Thank you very much for coming out today. So we're going to talk a little bit about who your customer is and why they don't care about you and what we're going to do about that so that they do start caring about you. A little bit of background to this.
Although I have a degree in business, I'm a trained biologist, and that's what I thought I was going to do with my life. Science. Yeah. I fucking love science.
And what we're going to try and do is connect the dots between you as human beings, the as human beings and the work that you need to do in terms of design and development of the products that you create so that you can actually get people to care. So apart from the fact that none of us have a crystal ball or the ability to see in the future, we are challenged with this idea that we as entrepreneurs or people working with entrepreneurs are required to build for the future. Every day one of you or the people that you work for looks at you and says, Can you create something that's going to be used in the future that we have absolutely no idea what it looks like? And that's becoming increasingly more difficult. Every single day, things speed up just a little bit faster to the point where we can create technology that we think is relevant.
And by the time we roll it out, it may not be relevant anymore or that market's changed. And this happens all the time. Or God forbid, Facebook enters the market or Google decides that that's a good place to be. So. So, in this exact room, about two years ago, I was teaching the Startup Institute's I think first class, was it two years ago?
For those of you who know the Startup Institute, it's kind of grown beyond that. I think they're now in their second or third year. But at about the same time that summer, my son, he was 10 years old, and we were part of a group of people, and the conversation moved to, what would you do when you grow up? So my son, Reese, was asked this question, what are you gonna be working on when you grow up?
what are you going to be doing, what kind of career do you want? And he said, you know, like most 10-year-olds, I don't know. And one of the adults just kept pursuing this question and said, come on, you know, are you going to be a lawyer, are you going to be a doctor, are you going to be an astronaut, are you going to be an entrepreneur like your dad?
And he said, I don't know what I'm going to be because the things that I will be working on haven't been invented yet. And that's the problem that you guys deal with, not just the 10 year old who's now almost 12, but you guys deal with this every single day. The future that you're working on hasn't been invented yet.
So, what do you do? The problem is, of course, you don't have a roadmap for the future, you don't have a crystal ball, so you need some kind of way of understanding what that future looks like. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today.
I'm going to give you the tools for you to see into the future. These are the things we're going to discuss today. These are the things you can write down. Everything else you can just stare at me and listen to my words. These are the things that you need to do every single day.
Let's start with empathy. Empathy is not that complicated in the sense that it's really just putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. It's you thinking or feeling or acting in the way that somebody else might. so that you can understand what they are thinking, feeling, and doing.
And yet, we really, really struggle with this. We talk about empathy, but we are not necessarily very good at being empathetic. And as entrepreneurs, we suck at it even more. How many engineers in the room?
Show of hands. You guys, you know that this is the thing leveled against you, right? This is my idea. I don't necessarily have all the answers, but my idea is the best idea, and I'm going to go and, you know. Build on that.
Not every idea that you have is an idea that somebody is going to embrace. So empathy is something really, really important to learn. And it's not just the domain of the marketers and the salespeople.
It's the domain of everybody. So in order to be empathetic, you have to understand what makes us human. What makes us who we are is ultimately that roadmap that gives you insight into the future.
You're going to start with why we even have brains in the first place. So we're going to do a little bit of biology now, just so that you guys understand what it means to be a human. Does anybody have an idea of why we have brains?
Why don't you come? Anybody? Why do we have a brain?
Why do trees not have brains but we have brains? Nobody's going to answer. Survival.
What kind of survival? Regulation. Okay, you guys are not even close.
It may be. We don't know exactly what the origin of the brain is. So we can procreate.
This guy's getting close. Evolution. Well, evolution is the method, is the system, right?
Okay, the answer is to move. If you don't have a brain, you can't move and vice versa. Those things that don't need to move, like...
the very successful plants that surround us every single day, they don't need to move, they don't have a brain. The brain performs the most important function for us, and that's to move. And why do we need to move? First, to escape predators. So to Bob's point, to survive.
To this guy's point, to procreate. All of the reasons why we need to move and be successful are driven by our ability to move. So much so that there are disgusting animals like this, called a sea squirt, That have a brain when they're in their swimming form.
So they swim through the ocean, they have this fantastic little brain that's made out of dorsal ganglia. And they swim and they swim and they swim until they find somewhere to live. And they put their roots down, and what's the first thing they do once they become sedentary? They digest their brain.
This is actually the same thing that you do as soon as you sit down. This is some of the evidence as to why we need our brains, because we need to move. As soon as we stop moving, we stop using our brain. The success of us as human beings is all about the ability to get our genes from one generation to another, this procreation idea.
But as we've evolved, we've also come up with this concept of memes. Memes are really the same things that we're transferring from generation to generation, except they don't require sex, they just require conversation. or maybe writing down. So as we transform our ideas from one place to another, those become memes, those become things that can help the next generation do better.
So our success is based on our ability to pass on ideas. Okay, now we're pretty good at understanding that and especially as biologists we know the mechanisms, but we kind of forgot this thing on the way. We forgot that When we're designing for human beings, we need to design for those states. Now, I understand that there is a limitation to material science and the size of things, but this doesn't look very natural, right?
Sitting at your desk requires behavior modification. So this doesn't look like a very empathetic environment. Me having to sit down, staring at a glass screen, doesn't feel... Like an empathetic design process. It doesn't feel like somebody said, this person has been evolving all these movement skills, these abilities to go from one place to another and they want to be mobile, they want to meet with other people, they want to converse with other people, they want to interact with other people and we're going to lock them into this tomb called the home office and make them sit in front of a glass screen.
This is not empathetic design. This is design purely out of necessity because in fact The mobility that we have is not a way to describe the cell phone that you own. It's a state that we inhabit as human beings. So the first thing that we are now understanding, in order to be empathetic as we are as designers and developers and entrepreneurs, is that it is a natural state for human beings to be mobile.
Everything around us reminds us of that. Think about every activity that a human being is involved in. We are mobile.
And so the mobility movement, hey, I'm going, I'm going to design something for the mobile world. That's insane. We've been mobile all along.
You're not designing for something new. You're designing for something that's been there all along. The trend is, of course, to be better at designing for that mobility. Now, love it or hate it, this is how that mobility is starting to transform, to adapt to who we are already.
So things are getting smaller and smaller so they can fit into who we are already and fit into the behaviors that we have adapted to make us human. We are not adapting the world around us. The things around us are adapting to who we are as humans. So think about that for a minute. You might say, gee, I've come up with this really good idea.
It's a pair of glasses you can wear and you can see the internet. You're like... Yes, that's called brain. That's actively what you do every single day. This is just a way to make it faster or to transform that experience at a level that you are not able to do just with your neurons.
