people want to fit in. Most people want to have good social standing, want to be perceived positively. And that also impacts how they see themselves in their personal identity, in their self-image. So You have to think about all three of these when you're thinking about how someone makes a decision, how someone buys a product, what does that product do for them very tangibly, how does that product make them feel, and what does that product signal to others from a social perspective. So hopefully this is all helpful. I know these are very text-heavy slides, but I wanted to have something tangible to leave behind so that you can reference it easily. 20 minutes, 30 minutes is not a lot of time and there's a lot of information coming, but at least you'll have it for reference. If we go into the second diamond, the solution discovery side, there are various tools that you can use. You can do fake landing pages, like put up a landing page before you build the product, see if people give you their email, people if they indicate an intention to purchase. You can use clickable prototypes to do usability testing. You can do presentation decks that really tell the story that you wanna tell. But in all of this, you wanna make sure that you're validating with the right user segments. You can't build something for everyone. We say that if you build something for everyone, you build nothing for no one. The market is not homogenous, so you need to pick the right subsegment and specifically tailor your solution to them. And in your solution discovery process, ask for commitment, not whether someone likes it. It's very easy. I'm in Canada, we're stereotypically nice in our society. So if you ask someone if they like something, especially if they know you built it, they're gonna say yes. But if you can ask for them for some kind of commitment, like, uh, input your credit card in this fake landing page, or, uh, we're doing pre-orders, uh, put $100 down, or at least give us your email so we can notify you when we launch, that's a more tangible, uh, tip for you or signal for you that you're on the right path. When you're doing your own research, also present yourself as an impartial researcher. So startups will commonly hire me and my team to do the research because we're truly impartial and we wanna get to the core of what the users are thinking. But if you can't hire an outside party, present yourself as not the startup, but an impartial researcher that's working for the startup to hopefully get people to speak more honestly. And don't forget that at this stage, your priority is to learn, not to sell your solution. So with that, let's, let's talk about some solution discovery questions. I'm not going to go through everyone, but just to give you a sense of what type of questions you can ask, you can go into stuff like, hey, does X solve your problem? Why or why not? Where does it fall short? How do you evaluate your alternatives today? Do you still use your product today? Why or why not? Would this create new problems or pains for you? What can be left out? So as you can see, lots of different questions you can ask. In the interest of time, I'm not going to go line by line, but Hopefully you get the sense of what type of questions are gonna be the right ones to ask to get to the insights you're looking for. And again, you'll have the deck for access. Um, the deck also has further reading resources. Uh, there's a more detailed, uh, demand side sales walkthrough, the book that I was talking about, The Force of Change from Bob that, that we talked about. Again, this stuff you'll have, uh, access. And you can go through and follow up with me for questions. Before we wrap up on the presentation side, let me quickly touch on this. Especially if it's an engineering-forward team or like a purely engineering founder, the common question is not to stereotype, like everyone wants to build as quickly as possible. But when you're the builder, there's obviously a further bias in building ASAP? And the answer to that, unfortunately, like in most things about product management, is that it depends. But there are certain things that you can look at. What we're trying to get to is good enough, and good enough will be different depending on your problem space and your stage. Obviously, if you're building— I'm going to make it up— but a healthcare product that is crucial to someone's personal well-being, maybe you need more validation and good enough takes longer. Or if you're building a, I don't know, photo sharing app, maybe there's less risk so you can get to good enough faster. But the things that I advise people to look for are when you start hearing the same thing over and over, if you have 6, 7, 10, 15 conversations and the last 3 have told you nothing new, that's a good signal. When you feel like you have clarity on the exact problem you're solving. So not just, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna solve, I don't know, the environment as a problem. Like, that's way too broad. But if you can say, I'm gonna solve the congestion problem in downtown Toronto for daily commutes between 9 to 5, because again, making up percentages, 30% of annual pollution comes out of this specific commute activity, then you're getting more specific and you're getting more clear what problem you should be solving. You ideally also wanna know your early adopters as soon as possible. Startup, being in a startup is a long journey. You can't, again, target everyone, but you need to be clear on who are the fastest to buy your solution so that your company has the best chance of survival and success. And finally, when you believe that you have a clear differentiator. So how will you win against the closest competitors in the market? If you get the questions, how will you address objection handling? When you have clarity from research, because you know exactly what problem you're solving for whom and why your solution is better, why you have the unfair advantage to move people on that force of change model, that contributes to good enough as well. So as you can see, this is not like, uh, if you do 6 weeks of research, you'll get everything you need kind of thing, but at least you have some signals to look for in your research process. So that's all I want to cover from a content perspective. I know it's information dense, but feel free to shoot me a note if you wanna chat further. Obviously we do this type of work, so we have lots of experience from different markets and different startups, and I'm happy to chat.

