Ask Me Anything with Alex Osterwalder and David Bland

Going live everywhere. Alrighty. Where is everyone logging in from? Can we see the chat? I think I've got too many browsers open here. Oh, here we go. Oh, hi. Carl from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Spain. Aid from Nigeria. Hey, Aid. Dan from Stockholm. Carlos from Mexico. I'm always really surprised at how international our sessions are. It seems like there's always participants from every corner of the globe. Thanks for joining, everyone. Colombia. Nestor. Hey, Nestor. Larry from nyc. I'm actually in Zurich in Switzerland and David is in San Francisco, I believe.

Yeah, outside San Francisco in Northern California. Cool.

Hey, Martin, I think we're not too far from each other here in Zurich. Julia from Russia. Hello. America from Lisbon.

Hello.

Yep, you can start the questions, Ricardo. For sure. We're going to get started in just one minute. If you can all add them to the Q and A. So there's a Q and A bar that you can all access in the Zoom panel. If you just add your questions in there. We'll get started just in. In a second. I always like to wait until it's perfectly on double zeros and we go.

It's a Swiss thing.

It is. It's Alex. It's Alex. Oh, and by the way, everyone, Alex was meant to be here today. He had to tend to something urgently. He might still join us, but it's just David and I today. I won't be answering any of your questions because I'm not the author. David is all the brains behind here, so he'll be walking you through, everyone. Right, it's five o' clock here, so let's get started. Welcome everyone to this Ask Me Anything session with David Bland today, the author of Testing Business Ideas. Obviously, here are our speakers. Alex, unfortunately can't make it quite yet, but perhaps join us in a little while. This is the book that you all know about and surely all have a copy of. If you don't have a copy, I would highly recommend you go and buy one. It's really one of the best books I've seen my entire life. And we've got a whole suite of tools, basically a webpage where you can access all the free tools that are mentioned in the book as long as as well as all of the exclusive content. So if you'd like to get access to that, just head over to strategize.comtest and you'll be able to download all of the tools talked about in the book. Just like to mention that this session is brought to you by our Testing Business Ideas virtual masterclass which is going to be taking place later this year in September. So after the summer, it's on the 15th, David. Is that it?

Yes. It's going to be three days, well over three days. So it's going to be really exciting.

Yeah. It debuted in February in London right before kind of pre Covid when we could still kind of do groups and stuff. But do you want to just run us through what it's about and what people could expect?

Yeah, we're really excited. Been doing a lot of virtual work anyway before this pandemic unfortunately hit us. And we had a really amazing in person masterclass on testing business ideas in London before the pandemic hit, at least here in the United States anyway. And we've been just working, translating it all and making sure it flows really well for a virtual workshop. It's very interactive. So it's not a webinar. Not a webinar. It's very much an interactive experience online. Lots of exercises, interactions. So if you are a fan of the book, it's, it's a very much a, you know, taking you through the book, through exercises, getting you to know each other. So it should be, it should be a lot of fun.

Yeah, I'm certainly looking forward to it. We just did the building Invincible Companies one with Alex and team and it was, it was a really, really cool experience. Really great learning experience. But I'll stop that. Sorry. We'll get right back to the session, guys. Ok, so we've got one question from Stephen Simmons. He is asking is there a recognized strategizer community where career jobs are shared? Actually, that's probably not the best question to start with, but. So I read the wrong one there, but we've got. Can you take us through the iterative cycle cyclic roadmap from idea to validated business model?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think from our experience in working with teams all around the world and I'm very fortunate, I get to work with companies in different industries, automotive, pharma, retail, software, you name it. And the common theme I've seen through all of them is that if you lean too hard on just the business side as far as business design, or too hard on just the testing side, which means you're kind of going through that lean startup cycle. It causes some weird dynamics and you might actually fail in a slow way, not quickly and learn. And so what we've seen time and time again is how to balance both. And that's what we tried to convey in the book. Also Alex's Invincible company, also with the portfolio Trying to get you to go from new ideas to more sort of cash cow stable ideas over time, which is a very iterative process. But yeah, it's from the business design side, like how do you ideate, how do you prototype out some business opportunities, like where you play, how do you assess those opportunities? So there are different ways you can assess a model, like my switching costs or how defensible is this thing I'm about to create. And then on the testing side it's like, where's my risk? So we map out our hypotheses, we design the experiment and we learn from that and then we feed that back into the business design side. So it's very telling. I think when I go, you know, I mentor startups in Silicon Valley out here too, and they're all in on the testing side, right? They're just like, test, test, test, test, test. And then I'm like, what's your business model? And they're like, oh, we'll figure that out later. And that I think, not to get on a rant here, but I think is coming back to bite us. We have a lot of these really giant companies now that just said we'll just raise VC money and it'll all work out later and we'll just keep testing, we'll keep doing our product thing, you know, and these companies don't have sustainable business models. Like the entire gig economy is held up by VC money. And it's very troubling to me because now when it comes back to, okay, now we have to actually treat our employee, our contractors as employees, so to speak, and regulations chains, it's all like, let's just push back on the laws and fight them, you know. And so I don't really believe in this, we'll just figure out the business model later approach. And so I've been doing a lot of kind of unwinding of that in accelerators that I work with. But and if you just have, if heavily go on the business design side, then you don't actually go out and test it. And so you have this amazing looking business model and all these canvases, right? But you can't just go build the thing and then see if you got it right. You have to test your way through it. So the cycle is very much on the business assigned side going through that and then on testing side going through that and then having each one inform one another.