The next thing we need to understand as part of being human is that unfortunately for most of us, especially if you're 40 something like me, you were taught that the brain is essentially a machine, it's a logical machine. And that if it happens to have an emotional moment, it's probably malfunctioning, right? That, you know, everything should be logical, everything should be rational, and these emotional things, these are just kind of like weird mutations that you just have to deal with.
Well, it turns out that that mutation of being emotional is in fact what makes us human. And that every single sensory input that comes into our body has to be filtered through... those emotional centers in the brain.
So you are in fact an emotional being that has a mutation to think rationally. That's super, super important if you're designing product. Because there are things like this out in the world that are not rational but are incredibly attractive to people.
This is my dad's favorite car. He had one when he was a young man and apparently this is how he won my mother's heart. So I have this car to thank for it.
He, I think he then sold it and bought a Beetle, which I think that's the first time my father ever received a slap from my mother. But this car is an emotional purchase, right? If you buy this car, you're not doing it for rational reasons.
It's slow, it produces a lot of pollution, it's got a shitty gearbox that makes all kinds of weird noises. It's just, I mean, it's a death trap, but it looks awesome. And to my father, it represents a deep emotional connection. And to other classic car owners, this is the kind of emotional attraction that you need to understand if you're designing a product. Now, you might say, well, I don't have any interest in classic cars, and Richard's father is clearly an insane person.
I don't have any of that. I'm just a rational being. But let's look at an example.
These two cars that are available in the market right now, have almost the identical features. If you break them down, you look at the size of the engine, the power output, the number of seats, all that kind of stuff, these cars are essentially the same car. However, there is a difference between these two cars. What is the difference? The price.
The price of these cars is very different because the perceived value is different. And that perceived value is nothing more than an emotional understanding of what that car is worth. It's not rational.
If you break it down to its rational components, these cars are identical. So those of you who say, yeah, I'm rational and so are my customers, they don't need any emotional content in order to get them to buy or interact or engage with me. You just need to look at this a little bit longer.
And if you really don't believe it just based on this, look at what you're wearing. Think about what you're driving. Think about where you live. Think about the people you hang out with. All of those have been made with emotional decisions.
You have paid a premium for something you own. It might be your watch. It might be your pair of glasses.
Anybody got a pair of Warby Parkers or something like that? The emotional connection there is what? The good that you're doing for the world, right?
Every pair of glasses that you buy, they give a pair of glasses to somebody in a developing country. So you might not be paying a premium. for luxury but you're paying a premium for guilt. So, as we said, you are an emotional animal that can make rational decisions, but the other thing that you need to understand about the brain is that when you remove the amygdala, which is the emotional part of the brain, you can't make decisions. So this is such an important part of who we are.
That when you stop people thinking emotionally, they stop the ability to make decisions. So that's critical. That means that when you're trying to get somebody to interact with your product, whether it's buying or engaging with it in some way, or maybe it's a non-profit and you're trying to engage them in some way, you need to be thinking about what's the emotional message that you're sending that's going to get them to do something.
So emotional first, rational second. We also know that those strong emotional connections lead to loyalty. Now, most of you have probably heard about... Toyota and GM having to recall a lot of their vehicles.
What they found is that in Toyota's case, where they try to hide that problem for the longest time and then do the recall when there was legal action, versus GM's decision to go ahead of the market and say, hey, we have this problem, we're going to come clean, we're going to do the recall without having to be told to do it. The GM car owners were much more loyal to the brand. The same mistake was made, but the emotional connection had been made because there was some trustworthiness there. That's that kind of emotional stuff that you need to be aware of as you're designing your product.
Now, we've talked about this idea of empathy and creating empathy and understanding ourselves as human beings, but now we need to define what it is that we're going to create. So if you're in a room and you are empathizing about who your customers are and what they're thinking, and how they're feeling. The next thing is to define the problem.
What is the problem that you are trying to solve? So if you don't have a pain that's worth solving and that somebody is worth paying for, then you really just have an elegant solution that nobody wants. That's not what we're aiming for as entrepreneurs.
This is a model called the Persuasion Model by a scientist at Stanford called B.J. Fogg. And BJ Fogg has tried to simplify what it means to be persuaded to do something. So as you're defining your market, you want to start thinking about what it is that they need to do and how are you going to motivate them to do that. So on the lower axis, you can see something that may be hard to do becomes progressively easier and something that has low motivation on this other axis becomes increasingly more motivating.
And it is... BJ Fogg's perspective that says that once you trigger that conversation, once you start the conversation, it might be something related to a life event. That person then moves up that curve to the point of high engagement.
So let's take an example. If you are a young student and you are not married and you don't have children, you're probably not thinking about diapers. So any amount of conversation about diapers is going to go in one ear and out the other ear. You don't care.
But the moment that you find out that there is going to be a baby in your life, everything sounds like it's talking about diapers. Suddenly, you're like, there's so many ads on TV about diapers. You're like, yes, they've always been there, but you weren't ready to receive that. So that's the trigger.
That's where those little speech bubbles are in that lower corner. That's where the activation starts. The confusing thing about this model is that the way BJ Fogg describes it is you initially assume that it's going to be a nice linear line all the way up to high engagement. And the truth is it never, ever, ever looks like that. So we're going to talk about an example of how this is used, but I want to show you a real world example of a BJ Fogg model.
Now in this one, you can see that there is nothing linear about this curve. In fact, it looks like a drunk spider. fell onto the page and ran around here. This is more like the real thing, where in order to engage your customer, you need to understand, is it easy for them to do?
From easy, you slowly make your way over to high motivation. So I go to Abby and I say, Abby, I need you to go to Starbucks and get me a cup of coffee. And you go, I know how to do that.
That's easy to do. I can do that for Richard. I can... Go to Starbucks.
I know where there's a Starbucks. I know how to get coffee. That's easy to do. What are you lacking?
Motivation, right? If I say, hey, I'll give you 20 bucks, you go, okay, I'm out of here. If she's a student, she would do it for 10. So what you're trying to do is understand how to define your audience by where they exist on this spectrum of easy to do and motivation. So think about who your customer is.
What are you doing to make it easy for them or motivating? It doesn't have to start with easy. It could start with high motivation. So there might be something that's incredibly difficult to do.
Like I cycle in a lot of races. That's hard. There's a lot of training that goes into it.
It's suffering. It's painful. It's, you know, it's not easy to do. But there are things that make it incredibly motivating so that I can start on the high motivation thing and move on.
Motivations might be... Physical health, it might be status if you win or you do well in those races. All of those things work to motivate you. And then slowly but surely, the more and more I cycle, the easier and easier it gets to perform.
So we worked with a client who came to us and said we've got this great product this product takes people who want to get fit and it puts them together with people who know how to make you fit personal trainers and we said that's great what's the problem and they said we're just not getting anywhere. We're not making the kind of strides that we want. We've got some people signed up, but this marketplace where we connect these people, it's not really working.