Oz, appreciate the time, man. This is some great content. I feel like I'm back in BrainStation learning with you, but a lot of, I like how you put together, you simplify a lot of these concepts and, or you revisit them and explain them in a very easy to understand manner. Okay, we've got a ton of questions coming in. I wanna spend maybe like 10 minutes doing Q&A and then we'll break out for networking. Yeah, so like some of these are gonna be tough to answer like in a rapid manner, but, you know, do your best. I'm just gonna focus, I'm gonna go by the most upvoted questions. So if you like a question, please upvote it. We'll probably do about 6 or 7. Uh, Vlad from Slovenia is asking, what's a good way to gather data, uh, for your market validation purposes?

Uh, it's a great question, Vladimir. So I think, uh, I'll interpret the question and then feel free to comment if that's wrong. My understanding is that, like, what's the best way to do the research and gather market data? There are various levels of fidelity when you're doing research. The easiest is obviously secondary research. So you go into Google, you go into market research sources like Gartner, et cetera, and do reading basically. That's helpful, but it's broad. It's not specific to your lens on the market, and it's something that everyone has access to, but it is a good place to start to orient yourself on the market. The best source is primary research. You wanna go out there and have conversations, especially early on, as, as you are trying to clarify how you want to look at the market. Doing qualitative conversations, exploratory open-ended conversations, will give you the best data. And then as you get later into the process, you can also do surveys. So you can add scale, add quantitative scale to your research efforts by taking what you learned from the qualitative conversations and turning them into surveys and sending it to 500,000, whatever people. So depending on what stage you're at and what type of a problem you're trying to solve, the best market data source might vary. But I definitely recommend that everyone, the classic thing being get out of the building and talk to people to, to get your direct insights.

Perfect. Um, yeah, we had a couple questions in there about validation, uh, or sorry, market research. I think you answered that. Okay, I'm gonna jump on to the next one. Riaz from Brampton's asking, how do we do the discovery calls in a B2B setting? And just to add to that, like maybe how does discovery shift between B2B versus B2C if you wanna shed some light on it?

Yeah, totally. More than 50% of our clients are actually B2B. There's a lot that you can do in the B2B space for a few reasons. One, B2B is becoming more consumerized. It's over the last 10 years, as decision makers have shifted guard and people are looking for the same quality of experiences in the business world as they are like in terms of ease of use, convenience, friendliness, whatever. So people are willing to talk. Over the last couple months, I've done I think 3 different B2B-focused research projects where we'll talk to current customers to understand their reality, their pains, what works for them, what doesn't. We'll talk to prospects from the market, we'll do our own recruiting and talk to them and get broad information from them. And then we'll also put prototypes or landing pages in front of people who have no idea of the product that we're building to get unbiased information. So what I talk about applies equally, maybe even more so to the B2B world. It's harder to do A/B testing in B2B if you don't have the volume, but all the things we're talking about around discovery and conversations definitely applies.

Awesome. And then on the B2C side, what's the— how would you like tackle it slightly different?

B2C side, the challenge that I find in B2C is people don't segment properly. So their idea of the consumer is too wide. As we all know, there's, I think, 8 billion or so people now in the world and everyone has different contexts. So my advice, if you're B2C side, definitely do validation still. but get as granular as you can, cuz it's a lot easier to win a market, like a small market, and then expand than to say, especially with limited resources, I'm gonna build for, I don't know, even 30% of the market cuz they're not homogenous enough for you.

Uh, I love your diplomatic answers. Uh, but great, good stuff. Let me, this question, Santos from Dallas. He's asking, you briefly touched upon this in your last few slides before wrapping up.

Yeah.

You know, what's the best way to do a soft launch before you have a fully functional MVP or software?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of soft launches. I actually would say start selling before you build it. It's a lot easier to build something when you have someone who said, yes, I'll sign a letter of intent, or yes, I am interested in this product. As soon as you launch it, let me know. So soft launch can be as early as a bunch of mockups, even in a slide deck. Or you can say, hey, we have the prototype, we have the proof of concept, we wanna put it in front of some, the term for that is design partners. So very early adopters that will build with you and presumably get like a big discount, but at least you have real customers helping you create the product. So I'm a big fan of soft launches. Product management, building products, is all about your riskiest assumptions. The more you can test your riskiest assumptions, the better off you will be. And soft launching is a great way to enable that.

Yeah, I love it. I like this whole question by Andreas from Austin. You talked a little bit about this earlier when you were talking about the— answering my B2C question, but like, how do you identify that right user segment if you're not using demographics? I think like you, you briefly talked about it when you're defining your persona, But maybe do you wanna like go a little bit deeper?