Excellent, thanks for that, David. We're going to move on to the next question. We've got lots coming in, so we're going to cover a lot, I think, in this half an hour. So I had one by email from Martin de Florin and I thought it was interesting. He says he's asking how important is it for companies to increasingly convert skills into products for several markets instead of product for a specific market.

I think especially now, it's very important. You'll notice this was kind of happening also before the pandemic. You'll notice that car companies, for example, we're not a car company anymore, we're a mobility company. And I work with car companies, some of the biggest in the world. And it's a shift I'm seeing across all of them. You'll notice in the messaging and the marketing, it's very much a no, no, we're not longer a car company, we're a mobility company. And when you start to think about it, it makes a lot of sense, right? If all of your domain expertise and your skills go into a product which is a car that serves a market or a series of markets, I think car companies know that sales aren't going to go up and to the right forever. You know, one that's not great for the environment. So we're introducing a lot of more like car sharing, you know, connected car things with your car can serve multiple people or multiple owners even. I think, you know Elon Musk's dream of Tesla, right, is your Tesla goes off and makes money for you while you sleep, you know, doing ride sharing and delivering stuff for you. You may laugh at that, but I don't think he's joking when he says that's his dream. He really means that. So you think of your car as a service then. And then people go, what is car ownership? And should I really be dumping all my time investment in R and D into cars? And you'll notice people are diversifying. They're going into bike sharing, they're going into helping the elderly kind of get around if at home or at assisted living facilities, like the mobility aspects for that before the Olympics actually were canceled in Japan, there was a lot of mobility stuff going around, that whole design of that event. And so there's some really interesting stuff from, I see companies shifting from we're really good at X, you know, but we can't just translate all that skill into a car. And it's not just automotive. If you look at, you know, like I work with paint companies, right? And they're like, we're a paint company, but now we're a color company. And it's like, you know, there's a whole business model around color that doesn't just manifest itself as a product for painting. You know, paint is for a hundred years about same way we're doing, you know, roughly the same way we're making paint. Right. It hasn't changed all that much. But if you start thinking of all the domain and color expertise you have, then you become like really broad as far as how you apply that, that thinking into different markets. So I see this trend, if you'll notice. Just pay attention to how companies brand themselves. It's super fascinating to me when they go from I'm a blank company product, you know, focus to a. I'm sort of a ability or like this verb kind of thing, you know. And I think it's smart because you tap into all your company's expertise and capabilities and skills and you try to translate that into different opportunities that are still close to your core. And what you know, you're not going from like, I'm an automobile company, so now I'm making like potato chips or something. You're still doing something that's really near and dear. But I think it's just a trend we're gonna continue to see as companies rebrand and subtly change from I'm a product company to more of like on this capability that we're delivering across different verticals.

Excellent answer there, David. I think actually Sebastian Becker brings in a great question just on kind of top of what you said there. And he's asking in more research intensive settings, so like pharmaceuticals engine solutions, where do you have to spend time developing inventions first? How can you approach testing and experimenting there?

Yeah, well, a lot of it when I work with R and D groups and I do quite a bit, what I'm noticing is the business modeling is getting pushed more and more onto them. And so usually executives are frustrated where they've maybe not aligned the R and D group well to the overall strategy of the company. Or same thing with innovation labs. You know, they, they're working through something, but maybe it's not aligned really well and they don't have guardrails on where they're playing. And I don't know from my experience, like innovation labs, you have about two or three years to figure it out before the executives shut it down. And so if you're not providing overall value, they just get frustrated. Which is very different from venture capital. Right. Venture capital takes a very much longer term view. Whereas inside kind of corporate America or corporate just around the world, I haven't met a lot of people that have patience for that kind of time horizon. They're not going to wait that long. It's going to be a shorter time horizon for them. And so if you're constantly working R and D and creating inventions and tech and then you're kind of throwing it over the wall for someone to monetize it, I think that's inherently risky. So what I've been doing when I work with R and D groups, it's been kind of pulling that business modeling upstream more into like how do we actually create a sustainable business model for this tech? Because if you think like just picture your business model canvas, right? Really you're just working in the key resources box. If you're like working through some kind of cool tech and that's the scope of your work, you're kind of starting from the backstage and the key resources box, like your tech is basically just a sticky in that box and you have to figure out the rest of the entire canvas. And so what's the value prop of that tech you're creating? What customer are you serving? How do you actually reach that customer? That is like a technology push. And if you don't figure that out, it's inherently risky to throw that over the wall to the rest of the organization and say, okay, go monetize this amazing thing we just built. So just from my experience, I'm seeing R and D groups and more of these, like tech push groups, technology push groups adapt more like business model thinking because they realize for them to be successful, it's not just creating successful tech and hoping other parts of the org figure out the monetization strategy. They have to be thinking about that earlier on because it's really hard in that handoff. I mean the context is lost. And this idea of I received a thing and I don't know the context of how you created this thing. And I'm supposed to create like a sustainable model from it. It's just really hard to pull off. Well.

Yeah, and actually Sebastian, I hope that answer, that answers your question. But we did a corporate in a, like a webinar yesterday with Bayer. He's a global pharmaceutical company. And we, we talk, we talked a lot. They gave their whole kind of presentation around the, their portfolio map and the kind of follow of experiments that they're doing. So keep an eye out for that. That's coming out tomorrow. I see Alex has joined us. Hey Alex. But yes, Sebastian, I hope that answers your question. I'll move on to the next one because we've got a lot coming in here. Bogdan hey. Bogdan is a Stradi regular always see on here. So good to see you. He says, I understand how you test product desirability, but how do you test for whole business models? Because that is where the competitive advantage comes from.