And the marketplace was sophisticated. So it looks a little bit like Match.com in the sense that you have got buyers on the one side and you've got sellers on the other side and you've got a marketplace in the middle for people to find each other and match each other. based on things that they like.
So you might say, I want to do CrossFit and that's how I want to get fit. You might say, I want to run. You might say, I want to cycle.
And there might be personal trainers who are experts in those areas that connect you to the right activities. Now unlike Match.com, this platform was a virtual platform in the sense that you never really meet the person that you're going to be working with. It is a virtual relationship.
You interact with them as asynchronously across the platform. They help you design a food plan and an exercise plan and they'll motivate you but you never meet them face to face. What's the problem with that?
The problem is it lacks the human touch. All the empathy that we were talking about, it's a great piece of technology, it works really really well. All the engineering is fantastic but there's no human interaction, there's no human story there. So in order to define their audience We went back to the drawing board and thought about what it is that's motivating these people to want to lose weight.
Now their audience was a group of people that they define as the Oprah moms, I think they called them. A little bit disparaging but we kind of worked with that for a while. We're like okay who are these Oprah moms?
A little bit more definition showed us that these are mostly females in about the 35 to 55 range. who have been moms, have a home, have a family, but are starting to feel like they're the last one on the list of priorities. So the kids are growing up to the point where they don't need mom anymore, so that's kind of like, eh, thanks for nothing. Anybody who's been a parent knows exactly how that feels.
They've got maybe a husband who's maybe not quite as interested as he was when they got married 20 years ago. And they're starting to look a little different to what they did on their their wedding day. So maybe they put some pounds on, going a little gray, got some wrinkles.
They're just not feeling that good about themselves. So as we define this market further and further, we started to understand that it had nothing to do with fitness at all. Bless you. They were not looking to get fit or eat healthy.
That was just a path on this other thing that was way more important for them. So this is the company, it's called Fit Orbit. This is the work that we did for them.
What we understood from defining, using the BJ Fogg model in defining this audience, we were able to figure out that it was all about companionship. That these women were going online and looking for personal trainers to help them do something that they couldn't do on their own. And so we used internally a way to describe this. We said, it takes one person to gain weight, but... Two people to lose it.
Think about that. You can use that in almost any scenario. It takes one person to get into debt, but two people to get out of debt. Maybe it's a financial counselor, maybe it's a friend.
Companionship is the most human thing that I can think of, because we're very social, and this is what people were trying to tell us. They were saying, we're going online and looking for personal trainers to help us get out of this mess that we're in. But we're looking for their support. We don't care what they tell us to eat.
We don't care whether they tell us to do push-ups or sit-ups. That's not interesting. What's really interesting is that there's somebody who cares. And that became the defining factor behind the design of the product, the way that we created the interactions, the features that we chose to use, the features that we threw out, the features that didn't help along with that, we threw out.
We even created a new feature called the panic button. So if you just ate a whole cheesecake, you could hit the panic button. Help! And of course, we helped ArtDirect some of their advertising and their marketing.
That guy, who you see there, Ryan, what we did is we got them to do video testimonials telling the audience how they experienced this virtual relationship and how much it helped them. And then we had a second video unit videotaping the first one. Videotaping, giving away my age here.
Recording. the set and while this person was talking about their virtual relationship hey you know Tammy really helped me and she worked with me Tammy walked onto stage and they met for the first time now that was an Oprah moment okay there was tears and what we did is we captured those moments on video to show that this was all about companionship and support and relationship and nothing to do with fitness or food or eating plans or any of the other garbage okay So if you're involved in a consumer health project and you're thinking about what motivates people, it's not about getting points at the gym, Virgin Pulse and everybody else, it's about companionship. That's the critical thing. When we relaunch the site, 300% increase in conversions.
That's how powerful that single message is. So defining your audience is critical. The next thing you want to do is you want to ideate around What's going to work for that audience?
You've understood their empathy, you've made the human connection with these people, you've started to figure out who they are and how you need to reach them. Now you've got to start ideating. You've got to come up with ideas that are going to work for them.
In our case, it's quite simple. We get in a room and we generate ideas that have no judgment attached to them. So everybody, this is not brainstorming, this is idea generation. Here's something that I want to present. Here's another thing I want to present.
Here's an idea that I have. Without judgment, you put all of those things together, it looks a little bit like this. This is in fact an actual project we're doing right now.
And these are all ideas using colored post-its, an easier way for us to organize them. But this is exactly how we start the project. Those whiteboards were in fact in this very room.
Do you remember? I bought them from the Startup Institute when they moved from the community space to the textile space. This is how it starts. You literally get in a room and you start coming up with new ideas. It's not that hard.
You can do it tomorrow. In fact, you can do the first three parts of what I just described, empathize, define, and ideate, you can do in one day. And we've done that with clients before. What you're trying to understand is what are all the points along the timeline, the interaction points throughout the experience of dealing with you or your product or your company that involve thinking, feeling, and doing.
What's Abby thinking? What's Bob thinking? What's this person over here doing? She's making notes, not looking.
Okay? All of the things that happen in your product. Think about How well Apple does it, right?
You walk into their retail environment and it just feels cool, right? It feels like high design, high-end design. All the geniuses look like they're geniuses.
They just look like a bunch of geeks. I mean, where do they recruit these guys? Like geeks.com.
It's awesome. They just say, let's get geeks. Give them thick rimmed glasses and tattoos and we're ready home run.
It doesn't matter what they say after that. This is important. You have to understand what that timeline looks like. So as you are ideating, coming up with ideas, you're doing it in context of the timeline of the experience of working with you. Now if you're a company like mine where you offer a service, you can do the same thing.
What happens when somebody starts talking to you? Where do they hear about you? What happens when they walk into your office? What do they see? What do they feel?
To the point now where we've designed an app that if they walk into the office, we have this kind of big cathedral space in Watertown. It's kind of intimidating. This is a big, beautiful space dedicated to doing creative things. So instead of people feeling intimidated, they immediately walk over to this iPad and they can select from all the photographs of the people on there with the names who they are there to see, and it automatically sends a text message to that person to tell them, come and meet me at the door. And they can even go back and forth a little bit, like saying, hang on a second, I'm downstairs parking my car, I'll be with you in a second.
So that's a way for us to reduce the anxiety that people feel when they come to a new office. You guys feel it as well. Every time you walk into a new home, a new office, a new restaurant, it's like, what am I doing here? Is somebody going to shout at me? Maybe I just feel that way.
So another way to do it, because there's no single way to do it, I'm not advocating any particular art form here, I'm just talking about the methodology. We do this as well. We go out, we photograph the people that we are aiming to have as our audience members. We take photographs of these people in situ, doing the things that they are doing, and then we come back and we annotate that. What are they feeling?