Yeah, totally. So demographics can be useful if it helps you get to real problems for those demographics. Oh, I think, did I do that? Okay. Oh yeah, nice. I like the camera effects. So knowing that someone is 18 or 20 or 25 years old doesn't give me much because an 18-year-old can be very different from an 18-year-old or is definitely different from a 25-year-old. So broad demographics are not actionable. What's actionable is the problems that they have, the anxieties that they feel, the hesitations that they have. So you could say, hey, I am building a product for university students. Presumably they're 18 to 22, but there are millions of them. So what I wanna know is, let's say first-year students who are, I don't know, engineering students who are nervous about their ability to keep up with course content or nervous about their ability to learn quickly enough, who have access to a computer and are facing these types of common problems within their courses. So you can see this is not saying I'm targeting 18 to 22-year-old students. I'm saying within that, here are the subgroups of problems that I'm trying to solve, and that's what I would segment based on.

Got it. Okay, so you're doing it more on, I guess, behavior.

Exactly. Yeah. Behavioral segmentation is always more useful than just demographic segmentation.

Perfect. All right, this is gonna be a tough one. So, but Joey from San Jose is asking, how do you help customers overcome anxiety and habit? This is not like in the real world, but like in the product world. Like, so you talked about this on your slide, like, hey, like you kind of, you wanna move them further down the journey. So like specifically to the buyer journey or the prospect journey or the customer journey, whatever journey you wanted to like how do you move them further down the funnel when they come to that point when there's anxiety and all that type of stuff?

For sure. Yeah, it's a great question. It is, to your point, really hard to say universally this is how you do it. If people wanna go deep into this topic, I really do recommend Demand Side Sales. It really talks about Bob's experience in how do you overcome anxieties and hesitation, all that stuff. It really is about a few things. One, The most important thing is to be crystal clear on who these people are and what their anxieties are. You may think you know them, but you may actually just be at the surface level. The deeper you understand why things happen— for example, Bob in that book talks about, um, he worked in the home building industry, like custom homes, whatever, and helping sell these homes to— that are smaller— to empty nesters or people whose kids have moved away. And they were finding that these people were hesitant to make a purchase because they had various anxieties. But one of them was they were saying, oh, we don't want to host dinners anymore. We want to downsize. Other people can host, blah, blah. So they were saying we don't need the dining room table anymore, but they still weren't pulling the trigger and making the purchase. So they went really deep into the anxieties, the hesitations of this demographic, and they saw that even though these people didn't want to host the big dinners anymore, the dining room table had sentimental value for them and they had a really hard time giving that up, sending the dining table somewhere else or selling it, etc. So one of the ways in which they overcome this anxiety was they actually shrunk part of the square footage of the living space and created a nook that the dining room table could go into, which helped avoid that anxiety of What am I going to do with the dining room table? Who do I give it to? Blah, blah. And even though their words said one thing, their actions said something else. And then they create a very specific solution to addressing that anxiety. So this is just an example to tell you there's no single way to address an anxiety, but if you can be very clear on who these people are and why they're anxious, you can then trial a bunch of different things through mockups, through feature updates, through through offering discounts, through offering white glove service, like premium customer service. There are different techniques to overcome the anxiety, but it really starts from understanding them all first.

Yeah, perfect. The only thing I would add to that, and I think we did this in your class, Oz, was we did an empathy map for our dummy ideas or whichever for the project. So folks, look up something called an empathy map. It's really good. It helps you identify what are these potential pain points and like forthcoming anxieties. And if you don't know what they are, then you'd go and you do user interviews to, uh, identify what those particular things are. They're very helpful when you're doing product development and just in general ideation. Um, cool, we're, we're towards— I'm going to wrap up here because I want to make sure we have like, you know, about 10 minutes for networking. Oz, thank you so much. This has been great. I genuinely enjoy this. I thought the content The content was awesome. We, we still have about 135 people live. We were at about 205, and people are starting to leave now. But, uh, you know, people are also going to see the recording of this, so, um, you know, I think this is some great content. Uh, the way I like to wrap these up is, uh, any last minute or, uh, any last piece of advice for the founders and attendees on this call?

Yeah, uh, thanks again for having me, to Founders Institute. This is always So much fun for me to talk about because I really think I've seen like one of our clients at PMF Studio has raised like $30 million. They're like a Series B company, but they still engage us to do this process, right? Because they've kind of, as they call it, done the drunken walk to their first successful product. So this stuff is really important. Even large companies get it wrong. Spend more time than you think you should in understanding the users. Don't fall in love with your own solution. Build it and they will come doesn't work. There's so much noise in the market. There's a lot of inertia. So make it a habit to frequently go back and talk to actual users, both current customers, non-users, like people who don't know about your product, churn users, and then continue updating personas that are based on jobs to be done and you'll maximize your chance of success.

That's it guys, you've heard it. You wanna go build a unicorn? Just follow what Oz just said and you'll be fine. You heard it here first. I take 1% for setting this up. Stuff, but, uh, but all right folks, we're going to wrap up here. I'm going to end the session. You'll see a bunch of virtual tables. Oz will have his own table, um, you'll have the ability to create your own tables as well, and then there'll be some general networking. We also have one table if you want to chat with someone from the Founder Institute team, that will also be there. But, uh, enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much for joining, and we'll see on the tables. Thanks everyone.

Thank you.