Yeah, maybe I'll start and Alex to jump in. I think desirability isn't just your product, you know, it's the overall value proposition. Is there a fit with the customer, how you reach them, how do you build relationships with them? What kind of the relationship do you have with them? That's just one piece of the puzzle that we often focus way. Well, I've seen both. I've seen us focus almost no time on that and it's a build it and they will come kind of thing. And then I've seen the. We spend way too much time on that and then we don't figure out viability, which is cost and revenue. You know, ideally that one box, you know, is less than the other to make it sustainable. And then feasibility, which is the whole backstage like your key partners, activities, resources. If you can't actually execute the infrastructure to make it happen, it doesn't matter how desirable your product is. And I constantly have this exercise I do in my workshops and advising where we say like imagine a product you really loved that doesn't exist anymore and everybody can think of that product. And it's almost always because the business model failed. It's not because the product wasn't great, it's because they didn't have a sustainable business model and they didn't test desirability and viability out enough. So I think it's unfortunate that that continues to occur. We see great products just have terrible business models or just not the awareness of what all it takes to actually run it and scale it.

Awesome, thanks for that, David. Maybe one last one I'll ask from. So Rafael Camus asked by email. He's asking how do I overcome a team's resistance to creating rough experiments?

I think Alex is working on this younger, but I think the idea of rough is kind of. That's a really interesting word to use. I think even in our early experiments we do try to be disciplined about like have a hypothesis, design your experiment. What are you going to measure? What's your success criteria? So if you're following that there is some element of just, you know, your hypothesis is testable, discrete and precise and all that. But I think, I think people almost have an aversion of just. They're not really. They don't feel really confident in Their ability to design the right kind of test or kind of experiment and go run it. And therefore they're just very nervous about, well, I'm going to do all this work and then I'm going to get this learning, but maybe I'll mess it up or maybe I'll put all my biases in there. And I think running giant slow experiments is not going to help you though. Like you don't want to spend three months or six months on something and realize you're wrong. You want to spend like a week and just learn a little bit and kind of build up your evidence over time. So it's a very much cultural thing. And also when you hear that kind of feedback from your team, think about your culture. Do you have a culture where it's like safe to fail? Do you have a culture where if you run something and it's wrong, do you get fired? Or is it a career limiting move? Because a lot of times I've noticed that when I get pushback on working that way, it's because people feel like they're going to be penalized for not having a bunch of success to report. So I'd also look at your culture really, really closely on that one too.

Can you hear me now? Because I was trying to speak and I realized I didn't have my mic on, so beginner's mistake. I've never been on stage before, so I really don't know how this work. I wanted to add to what David already said. Really? Well, just the question before about shouldn't we test everything? Right. So actually I had a breakthrough in my thinking couple of years back when someone in a big pharmaceutical company said, Alex, this is brilliant because we actually tried to always test the whole idea. Oh, we're going to make a project in this, in this field. And they always try to tried to test the whole idea. And how do you test the whole idea? You actually build a business, right? So for me, the breakthrough was when I understood the whole value of what we're doing is we're taking an idea, kind of shaping it with this, then we're shaping it with this. So it's still the whole idea. We try to make everything explicit as fast as we can, maybe four hours or so. But then this is where it gets interesting. We say, okay, probably this thing is not going to work. So what do we need to do first? We need to ask ourselves, what are the underlying hypothesis, the things that need to be true for this idea to work?

Right.

And this depends on your idea. So you Take this big idea, you break it into small chunks and as David just said, we have desirability, we have feasibility, viability, maybe adaptability, but we broke down the idea into smaller chunks that we can test. And then what David opened my eyes up to is, okay, well, we can now turn this into the assumptions map. So if you have the testing business ideas book, you say, well, now we take all these assumptions and hypothesis and we try to prioritize them, but it's this really, this is really, really important. And I see, and I'm curious, David, about you. I see too few teams being aware that they're taking a big idea and they're breaking it down into smaller chunks and smaller chunks, not in the sen of oh, which product feature can I test? But we're testing the whole idea because at the end of the day, you're building a business, you're not building a product. Right? So what I don't see enough is this idea of prioritization saying, okay, these are the most important ones that we don't know yet. People go right into building something and you know, very product focused maybe, okay, we're going to look at the customer segments, job spins and gains, but it's about the whole business. So this whole idea of prioritizing, breaking down your big idea into smaller chunks of risks, that is something I still don't see being done systematically enough. So David, throwing back the question to you, do you see teams now prioritize their hypothesis more or are they still kind of stuck in this loop of oh, we gotta kind of figure out if people want this product.

I think they're slowly starting to, and I think it's because some of this work has permeated through other things. You know, I know design sprints are very popular now and Google has basically. I gave a talk before the pandemic, I gave a talk with, with Google in San Francisco and they've taken this two by two and kind of pulled it into their design sprint process. Right. And so I think when you have a team going through that process now, they're at least attempting to prioritize. But I feel like it's just we don't give space to have that conversation, you know, because it's uncomfortable conversation if you don't know how to facilitate it, you're not sure how to address your, all your fears of you're building the wrong thing with your teammates and then you just kind of keep that back in your head and it's always there, like whether you're coding or designing or Testing out different channels and all that. Like, it feels like in my hair working on something that matters, you know? And so I think just giving people the space to have the conversation and then say, okay, what's the most important thing? That if we have no evidence to support and we're wrong, we're done. Like this whole initiative, it doesn't matter how beautiful the product looks, this whole initiative is done. And I think it's slowly coming along because it's been adapted by governments and by people running sprints now. But we have a lot of work to do. I feel there's still not enough space for the conversation. And then people just jump to build because that's kind of what they. What they know.