What are they thinking? What do they see? What do they hear? What kind of emotional pressures are on them? This is incredibly easy to do.
You all have smartphones, right? Does anybody not own a smartphone? You don't own a smartphone.
Give this person a smartphone. Go out, take pictures of the world, the things that are important to your business or your product, come home and annotate them. Draw speech bubbles, draw words over the person's heart. Think about what they're feeling. What's this person feeling?
They're buying a movie and a game off a kiosk. They've probably never done that before. They're probably thinking, is my credit card going to be used for some nefarious purpose?
Should I put it in there? Will I find the thing that I want? How will I get it out? There's lots of things going on in that person's mind.
This is how you ideate. You can come up with ideas. Hey, maybe if it's a friendly face, we can reduce some of that anxiety. In fact, we have a client called Rethink Robotics, and they make this cool, somewhat cheap, so mostly these big manufacturing robots are expensive, hundreds of thousands of dollars. They make a cheap one, $25,000.
Buy one for everybody. And Baxter, as he's called, is a very intimidating robot. I mean, he looks like a...
600 pound man. He's just this huge big guy, red. So instead of making him look scary, they've put a screen where the head would be and a big emoticom face.
So if he's sad, he gets an emoticom face. Okay, if something's wrong, like he can't figure it out, because you can teach Baxter what to do, he gets a sad face or a confused face or something. So by giving it human qualities, anthropomorphizing him makes him more...
Understandable and there's more empathy created. And that was done because people literally took a piece of paper and put a smiley face and stuck it on the robot and somebody went, that looks way cool, we should do that. The most important thing you can do at the ideate stage is talk to your users, talk to your customers. Get out of the building and go and talk to people.
Watch them if you're scared of them. If you're really very socially awkward and you don't want to talk to people, just watch them. See how they interact.
Explain to them what you're doing and they'll most likely want to help you. Say, hey I noticed you just took one of those DVDs out of the red box. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions about renting DVDs? I'm a user experience person and I just have a clipboard that makes you look official or a laptop or an iPad even better. But talk to your users and don't just do it once, do it a lot.
Because the first time you speak to them, you're going to learn things a lot about your product and your business and yourself that will probably result in immediate changes to the idea that you have. And if you have those immediate changes, you need to go and validate them again and again and again. So often, and as Abby so kindly said, we've done over 600 projects, digital design projects. So often the ideas that we have or our clients have that are manufactured inside of the office with the whiteboards are torn apart when we take them out into the world and say hold this, tell us about this, explain to us that, how are you feeling about this. We had a client that developed a product that replaced the help I've fallen down and I can't get up button.
Who doesn't know what that is? best advertising campaign ever. Okay, they said, you know, everybody's got a smartphone, there should just be a button. So you fell down, you reach for your phone, you hit the button, and it calls the emergency services or friends and family, depending on how you set it up.
And they were pretty sure that they knew exactly how this product was going to work. We just happened to share a building with the American Alzheimer's Association. So we were able to get out of our building, not by just walking over to the office next door and say, hey we've got this product, do you mind if we work with some of your clients to understand how they might use this? And immediately we found that some of the assumptions that we had made were incorrect.
And we were able to fix that and move on and pivot, I think is the fashionable word these days, to something that was very, very interesting to them. And now they've gone on to raise a couple of million dollars and they're doing really, really well. So that just going out and talking to a couple of people made that important change.
If we hadn't done that... We would have gone down the road too far to realize that this product wasn't going to work. The next thing you want to do is you want to start making stuff.
So you've got all these ideas. You've spoken to your customers. Ideally, what you want to do is ideate and prototype in a kind of a quick succession, but we'll get into how we're going to do that in a second.
But you want to make stuff. You want to get out of your head. You want to get out of the whiteboard. And you want to start doing things that are demonstrable, that people can touch and feel and hold.
There was a company way back when I was a young technologist just kind of getting started in my life that built a thing called a Palm Pilot which is kind of the precursor to the smartphone. For those of you who were around then it was basically like just this little calendar device that you could keep your schedule and people's phone numbers and and the guys at Palm made this really cool thing and then handspring came out of that and was brightly colored and it was awesome. No phone, nothing.
It was just... The calendar that you used to carry around. Their first prototype was a piece of wood. They used to carry around pieces of wood of varying sizes. ...to figure out what was the most convenient size that people would in fact carry around.
Because if it was too big, they would just leave it at home or in the office. But if it was the right size, they'd slip it in their pocket and they'd carry it around with them. And that size became the precursor to all other similar devices since then. And those of you who have phablets, you will have realized that you are now venturing into the realm in which it's not convenient to carry the damn thing around. So, a prototype can be very, very simple.
It doesn't have to be a fully functional version of your product. You can start simply. One of the things that we teach, I teach at the MBA program at IE, which is the business school in Madrid, and one of the things we start with is this thing called the wallet exercise.
For those of you who want to do the wallet exercise, type in wallet design exercise into Google, and there is a PDF. If you can download it, you can do it yourself. We also do it at the Startup Institute. What we do is we ask everybody to create what they think is the ideal wallet.
And we give them just a couple of hours to do this. They craft it, they actually make the things, and then they start testing it amongst each other. So they ideate, they come up with some ideas, and then they make these things, and then they go to each other and say, this is my wallet, what do you think? And somebody opens it up and they go, this is crap, it doesn't work, or whatever. One guy designed one where he wore it around his ankle, so he was kind of...
I'm trying to be real like this. But what you find out, as soon as you start making the thing that's in your head, you realize what's wrong with it and what's right with it. And that immediately gives you feedback that you can't possibly do in your head.
You can't do all these calculations mentally. You have to do them physically. These are fantastic projects to do. If you are running a team or you're part of a team, and you want to break the ice and get everybody to start thinking in a prototypical way, or a way in which is...
aimed at getting prototypes done, I highly recommend doing the wallet exercise. You can get people's input and immediately all these highfalutin assumptions about people being right about their ideas get thrown out the windows because that fantastic wallet idea that somebody has always has flaws and they always need to go back and fix that stuff. The final part of that process is to test. You want to take that prototype and you want to go back out into the market and find out whether in fact the thing that you've created actually works.
So what I've already mentioned is in this wallet exercise, people now have to share their designs with other people and have to give them their designs. And just as an example, we started testing these in Madrid and most of the wallets started falling apart because in Madrid, the euro still has actually got quite a lot of value. So people carry around a lot of coins. Now in this country people don't carry around coins because our coins are pointlessly valuable for valueless right they're useless I mean a one dollar note is almost useless unless maybe you're at a strip club or something but it's just you know there's there's no value in our coins but in Europe there's tons of value in coins so if you're in London or Madrid or Barcelona you carry around a bunch of coins in your pocket because a single coin can actually get you pretty far so these wallets were falling apart because people were trying to put their coins in these wallets. The other thing is that most people carry around some form of fairly clunky ID.