Excellent. Thank you. Both those very detailed answers and Alex for joining in with the iPad. It was very slick. So we have a question from Lloyd. He's asking Alex and David, what is the strongest and most memorable or successful experiment that you've recently seen? So I'll let David go first.

Hard. There's so many. And when you say successful, I think that's somewhat misleading. Right. Because some of the most interesting ones are the ones that don't succeed. I won't talk about the company, but I'll talk about one that succeeded but in the wrong way. I was working with a company and they're working on, I don't know if you're familiar with Harry Potter brace in the Harry Potter movies, right? And the paintings and how they subtly move. There's a term for that. It's called cinemagraph. And so imagine being online and seeing something very high res, Not a gif, just a different kind of format. And so working through a team is really cool. Working through what's the value prop to what segment. And we thought, this is a great B2B play. Like, people are going to be on Pinterest and they're going to want to see their stuff suddenly shift or on a Shopify store or something. They want to see it, like drag people's attention to buy something in testing it. Overwhelming positive response from the market. It was all for people wanting to animate their cats and their dogs. B to C, we're like, what is going on? It's like a flood. It's like we opened the floodgates and only marketed to, like really passionate pet owners, you know. And so it succeeded, but not in the way the team was interested in. The B2B play was not interested in like, almost like a Snapchat tile style thing, you know. And so it was just really Interesting to see it happen because sometimes you build something or you're testing something. And actually we did this without software. We were just manually. It's long story, but we were manually creating the animations and see like, who it resonates with. And it's not always who you intend and it's like how you respond to that matters, you know. So I just thought that was a really funny story of something that was like so much like B2B. We got this figured out and then the influx of like, make my cat sparkle. Everybody wants their cat to sparkle. What's going on? And so we ended up parking the idea. But I just thought it was a really interesting example of it was successful, but with the wrong customer segment.

I'll give you two things, and one actually comes from Strategizer. You know, when we, when the pandemic started and we asked ourselves, should we do virtual master classes? It was, you know, in a context where everybody was doing stuff for free. So it's not, you know, you can't just assume people are going to pay. And rather than saying, okay, we're going to go over certain price, we said, well, we don't know how much people are going to pay. And we launched this, testing this experiment to see if they would pay 1300,000, 600 or 1,900 as a price. And our regular masterclass bid over 2000. So pretty close to the regular price. And something very unexpected happened. The most expensive,900 actually had double the conversion rate of the cheapest one. Something you would just never assume. How can, you know, you can't, you can't, right? So if we had just gone for, you know, average price 1600, well, we would have left a lot of money on the table, right? So you can't just assume. You just always need to ask yourself, even if you have a pretty good idea, you know, what do customers really value? So for us, that was a big insight. Again, you never know. You never know. And in particular in the virtual space, in the shift, even when everybody's doing stuff for free, people see value in certain products and things. The other thing, and I just quick one on pricing in general. So I played around on Twitter with a couple of questions. I did a poll and I asked, would you pay 75 bucks for a newsletter if I started one? And I put four options. And then one person already said, oh, very bad experiment. Because a, it's people's opinion and you're telling you're giving them the answer said, well, if it was my only experiment yes, it'd be a disaster.

It was really bad.

But if you're doing 10, it's actually a very cheap 60 second experiment to just get a feel. What are people saying right now? You don't take that as a basis for decision making. So there's this still. Is this thinking out there that you do one experiment and you make big decisions based on that? No, this was a 60 second experiment. Takes me 60 seconds to do it, one minute to analyze. And I've learned, okay, in what direction do I take my things? So I think people need to also a little bit, you know, grow up on. It's going to be 10 experiments and before I make one that takes me five minutes, why don't I do one that takes me one minute and then one that takes me a day? Right. So we need to learn in terms of what. And again, David, I love the way you phrased it. You call it the, you know, the experiment sequence. Right. So I think we really need to think more of in terms of sequences where you start with the cheapest and fastest just to get a feel. You're never going to make a decision based on that. But if you immediately start with something that takes you a day, you might have wasted a day. So don't waste a day when you can waste a minute. Right. So there's this, I think this, this, this granularity and professionalism that we don't yet have and where we can still improve.

Excellent. So we've got a lot more questions coming in, so I'll move on to the next one. We've got one that's come straight out of the book, so hopefully everyone's read it.

On here.

We have Ricardo, who is asking, can you explain a little bit about the main challenges that you face using the concierge experiment?

Well, that one's for David for short.

You know, culturally, it's always time. It's really interesting when I tap into a team's creativity, they can always come up with a way, almost always to create a manual process to deliver what that thing should do to deliver the value prop to the customer. They can almost always crazily go, oh, we do this and this and this business and just like do it this way. We could like hand deliver this value to them rather than going off and building some crazy, crazy behind the scene architecture. But it's always time. So you think about how you're incentivizing a corporation or even the startup extent. I think startups do face this a little bit, is you're not incentivized to be creative and do something that might be a little slower, that doesn't scale, to learn, you know, and so usually when I get pushback is we don't have time to do that, and we have to build. And it's like, wait, we don't have time to learn where the customer actually wants the outcome of the thing we're about to build. But we do have the time to go build that thing and scale it and then find out what happens. It seems really. When I say it out loud, it seems really silly, but that is always the pushback. It's not. It's not that they can't do it. It's always the, well, we don't have time. We don't have do. We don't have time to do things that don't scale. And my challenge to them is, early on, you often do things that don't scale because you want to learn, and you can take that learning and you can inform your overall business design and your product design. But I think that's a cultural thing that we have to really grapple with inside organizations, is that people aren't incentivized to do things that don't scale, that emphasize learning, because probably it's really hard to measure, and we're not sure how that goes into their annual review. You know, it's always like, what did you deliver on what date? And it almost doesn't matter if that thing was successful or not. It's like, well, you hit the date and you delivered it because it's easy to measure. So, yeah, I think it's. It's almost always time. And just this cultural pushback on. I don't have time to do this, like, the.

One of. The. One of culture. Right. Because, you know, the example I always like is, you know, Owlet, I don't know if you know this story, but Owlet is this baby sock that monitors the vital signs of a baby. And now it's a real product. But, you know, when they started testing, they did things like a person in the room who would monitor the baby rather than a device. Now, again, it's the attitude, I think so, thinking that, oh, well, we don't have to build a device, but we can put a real person into that room watching the baby, which might be a bit weird, right? But you do learn. So the challenge with those kinds of experiments is also to then understand what did you learn and what did you not learn, and how does that actually relate to a device. So it is kind of complex thinking because of course it's different when you have a person in the room. It's not the solution that you're going to build. So sometimes people get a little bit confused around the variables. Okay, what was the difference? When we have a device, when we have a real person, what did we learn and what did we not learn? Because I think, you know, in the scientific, real, scientific mindset, you know exactly which variables you're controlling. And I think in the whole testing movement, we're not always making those variables explicit enough. So it's like, oh, we put the solution in there. Yeah. But there are 25 things or 30 things that characterize that solution. How are you going to know it's because of this or because of that that they didn't like it or didn't work? So you have to be able to narrow it down. So I think this comparison is not always easy between a scalable solution and a concierge type solution. So it requires some pretty interesting conversations. But I think it's a great underestimated tool because you can learn very quickly and you should invest the time. I love what you're saying, David. The time aspect, you know, they're just not allocating the costs well enough, I guess, to figure out what costs more time.

Yeah. And just building really quickly off your answer, I think coming back to how it biases things that is concerning, you should take it into consideration. So if we're going to, let's say we want to test out where to put a vending machine in a store, in a physical store. Well, we could just put a person there first and say, why don't you try to with a little table and sell this thing to customers when they walk around? That could go really well. And then you put the machine there and people walk right past it. Right. Because it was a human biasing the thing. So biasing experiments. So you do have to think about that. But I feel like time and time again it's just, nope, we got to go build the thing. We can't do something manually that doesn't scale. Great.

Thank you both for your answers. So I've seen Marnie Landon has posted both in the chat and in the Q and A box. So definitely gonna have to answer her question. It's a bit more serious, it's a bit more down to earth, I guess. But it's, it's in relation to Covid and she's asking, how does Covid impact innovation positively or negatively? And will there be any further severe economic setbacks to follow? So it is an ask me anything. So put that one in there. Would love to hear what you guys think about that.

Dave, do you want to go ahead a little bit about. You did a lot of I've seen recently the testing in this context. I think that could be very interesting. What does it actually mean for innovation and testing?

Yeah, I mean there have been others speaking out about this too, like Steve Blank, who I admire quite a bit and pull inspiration from. Just was speaking about this recently too. I felt like he made a great point about everyone's at home now. So those executives you couldn't get to before, now you can get to them. They don't have a personal assistant. They're not walled off. You can get to them on LinkedIn and their personal email and other ways. And so I think there is a positive. Even though we're all home and distributed, there's a connectedness that happens when we're all online that way. But you know, I'm in California. We actually did pretty well when it first came out and then we had a Memorial Day weekend and everybody kind of loosened up and partied and now we're having biggest daily rates and spikes in Covid we've seen so far. And so I'm not impressed, I will say, with the US's response from a government level on what we've, what we've done so far. I feel like it's a mess. I think the positive side is it is going to force us. It's almost like I heard this, I don't remember where I heard it recently, but it's almost like take things and fast forward them 10 years. And so things that we thought were, you know, this remote work thing, that there were some companies that were doing it and some companies dabbling in it and other companies that weren't trying it at all. Now it's, we're forced to do it, you know, we're forced to figure it out. And so I feel like it's just accelerated things. It amplified things in a way that we're already starting to be trends and it just forced us because of the constraints to figure it out. And so I do think that's a positive. I do think that taps into our kind of resilience and creativity. And all these things were culturally not norms yet, but because we're all suddenly remote, it's been accelerated and we're having to figure it out. But I do think it's going to yield some opportunities. I know, Alex, you have some ideas about this too, about what it does to us as Businesses, but I think just as people, I think it's really tapping into our creativity. And can we. Things that maybe we felt like, oh, that won't work because it's online. My kids are taking karate online now. You know, like there's all this stuff that now. It's just now that we're forced in this situation, it's not so much that we can't do it because it's online. That stigma is kind of getting actually obliterated.