So students have got these big ID things and they want to put them in their wallets as well. So as soon as people started doing that, the wallet started not falling apart, but they couldn't accommodate these things. So that's why it's important to take these things out and test them.
You need to test Both with the individuals that you want to ultimately have buy your product, but you also need to test with data. You need to look at the data out there and figure out what that data is telling you. So let's look at a real-world example that looked at the data as a way to prototype or improve on an existing product. Who of you are not familiar with The Guardian?
It's a UK-based website that produces news content. Now, they knew that the world was changing and that people were consuming content in new ways, and they knew that their customer was, as they described, always on. So they're always connected. They've got a device with them, and that device is what they use to connect to the Internet to get content that they want. The assumption was that they have a preference.
They use an iPad or a laptop. or a smartphone to get the content that they want. And that that assumption should hold true for most of the customers.
...that use the Guardian as a source of news content. The reality, of course, looks a lot like this. So how did they find out that this was the reality? They looked at the data. First thing they looked at is what the weekly data looks like, where people are going to find their information based on the device that they're using.
So in this case, you can see on a Monday and a Tuesday, Tuesday, the iPad is popular, but then it kind of diminishes during the midweek, and then starts to get more popular during the end of the week, Saturday being the peak. And the website itself, guardian.co.uk, that is incredibly unpopular during the weekend, and that denotes some kind of device change. So people are possibly using their desktops while they're at work, but not when they're at home.
It seems somewhat obvious to us now, but this was a couple of years ago. They then looked at the intraday data, and they saw similar kind of things. They saw that at certain times, like the morning, the mdot site the mobile site of the of the guardian content was being the most frequently accessed part of their digital property offerings and that people were probably using a certain kind of device to do that so think about your own actions you wake up in the morning you're still blurry eyed you reach for your smartphone you check your text messages and then you kind of get up and you grab your cup of coffee and you grab your tablet And then maybe when you get to work, you go and check the news a couple of times on your desktop as well. That's kind of what happened.
So what's happening here, as you can see, is there's different peaks and troughs in how people are accessing this information, which means that ultimately there's no substitution. People aren't saying, oh, I've got a smartphone. I'm going to use my smartphone all the time, or I'm going to use my iPad all the time. They're going to use all of these things at different times during the day.
So that gives the Guardian an opportunity to build a solution that's going to be relevant to different people at different times of the day on all of the different devices. So now the average person has about five devices, so if you divided all the mobile devices by the number of people I think it's like five five devices per person right now and that's only going to get in even worse. So you're going to have more devices, now people are gonna be wearing them. You're going to be wearing them on your clothes. They're going to have all kinds of, there's this ring that's just come out, smartwatches.
People aren't saying, oh, now I've got a smartwatch, I can get rid of my phone. They're saying, oh, I've got another thing, right? So there's no substitution effect, and that's a critical, empathetic understanding of how people use technology. They're not throwing things out. They're just adding more.
So, you know, when my kids are growing up, maybe they'll have 10 devices or 20 devices. Maybe they'll all be embedded in their skin. Eww. Okay, let's go back to the biology for a second, because I want to make sure that this stuff is really impactful and you really understand that it's part of the biology, part of the design process. Design and biology are really just the same thing.
It's just a different word as far as I'm concerned. It's a systems thinking idea. We know that your brain is lazy.
It's going to try and do as little as possible. It's going to try and avoid doing as... Any kind of thinking or any kind of calculations, unless you make it super motivating and interesting.
So start with this premise. Start with this as you're designing stuff. Think, oh my god, all my customers are just super lazy.
Well it's not their fault, it's because your brain is designed to be lazy. It's trying to be efficient. It's trying to be economical about the glycogen that it's using. Have any of you seen the video on YouTube where there's a bunch of kids playing basketball? And the instruction to the kids is pass the ball between yourselves as much as possible and the viewer, the observer, has to count how many times the ball is passed between all these individuals.
That happens and while that's happening, a guy in a gorilla suit comes walking through between all these kids playing basketball. And if you're counting the balls, you don't even see that gorilla or that guy in the gorilla suit. You don't see him at all. I think only 10% out of everybody who ever watches that catches this thing.
And the experiment has been repeated a million times over. But your brain is designed to focus. It's really good at focusing. That's why it's really hard to text and eat and drive at the same time. But this is important to understand from a customer design point of view, when you're designing for your customers, because the process by which they think is to...
Try and eliminate as much as possible so they can focus on what they need to and what you've told them to. And that gives you an indication of what you need to design. The funnel that you create needs to tell them what to focus on. Count the number of balls being passed between the kids. Explain to them what you want them to do and that's what they will do.
That way, when the gorilla walks across, they won't see the gorilla. Gorilla being distraction. Making things fun also makes those memories easier to create and makes the engagement more possible.
And by fun, I'm not talking about joy fun like, you know, sparkles and fun things and bright colors. Fun is different things for different people. As a cyclist, fun is riding a very long distance for a very long time in an extreme amount of pain, right?
Your ass gets sore from sitting on this tiny little saddle, your back gets sore from leaning over like this. But it's fun because you were there with your friends and you did this thing and it was kind of cool. So fun doesn't necessarily have to be joyous fun. It just needs to be relevant to your audience. So depending on what you're creating, think about what that fun aspect, that engagement aspect is for your customers and try and lead them down that road.
Try and gamify that process. Okay, storytelling is important. We spoke about how genes were the DNA's way of getting its information from one place to another.
But now memes are more important because they're essentially ideas that can travel faster than gene generations can. And the way that our brains have adapted to understand ideas being passed from one person to another is through storytelling. We're really good at remembering stories. My friend Bob at the back there is the...
best storyteller I've ever met in my life guaranteed he will engage you with a story to the point that an hour will go by and you're like oh my god I can't believe an hour just went by okay you need to find somebody either on your team or you can help you develop the story for your product so that that story is easy to transcend from one person to another so that when somebody engages with your product they can then go to somebody else and say oh my god these guys did this cool thing. Warby Parker sold me a pair of glasses and guess what? They're going to give a pair to somebody in a developing country or Tom's Shoes or something. That's their story.
That's a great story. That story allows that person to make the emotional connection to you and then transfer that information to somebody else. But as this gentleman pointed out earlier about procreation, we are ultimately designed for sex.
So a lot of what we do is around the interaction between us as human beings, the socialization that we have, the things that make us feel important, the things that make us feel scared. All of those things are connected to how we feel about each other and our ability to form relationships with other people and create new people. Now, I'm being a little bit scientific about it, but think about some of the most amazing moments in your life are when you're connected to another person. person and when you're doing something that helps you bind that relationship. Because those relationships are things that help you be successful in life as a human being.