Yeah. I'll share my little scribbles one more time. I think one of the big things, so two or three topics here, because there's a question with many answers. Right. If we look at innovation, I actually think COVID 19 might be a booster. And that's because I'm always very positive in my thinking. And the reason is why, because 90% of companies were disrupted by this. So their exploit is just they can't operate the same way. Some of businesses completely expired. Take travel industry, hotel industry. So they're forced now to explore. So this is a disruption that affected every single company on the planet and very few positively. You could say Zoom and Netflix positively affected. Right. They're disrupted, but in terms of scaling faster. And then you have obviously pharmaceutical companies which continue. But it is. The disruption happened to everybody. While disruption was a theoretical concept for most people before because they knew it could happen, but you know how humans are when it's not in front of you and it doesn't hit you, that's not going to happen to me. It's actually a human characteristic that we never think is going to happen to us. So it just happened to everybody. So a lot of companies were forced to explore. So the awareness at the leadership level of disruption is a lot bigger now. Where it's not clear is are we going to go back to normal at one point where it's just going to say, okay, you know, we can work again, travel again, business as usual. I do think the awareness is here and the exploration that some companies were forced to do will expand. The thing that is not quite clear yet, and this is now maybe a macro answer is exploration requires money. Not that much, but it does require money teams, right. You know, innovation teams. So there's a mixed signals right now. Some innovation teams got killed, some innovation teams got scaled. But where for me personally, even for strategizers, not quite clear yet is, given what's happening in the US now with a surge of the virus, what is the economic impact longer term? Because you can't escape this, you can't buy yourself out of this economic crisis. Right. So if there are no consumers at one point, companies are not going to earn money and there are no more earnings. You just can't compensate putting money on the market. So that is for me a bit unclear here. Are these budgets going into exploration and innovation safe? I think it can be positive, but depending a little bit on how the consequences of the US's non response or you know, bad crisis management. You know, look, it's, it is what it is, right? Because if you compare the curves, right now it's going up, right? It went down a little bit, now it's exploding. We don't know the economic consequences. So for innovation that might actually be, it's not just for innovation for every single company on the planet. We might just be at the very beginning of something very hard. That's unclear.

Thank you both for your inputs on that. Actually Matthew Holmes has just shared an article in the chat, it's very relevant. He said we found collaboration was a great benefit of COVID I'll just leave that one there Matthew, if you'd like to elaborate a bit more in the text and we'll pick that one back up. But I'll move on to the next question because we're getting a lot coming through here. So an anonymous attendee so didn't want to be named. Do you have any advice for startup companies who have limited resources to test their hypothesis in the most cost effective and efficient way? Do you have any tools, platforms that you can suggest to use to gain market and consumer insights? David, would you like to get that one off?

Sure. I mean I do a lot of startup accelerator work and I just did a really smaller workshop online yesterday where I took entrepreneurs through their own ideas for three hours and it was just group of 15 small. But what I, what I did and this is something we didn't have luxury doing in the book with Alex was listing out all the tools that match each experiment. And so there are reasons why you don't put all those tools in the book. One, there's new tools every day that you're going to miss out on that are going to be the hot new tool and two, there's tools get acquired, shut down, et cetera. So but in digital fashion, you know, when we do our workshops and masterclasses and, and we do experiment libraries that people can kind of go through with self paced and learn, we do have that mapping. So for every kind of experiment I have a list of tools that are my go to. I shared some of Those to the attendees yesterday. We're working on making that more robust with Alex and the team. But the good news is there's almost like an overwhelming number of tools now. The bad news is it's just hard to choose which one's going to help you the most. And so you know, when you're doing research like search trend analysis using Google, using Adwords, using Moz or something to go in and see, like for this region for this time period, are people actively seeking a solution, like coming, pulling from Steve Blank there, actively seeking a solution to a thing that I'm trying to solve? Because Maybe you interviewed five to 10 people, you don't know if it goes beyond them. And can you go online and find out through discussion forums, through search trend analysis, through all these different things? So the short answer is yes, there are plenty of tools out there for you. I think the challenge is always how do you match them to what you're attempting to actually perform and learn? And we're working on that. But the good news for startups, a lot of those aren't very expensive. You know, some of them are free. I'm a big fan of the no code movement right now too. So even if you want to stitch stuff together in a mashup mvp, there are tools that you don't have to really even know how to code. You can take Airtable and Zapier and Unbounce and put it all together and all of a sudden you got a product that kind of functions. So there are all kinds of real cool things you could do. It's just always maybe even follow up after with this AMA with us, send us a note if there's a specific thing you're trying to explore. Because the biggest challenge is just picking the right tool for the job.

I would add to that that it's rarely a tool or cost. Two things. First one is, is the cost of failure bigger than the cost of, you know, a small subscription for certain tools? Right, that's the first thing. Because startups, you know, kind of got into the habit that everything should be free. But, you know, cost of failure is big. So paying a little bit to validate your business model, probably you shouldn't hold you back. But the other one is, I think is rarely a tool problem because, you know, we're almost sometimes in this mindset, oh, I need to build something or I need this tool to test. No, you don't. Right. So for a long time there weren't any tools. A little bit more energy you put into it, but you know, there are a lot of things you can do or you can hack together. And let me give you a silly example. Number one, you can do interviews with people. It's a good start, but it's not enough. Right. So we know there's so many things you can do before you ever build something, before you ever go to tool. Next step. Okay, you now know. Okay, these are probably the challenges that my customers might have. Oh, what if I did a card sort thing just to get, you know, an idea of their priorities or another one, you know, this speedboat thing that we described. So you understand the biggest pains, the smallest pains, that already starts to give you a pretty deep understanding of the challenges of your customers. Oh, now I understand the challenges. Maybe I also worked a little bit on the features that they like. Again, card sort speedboat. What if I made a PDF brochure that's not very costly, and now I can start to send that to customers. And of course, this is all just discovery, but you can go very far and get very deep information before you kind of go into the tool. So I think, you know, there's this. And I'm not saying tools are not good. They're great. They can speed up certain things in particular when you start scaling your testing. But I don't think tools are the real challenge. And if you don't have the money or don't want to spend the money, there's so many things you can do to get a really, really deep insight into customers, solutions, even willingness to pay. Right. I think there's. There are tons of things we can do. And I'm not trying to say tools are not important, but it's the smallest of all problems, I would say.

Great.

Thank you both for your answers. We've got another one. We'll probably just take a few more. So if you do have any pressing questions, please get them into the Q and A box and I'll try my best to get through them. So Zane Gibbs has asked, can you talk about culture design and culture tests? How do you run them?