So I don't want to get too Facebooky about this stuff, but that's why Facebook is really popular. It's because this is what's driving it. The ability to connect people.
It may seem like a complete waste of time. But it's not really a complete waste of time because it's helping you connect to other people. And if that's what we're meant to do as human beings, that's what our biology is telling us to do, then Facebook's on to something. And what B.J.
Fogg said is those triggers that start conversations very often have to do with the things like acceptance and rejection, love, hate, all of the things that we are doing in our relationships. If we apply biology to design thinking, We can see it around us every single day. So, car safety and soccer moms go together, okay, all the time.
When moms buy cars, they're thinking about safety. A friend of mine runs a car dealership, and he couldn't understand why the safest car that had ever been built by that company wasn't selling very well to the very people that were coming to the lot and saying, I want a safe car. He would show them the safe car.
He would say, This is the safest car we have. It has side airbags, it has top airbags, it has airbags in the airbags. It has everything that you can possibly think of to make you safe. But the moms would say, that's not safe.
Fantastic, that's great. Okay, I'll get back to you. And then I'd walk across the lot and they would buy this thing.
They would buy the biggest SUV that they could find. Why did they buy the biggest SUV? Because it looks safer.
It isn't necessarily safer, but it looks like a rhino. It looks like when you put your children in this car, they can go anywhere and be safe. That's way more important than that list of features that the engineers were so proud of.
Engineers were like, look what we did. We managed to insert this thing in here and do this thing here and put this thing in this roll bar over here. And the moms said, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, okay, bye.
later I'm gonna go buy this thing. That's what's happening every time you're designing a product for somebody you haven't empathized with. So the empathy in that particular case or this one was lost when those engineers failed to go out and ask the soccer moms what safety looked like.
Not safety, oh you want safety? Cool I'm gonna go back to the drawing board and make a lot of things that are safe. What does safety sound like to you or look like to you?
What do you feel when you think about safety? That's empathy. That's the design process. Not moving pixels around the page or writing code.
That's not empathy. That's just part of the process of getting the thing from empathy. to the customer that has asked for it. So, as you design your products, I would love for you to do this exercise.
Draw this picture, draw the brain, draw the heart, all the other sensory organs, and think about what it is that you're doing to... Engage those parts of the biology of the human beings that you're trying to connect to. What are you doing to build something that's going to make us feel more human and not less human?
What is the thing that you want from your customer that they already know inside that they want for themselves? What's the journey that they're on? What did they see or feel or hear? What's motivated them? What's the story that they need to tell themselves?
Remember those Fit Orbit moms. They need companionship to be successful at losing weight. They don't think they can do it on their own.
That's not necessarily true, but it's their story. And as long as it's their story, it's true to them. So, in summary, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
And like I suggested earlier, you can do these things in different orders. You can do them in rapid succession. You can come back and repeat them over and over again. In fact, what we often find is that while we're ideating, we go, there's really no way for us to know that. Let's go and do some testing before we even do the prototype.
So we go out and ask some questions. And that is that. OK, thank you. Awesome, thank you. Can you stick around more for questions?
Sure, yep. OK, so if people have questions, just raise your hand since we are videoing it. I'm going to try to run up to you with the mic so that we can catch your question on the video.
So I know you guys must have some questions for Richard here. They're way too smart. They know all this stuff already.
You answered everything. Bob. So we always talk about the minimum viable product.
How do you gauge what minimum viable, product is the easy part, but minimum viable, how do you know when enough is enough on the product feature list? In the creations process. Yeah. Yeah.
So the. question is it doesn't really know what minimum viable product is or MVP the question is how do you know what's minimal enough so that you can start taking something to market I think that it's probably easier for me me just because I've done it so often to feel to have that instinctive feeling is we've got enough here we should start testing this thing but there really isn't a good answer you have to find out on your own before it's too late so if you start feeling like hey we're in future creep there's probably a reason for that if you feel like you haven't got enough client inputs there's probably a reason for that our bodies are pretty good at telling us when we're ignoring those signals and start feeling guilty about it you're probably doing too much So I know it's not the scientific answer you wanted, but you'll start to realize it. If you haven't left the building in about six months, it's probably a problem.
There's a question over here. You're being ignored. Oh, you don't have a question. Thank you. So I guess sometimes, like, if you do a survey among, like, your potential customers, and you ask them, so I'm going to launch this product.
It's going to have these cool features. Do they really kind of align with? your was your demand and they would say oh this is cool this is interesting I would love to see this product come into the market and you launch it then you find out actually they're not buying your product at all it is just say I don't know why but I'm not just not interesting now.
So I think it's more of like a psychological question, like the moment before the product is launched and the moment after it's launched. I guess consumer, I just kind of feel that the consumer doesn't really understand their need sometimes. Yeah, so this is a topic made famous by Steve Jobs.
Somebody once asked him, you know, what kind of user testing he does in order to find out what their customers want. And he famously said, my customers have no idea what I don't listen to them. Now, he did say that after building a multi-billion dollar business and having more cash in the bank than most African countries.
But on his way to doing that, he did ask a lot of questions. And asking the question, do you want this product is not enough. That's a failure to get the information you want.
Because if you hold up something to somebody and say, hey, we've got a great product here. Do you want this? Everybody's going to say, oh yeah, cool.
I'll take that. What's the next question? How much will you pay for it? Okay? Because if you're planning on doing it as a handout, that's terrific.
Then you've got all the data you want. Let's go and produce all these things and we'll go and hand them out for free. But if you're planning on being an entrepreneur and you want to sell it, then the second question is, great, you want to sell it, it that much?
If I had it right now, how much would you pay for it? Oh, hang on a sec. Now I don't want it so much. So the important thing is to understand is if you're building a business around something, you need to validate those questions by adding additional questions that are going to lead to a business transaction happening. That's critical.
So ignore what Steve Jobs said because he did say it from a place of luxury where he didn't have to listen to anybody. He was like, hey, we already built a brand. Everybody recognizes us. We've made a whole bunch of great products.
Even if we make a mediocre product, people will buy it. If you're an entrepreneur, you're not Steve Jobs. You don't have his money.
You don't have his brand. You need to validate those questions by going deeper and deeper and deeper. Don't ever get arrogant.
Don't ever think that you know more than your customer. You don't. It's your job to get smart by asking them questions. But it's got to be the right questions.
OK? Any other questions? Do you think that your product, you need to add I'd just like to say, does your product, can you transfer these principles to any industry?
Yes. So these ideas that I've just shared with you are not new. These have been around for decades.
Companies like IDEO. who are primarily a physical product design company, have been using them for a very long time. And before that, industries like the consumer electronics and the automotive industries have been using these ideas for a long time.
Think about how a car is designed. They kind of have these ideas like, hey you know this would be a really cool car design. They draw some sketches, they show it to people, people say that's pretty cool, that's better than the horse that I'm driving. And then they go and they make a model. Normally they make a model out of clay and then they make a model out of fiberglass and then they make it out of some kind of you know lightweight product like aluminum and they test that.
They don't go and build a factory and start producing cars and then go, hey do you want a car? Like, no, I don't want a car. What, I want that car. They've been doing it for years and years and years.
So these ideas have been validated. They're very relevant to the digital design world now because we think we're a little bit removed from that. So we kind of needed to learn our lesson by being reminded that we're not that dissimilar to those people.
And the reason why we're not that dissimilar, because we're human beings and the people that buy, they're also human beings. So principles that work, like the Dieter Rams design principles. If you guys know Dieter Rams, he's the founder of the He's the guy who produced all the Braun products, which if you go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you'll see all his products that he designed in the 40s.
And guess what they look exactly the same as? They look at all the Apple products. The Apple guys literally walked down and saw all the Dieter Rand products and said, we're doing that. It's very similar to the entertainment industry.
The whole entertainment with movies and songs and music and same principles. Yeah. In fact, a thing that I am fascinated about is You know, we think startups are this cool, interesting thing like Silicon Valley is on the cutting edge of innovation. Do you know what it takes to create a movie?
Have you any idea how much time and effort it requires to put a movie together in a short space of time? People have been doing this for a century, bringing thousands of people together at the last minute, organizing them, producing something immensely creative, and then letting all those people go back to doing other things. They do it every single day.
And we're like, oh, Silicon Valley, this is so cool. We're doing it for the first time. No, the movie industry have been doing exactly that thing over and over and over again. The sky, I think, maybe it was both of us were at this conference.
We bumped into this guy. He was the CIO of NASCAR. And we're saying, geez, that sounds like an interesting job.
He goes, yeah, it's so interesting that you guys get super excited about watching the Super Bowl once a year. He goes, I put on 26 Super Bowls every year. There are some industries that get all the credits and get all the media because they're good at marketing themselves, but there are a lot of industries that just get on with it. You should learn from those guys.
I think there was a question here. So the processes and the principles that you described today involve a lot on designing the product and acquiring new customers, but could you also apply these principles in recruiting new employees to the team as well as also... inviting you finding new investors and if you're applying these principles and processes like would you also need to then tweak them for employees and investors slightly different from customers right the answer is yes so the question for those of you didn't hear it is can you use these principles to recruit or even reach out to investors and the answer is yes We do it ourselves, especially around the recruitment, and I'll explain to you how.
But we also have clients who do it to attract investors. So they build these ideas around the initial concepts to get the investors to buy in. that idea. We use it in our recruitment by we've created a process called the apprentice of user experience which we abbreviate to AUX and the AUX program produces a pipeline of new product and that new product is talent right so we have new people joining the AUX program all the time they go through the process which is basically this process. And they come out ready to be either employed by us or if we don't have a place for them, they can go and work for our clients or in some cases even our competitors.
So we're creating a lot of products by prototyping these people and finding out whether they are going to work. So we test them in real-world situations. They work on clients'work. They get challenges that they have to work on. And then once we've tested them, we decide whether we need to give them other challenges or let them go.
Richard, thank you for coming here today. So I have a question. I think a lot of people here are designing products that are very frame-shifting, right? So imagine a world. How do you use these principles to, let's say, try and connect a user with a product that they have literally no familiar with and they wouldn't see a use for it?
Like trying to sell pasta to someone who's never seen pasta before. How would you do that? Well, we've kind of...
Touched on it a little bit. So when the cell phone, the mobile phone was invented, the smartphone, it was like wow that's amazing I couldn't have imagined that you would carry this little computer around and hold it to your ear but all it was doing was allowing you to do what you're really good at, which is connecting to other people. What does a phone do? It's a conversation.
What are the other features in the phone? They're just making asynchronous phone calls. They're basically texting and email, which is just conversation. That's a human thing.
You already know how to do that. So what you have to do is if you're starting a new category and you're trying to reframe a conversation, you have to connect it to the thing that people already do. Hey, here's this new thing, but it's actually not that different. It's like this thing. It's the metaphor that connects those two things.
That story becomes the way that people can explain it to themselves like, oh I get it. You're the thing for the thing. Right?
Now the popular one these days is we're the Uber for whatever, right? Everybody's starting the Uber for the next thing. Because that exists, it's easy to bind the new idea to the old thing that exists already.
So that's how you do it. When you start new categories, you just find what the closest measured metaphoric thing is and you connect it. Hi, this is Elsa from Team Agara. So actually during lunchtime we had a debate about waterfall and agile. In the context of incorporating design thinking into product development, we realized that we want to do rapid prototyping, we sacrificed some of the thinking here.
So how How do you balance or manage the two seemingly opposing forces in terms of being able to rapidly get results but also be more thoughtful about the design? Right, so the question is how do you use the things that are good about agile and think your things are good about waterfall and combine them in a way that you can do things like rapid prototyping. The answer is probably not as obvious as you would think but you just combine them.
So sprint zero, the first sprint that you are involved in, becomes a waterfall process, which you just do a lot of thinking. So you use that first two weeks to do what we call a deep dive. All this stuff is on my website, so I'm not going to go into too much detail. But you do a lot of upfront thinking in the first two weeks, and that gives you the opportunity to weed out some of the problems, figure out some of the things that you need to figure out, and then you can start on your fast iterative cycle. So the thing looks like this.
Now... Lean people would shoot me and say, well, you just have to start like iterating day one. It's possible, but I can guarantee you don't send a man to the moon without doing some thinking up front, okay?
Complex problems require complex thinking. So it's okay to do a little bit of waterfall for the first couple of weeks and then start your fast iterative cycles. There's nothing wrong with linear thinking if you've got a framework to think within.
to guide you down that process so that you don't get caught in your own feature creep type thing. The reason why waterfall didn't work is because all of the solutions were decided up front. What I'm suggesting to you in this sprint zero is that during the deep dive, you solve some of the problems enough for you to get some momentum.
And if there's some ambiguity, that's okay. You just put it aside and say, we'll test this. The problem with waterfall was everybody was trying to say, let's write it. 10,000 page spec that identifies every single thing, and then you get six years into the project and you realize the big dig's broken.
That's personal, political. Thank you. So if you follow the methodology, and there certainly have been tech companies and car companies who have and have had failures large or small, right?
So Windows is going back on its sort of metro UI. Google Plus fell below expectations. some electric cars, et cetera, right, that they've sort of failed completely or failed expectations. So in your mind, whether you're a startup or whether you're a larger company and you're going through this process, what are the things that sort of lead to failure? What are the common missteps that you see in the process?