Did you, David, did you ever run culture tests? I've never done culture tests. I can give an example afterwards, but maybe you have something there I don't.

Well, I can tell you how I approached organizational transformations, and I certainly there's an overlap in how I approach my work today. But. And I think Alex and I even whiteboarded this out one day and in San Francisco on a whiteboard wall. But basically, it's really interesting when I look at culture, cultural change in companies, it's very much a map out your strategy the best you think it's going to be wrong, by the way, but I usually use like a mind map with the executive team and then how do we break off pieces to go try, right? And that, that try might be really interesting. Might be a lunch and learn with the engineers. It might be like having like some kind of social, like, like, I'm just trying to think of how to describe this, like these like little meetings where you kind of work through things together and just test out these different dynamics. And maybe we said through email we do a video to share updates with our teams. Like, but it's all, it's, it's all experimentation. I think just personally, I had one of the scariest moments in my professional career when I was in front of the entire exec team of this really large travel company and I said, your transformation is just one big experiment. And I thought, oh no, I said the inside part out loud. I shouldn't have done that. And they were like, actually, yeah, there's no way we could predict change in the culture in this org, what it's going to do. And so it was really interesting because it kind of took the attention out of the air. And then we started realizing, hey, let's try and learn and keep experimenting our way through this. Because I think it's so fascinating when I go into companies and they go, there's a bunch of test and learn people that come in and they go, well, here's your five year culture change plan. And you're like, no, what are you doing? So I have tried things, I just didn't call them culture tests. I think is what you framed it, but I think it's exactly how you approach any kind of culture change. You can't plan it out because every time you make a little change, something else will happen you don't expect and then that has ramifications. So yeah, I think it's just a really smart way to approach any kind of change in a big company.

I love that in particular also because again, it's this whole idea of making plans when you know it's execution, but you don't know when you're transforming your culture what's going to work. So again, it's admitting there's uncertainty that it's not an execution problem. I'll give you one concrete thing, but it's not about testing, but it was about culture bringing in a culture of testing. So I worked with the CTO team of a Fortune 50 company and they came to the masterclass with 20 people of their team. And then we did a debrief at their offices. And one of the ideas that we looked at was, okay, let's map out the biggest blockers to innovation, actually to this behavior of experimentation, etc. What's holding us back? And we just put on a flip chart all of these things. So we had, I think about five teams. So they put up these things. All of the blockers today, you know, marketing is blocking us or whatever. They don't know how to do this yet. And then here's the next thing we did. Okay, we said, well, on our flip chart, let's look at the things we can change within one week. Let's look at the things we can change within one month and let's look at the things which we can change maybe within six months. I don't remember the exact timeframes we looked at. And all of a sudden they saw there's some things the blockers they can eliminate immediately. They just never thought of it explicitly. There's some things that's gonna take six months and probably never going to change. Right. But they could immediately work on it. So here we weren't even in the land of assumptions. We were in the land of how do we tear down blockers, right? So wasn't cultural changes that we're going to make a big plan? What are the blockers today? Can we take them down or not? Can we take them down in a week? Can we take them down in a month? Can we take them down in six months? It was a brilliant exercise and that for me was really that kind of eye opener. Also a conversation I had with Scott Anthony, great innovator from Innosight. We had a conversation when we were finalizing the book behind me, the Invincible Company, because we were talking about innovation culture and we looked at blockers and enablers and then Scott Anthony wrote back to me at an email exchange, said, well, Alex, probably we just need to work on blockers. The enablers are important at one point, but, but, you know, just to get started to create an innovation culture, let's just take down the blockers because innovators are already driven to innovate. We're just putting too many obstacles in their way. So I think it's not a big planning exercise and yes, I like that idea of testing certain aspects. But number one, let's just eliminate the blockers first. Those are low hanging fruits. So I think before we go into big cultural change exercises, which are great, must be done and are hard, start with the easy stuff, let's just take away the blockers. So for me, those two little stories, right, you know, having done it with the CTO team, had that conversation with Scott Anthony was an eye opener in the sense that, well, there are low hanging fruits in terms of cultural change.

Great. I think we have just about time for one more. But before we do that, that's someone in the chat, Matthew Holmes, going back to this idea of what Covid kind of did to collaboration. He said it's improved collaboration between people. He's actually been working on a project where they built a 3D printable vacuum powered ventilator. Sounds pretty intense. As an answer to the UK Health Secretary's call for ventilators. Said the demand has since gone away, but we have pivoted to a low cost tech ventilator and now we're looking towards opportunities within developing nations. Refugee camps, rescue helicopters. I just thought it was a great example to see people. Matthew is from Durham University in the UK and said now that's kind of taken a life of its own. We've got companies like Black and Decker and Parker Hannafin getting involved in that kind of collaboration. So I guess the question there would be to David and Alex, what kind of impact do you think Covid will have on collaboration? Will it make it a lot easier to collaborate or will people be more kind of open to collaboration?

I can speak a little bit to the US specifically. I think it's going to have some detrimental effects for in person collaboration. I don't see co working spaces really surviving this. I think co working spaces, it was really tough business model anyway. And the fact that I don't think you're going to fill up open office seating plans anymore with people, even if you put Plexiglas up or something like that. I think a lot of the retailers are shutting down. Maybe those can be repurposed into some kind of spaces. But I feel like a lot of the in person collaboration is unfortunately just until we get this pandemic under control with some decent leadership. It's just gonna. We're not even through our first wave. It's spiking again, but we're still in the first wave here. And so I think remote. I think there's so much that can be improved remotely. It feels like late 90s, early 2000s.com to me. You know, it's like we're all figuring out the web and we're all building for like 10 different browsers and dating myself a little bit here, but it was like lots of long Weekends going. This didn't work at IE5, you know, sorry, I'm not traumatizing anybody with that comment, hopefully. But basically I feel like this is where we are now with video. You know, like, zoom's great, but like, it could be a lot better. When you go to online conferences, you don't get to hang out people in the hallways. Like, we're trying to recreate that experience with our Masterclass, obviously, but most it's just a talk and then there's. You don't know who you're with. And so I think we have a long ways to go, but we're just scratching the surface. I think virtual collaboration could be be amazing. It just feels very early adopter stage still. Even though we have some pretty established tools, I just think there's so much that can be improved.

I think what happened, what's interesting is since people are not traveling at the moment, people are more available. So all of a sudden it's much easier to get the right people into the room for a meeting. So that it's much easier. So actually the consequences are more meetings, but you can get the right people in the room, so you don't have to compromise on that. That's a big boost to innovation because you're going to get the right people who can make the right decisions into a room that is very powerful. I'd build on what David just said. I think there's a very poor virtual meeting culture in the sense that just talking heads, right? What you want to do is you want to use a visual kind of like, you know, virtual sticky notes. You want to put that up. So when we do our projects and strategizers, that's what we do at the virtual Masterclass, there's this experience of you do exercises not just by talking to people and watching slides. And so, no, you do real stuff in a virtual space, as if you were working on a wall and that is now taking off, right? So I'm hearing a lot of people saying, wow, we didn't even know that was possible. So they're moving away from just talking heads because that's the worst possible form of collaboration. It's called blah, blah, blah. Also commonly, just what we're doing now, David and I, but that's really been a huge shift. And I think that is phenomenal. And it allows, I think, also the impact generally on the world in terms of environment. And so we'll see the strengths of not traveling. And we'll also learn where physically meeting makes sense. So I think when we get out of the pandemic and we can travel again. We'll have a completely different attitude. We'll use face to face when face to face is really required, and we'll use virtual when virtual can help us scale and go faster. So far we're working with some companies, they say virtual telemedicine wasn't a topic until the pandemic hit. Now everybody wants to work with that team that was dissed, you know, just a couple of months ago.

Wow.

Okay, so there's a realization of the strengths of virtual. I'm not saying everything should be virtual, but there's a realization. So I think collaboration is going to take a completely different form. We'll have less face to face, but we'll use face to face where it really creates value. We'll have more virtual, but we'll also have better virtual. So I do think in terms of how we collaborate, this is a game changer. But again, you know, it also requires not just jumping on zoom and talking, it requires using visual tools, structured. You know, like we in testing business ideas, we show how you do testing in a structured way, how you visualize your hypothesis and then prioritize. All of that is not. Might be common sense, but it's not common practice yet.

Yeah, those are some great answers and I think that brings us nicely kind of to the end of the session. And just on final note, you know, this whole session has been created and kind of sponsored by upcoming masterclass in September. So I don't know, Alex and David, would you like to just give a little note on this before we finish off today's session?

Yeah, I'm excited about it. I think, you know, we're working really hard to make sure it's very interactive and virtually hands on. And we had a blast at the London Masterclass before this pandemic hit. I was so bummed, you know, I was looking to do those everywhere, you know, because everyone was testing the real, like, ideas and getting out of the building and coming back. It was such a fun experience working with Alex and Francisca and the team. So we're working really hard to make sure it's just as good online. And again, it's not going to be a webinar. I don't know how else to explain. I think we still have this. People think online training are just webinars and they show up 15 minutes late and then they just expect to not do any work. And that's not our style. So if you come, prepare to do work, prepare to learn. And it's intense. Like three days of this is going to be mentally exhausting for you in a good way. So we're really excited to host everyone.

And I think what's really fun doing this with David is the level of professionalization of the testing process. When you don't go through this, you don't realize. So it's not just about, oh, using sophisticated tool and a lot of data. No, it goes down to what's a good hypothesis, how do I prioritize my hypothesis, how do I select the right experiment at the right time, how do I make quick experiments here and there. So it's just fun to see how we're trying to push the boundaries, the level of professionalism. I believe testing is now not an ideology anymore. It's becoming a profession. Might sound a little bit boring, but you know, it's starting to be a profession like accounting. Maybe that's not the best sales pitch I'm doing right now, but there is a level of professionalism that we try to bring into, you know, startups, large established companies that I think is personally, I think it's unprecedented. So we're really trying to push the boundaries beyond the book even. Right. So there's a lot of new content in there already.

Great, thank you both. What a, what a great session. We've had all sorts of questions. Sorry for the I took all different kinds of ones because it isn't asked me anything session. So we're trying to get as much many questions in there as possible. But thank you both David and Alex for taking the time today to answer everyone's questions about the book, about innovation, about testing. It's always great to host these sessions when we can. And yeah, thanks to our lovely audience to you know, spent time to want to learn with us today and ask these questions and be involved in the conversation. So thank you to everyone who's participated and if you do have any questions, please email me@webinarstrategizer.com and I will hand over these questions to Alex and David and we could perhaps do some follow up sessions around that. Thank you everyone. Have a lovely day wherever you are, around the world and hopefully see you soon.

Thanks everybody. Thanks Matt, David, thanks.

Thank you.

Bye guys. Bye everyone. Thanks everyone. See ya. If you do want to connect in the chat box, feel free to put your LinkedIn or whatever contact details you want. We like to keep the community thriving here. Otherwise I shall turn off my camera and I wish you all a lovely day. Bye everyone.