What's your name? Vassilios. Vassilios, I would say that the question might be the wrong question.
Our job is not to prevent failure, but to understand how to come back from it. So the lean and the agile processes have been formulated so that we can deal with failure that's inevitable in a more constructive way. Whereas waterfall was a kind of a let's not have any failure at all.
This is the same problem we have with our school system, right? Don't have any failures. No child left behind.
It's never going to happen. Somebody's going to get left behind. Failures are part of life. It's actually an important part of learning and it's an important part of being an entrepreneur.
If you're not okay with failure, don't be an entrepreneur. It's just not a good place to be because you're going to fail 99% of the time. There's a lot of experiments you make that are not going to work. That's okay with product design as well.
It's okay to have a framework in which it's okay to break down and and fail, but have quick remedies for it. So lots of small decisions instead of one horrible big decision to make at the end. That process, the framework in which you work in like Lean, allows you to try something, oh it didn't work, okay let's try, let's fix it, let's do something else, let's try something completely different.
That is a framework that allows for what's going to happen anyway, acknowledges it, and is authentic, versus let's avoid failure from the beginning. So that might be the answer. the question if I understood it right.
Yeah. Yeah? Well, I guess what I was thinking was obviously failure is inevitable, right, because no one can be a perfect startup or large entity. Yeah. But in someone going through the process, what are the things that you basically, for a novice or a larger company who is following this process, where is it that they can sort of go astray?
What are the either steps, right, or techniques that they... didn't do as well as they could have to have a better result? You know most failures happen when you don't get input from your customers.
That's really the major problem area. The other one is believing what you think is greater than anybody else. So the loudest voice gets the most attention, which in my case would be me and my company.
because I'm the one with the loudest voice, I've got to be very guarded about expressing my opinion because there might be a smarter, quieter person in the room who just says, well, Richard's shouting, so let's not do anything about it, right? In an environment, in an engineering or product creation environment... Very often the person with the big personality or the senior title can run roughshod over the idea generation process.
And even though somebody might have a better idea or have validated or the customer's feedback is in some... way counter to that idea that person might just have a bigger voice. So part of this framework, I didn't go into the detail, but part of this framework is actually trying to normalize that stuff so that even the big voices get teared down and the little voices get teared up so that everybody has a voice at the table. So it's people.
People is always the problem. Right? So I think that's it.
Bye. I think in fact in Agile they say people in process before tools and technology. Is that right? So thanks for sharing your experience with us but I want to go a little deeper maybe ask you something a little autobiographical okay and maybe these answers are available.
I'm in a witness protection programs. Yeah I understand but I'm curious like how you got to starting what you are now doing yes and then how you got that first customer and went from there good so the best way to get a customer is to offer to do something for them for free I actually don't encourage anybody to do anything for free. I think that sets a precedent. In fact, I don't even ask my interns to do work for free because I think that sets a precedent for their psyches as well. But you can do it at a deeply discounted price.
race. Hey, this is ordinarily going to cost $10,000, but I'm going to do it for $5,000. I'm going to basically break even here so that you guys can work with me.
And that way, you can build a partnership. You can say, look, it's not perfect. We know that this product isn't quite where we need it to be or this you're actually my first customer I'm going to be completely up front with you so I'm going to discount the rates and we're going to work together to make this really the best thing now you're not going to get yeses from everybody but you'll get a couple of yeses and those people will become your true partners and those people will help you improve the product we've got clients like that I mean ours is a service business but we have to somehow productize what we do and we often ask them you say hey how did that go and they go well it was It was good until day two and then something happened and then there was a kind of a misstep here.
We have to go and fix that. We have to be willing enough to listen to our clients'opinions about who we are. That's hard. Sometimes they say things we don't want to hear. I think when we started Fresh Till Soil, we did three projects for very close to zero.
I think in those days it was a couple of hundred bucks. We were like, we'll build your website for 500 bucks. Now, if we really, really want a client, we might do what we call black tar heroine work, which is we might do something that gets them excited enough that they want to work with us.
So we did this with a bank called Santander, where we were dissatisfied with the experience as customers. A couple of our folks used that product. And so in their own time, they redesigned the Santander experience, and we put it on our blog, and we said, if we were to do something like that, we would be able to get them to were working for Santander this is what we would do.
Guess what happened? They called us and said, you should work with us. So we're doing that with other companies.
We also did it with FedEx except they called and said, can you take that down please? Avi? The two things occur to me. Once, first of all, you're building in like an emotional tie with these people. Right.
So they become, right, supporters. Yeah. Right. But how often are you competing with some other? All the time.
All the time? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, you're competing. with everybody all the time. And even when you don't have direct competitors, you are competing with people who are going to take that wallet share. The money that ordinarily would be spent with you is now going to be spent with somebody else. So with Foot Orbit, they didn't have any competition.
except for every single gym in the world, right? They are not in the gym business, but people spending $100 a month on a gym membership takes away from their opportunity to get you as a customer. And you need to frame your conversation in the way that you're not saying, well, we're better than this guy because that's a non-winning argument. Like, we're cheaper.
In fact, we just won a project from one of our competitors after they discounted their price. So the client went back. I went back to them and said, you know, you guys are a little bit more expensive than Fresh Tilt Soil. And I said, well, we'll take 20% off.
And they went, that's not the answer we wanted. We wanted you to explain to us what the value is of the money that we were going to spend with you. Not that you can give us a discount, which means you clearly were overpriced.
Right? So the price is really hardly ever the issue with competitiveness. It's mostly like, what's the value? What are you getting for that? And so we go into great detail saying, this is what we do.
These are the people that are going to work on it. This is why they're so smart. This is why you want. want to work with these people. And that gives them reason to say, yeah, I want to spend extra.
I want to pay the premium like that Porsche Lexus story. The 25% extra, yeah, I'm willing to pay that premium because I'm getting all this value. What do you say?
Value plus? That's it? Cost plus, value minus? Cost versus value minus. Yeah.
I think we've got time for one more. Yes, up front here. I'm kind of curious about that story you were talking about, the Escalade and the very safe car. So I'm still thinking about it.
What is your solution to that problem and what did happen? So have you noticed... what cars look like these days?
They're a little bigger. OK, some of the cars that have safety features are really just bigger versions of what they used to be. Have you noticed how the Subaru went from being this little car to being like this bigger and bigger thing, and now Subaru makes models that are are like kind of clunky and unnecessarily big.
That was part of the thing. They changed the shape of the car to make it look more significant. So a lot of that stuff is just plastic cowling and wider tires and bigger bumpers, but it looks bigger.
It's the same car, the same chassis, the same engine, the same drivetrain. All of that's the same except that it now looks and appears bigger. And that's true of many industries. There are industries that have changed their form.