I've been living on a farm in Mozambique for the past week to get to know our users for InGrower. My cofounder has been working here for 5 years. But still, the fact that I'm a product lead whom knows almost nothing about the lives of our users outside the context of our product trouble me. Soon after starting our alpha trial last month, I informed our team that I'm going over for user research.

Immersion is one of several ways to get to know your users. According to IDEO,

The Inspiration phase is dedicated to hearing the voices and understanding the lives of the people you’re designing for. The best route to gaining that understanding is to talk to them in person, where they live, work, and lead their lives. Once you’re in-context, there are lots of ways to observe the people you’re designing for. Spend a day shadowing them, have them walk you through how they make decisions, play fly on the wall and observe them as they cook, socialize, visit the doctor—whatever is relevant to your challenge.

The insight here is that a product doesn't operate in a vacuum. To build a product that our users would love, I need to understand who they are, what motivates them, what keeps them up at night. So that we deliver a product built for them for their lives in Mozambique and not what I assume to be while living in Boston or Copenhagen.

One of the many things that I learned here is that our users have a high tolerance for bad user interface. If they want something, they'll make it work. The big question for us then is creating something of tangible value to them. Having shadowed and spoken to a handful of local smallholding farmers, I think I have a better sense of what that actually means.

This is our makeshift kitchen that my housemates assembled. Everything here are hacked together in one way or another.

I have become a permanent nomad since this Spring and continued my habit of having coffee chats with startup founders. After traveling through 13 countries and speaking to dozens of founders, I found myself receiving lots of wisdom from many amazing people. My friend and mentor Martin suggested that I publish these gems of knowledge. Here are some of the distilled takeaways from a select few of my chats. I hope you find these excerpts useful in your own journey.

Thank you very much to everyone that has taken the time to chat with me!

Starting Up

People doing startups are not necessarily the best and brightest. They are people that can take a lot of risks.

Bradford Cross, CEO of Prismatic

Bradford talked about the Bay Area startup culture with me. My takeaway is that a solid engineering culture is a necessary condition for any great startups. I need to learn from the best. So where can I find the best cultures? While it is trendy to look at places like Airbnb or Uber, I should learn from established companies like Google and Facebook, which have had the time to develop their best practices from experience.

The way to distinguish people with empty ideas versus those with real ones is that those with real ideas have the problems themselves.

Diego Basch, Founder of IndexTank (acquired by LinkedIn)

Diego and I spoke for a couple hours about the right problems to solve and how to find them. There are two kinds of people to look for inspiration from:

1. those that can build, and
2. those that have needs but don't know how to build.

People in (1) can usually build what they need themselves. Our job as startup founders is to find (2). The farther away the problem from tech, the better. People in these industries have felt the pain and identified a problem to solve from experience. Look for people with at least a few years experience in an industry.

Be diligent and ask specific questions when reaching out for information interviews.

Martin Scholl, co-founder of an unannounced startup

I met up with Martin in Berlin, where he has started a handful of companies in the past 10 years. Currently, he's working on a tech startup for the art industry. I asked Martin where he gets his far-fetched but obvious in-hindsight inspirations from.

Talk to people outside of technology, he told me. Not only that, but he would spend days studying an expert's area of expertise before speaking to them. Research papers, academic books, and whatever material that he could get his hands on. Imagine putting in that amount of work for each outreach. That's why he said that I should not hesitate to spend an entire year just looking for the right problems to solve.

People think most of my ideas are ridiculous at first. What actually matters is: are your users loving it?

Tim Allison, CEO of Darling Dash

I visited Tim in his office in Copenhagen just weeks before they were launching their next product. Tim recalled the time of his launch of Cupple (acquired by Tenthbit, January 2013), when all the investors that he pitched to thought his idea was stupid. Who would want a social network for 2 people?! But he knew that there was something to it because his users loved it. He listened to them and executed his vision.

Team Building

Discover the strengths of people that you work with.

Paco Nathan, Director at O'Reilly Learning

Many years ago, Paco was on the management team at a company. There was a star engineer, who management pulled aside and gave him more responsibility to head some greenfield projects. He made no progress and Paco was tasked with firing him. He spoke to the guy and worked with him to discover that he was a finisher. Paco placed him as the go-to person in the data team, so PhD's would go ask him for help. The guy excelled and became the "most valuable player" there, then moved on to do great things.

We document all our communication and processes on Github.

Mårten Gustafson, Technical Director at Schibsted Media Platform

I find the vigorousness of Mårten's approach to improving their engineering processes fascinating. For example, he uses mind maps to illustrate the cost of software maintenance. He made me realize that the same level of critical thinking and data-driven feedback for businesses can be applied to evolve a company culture too.

Sales

Solve a need. Don't sell the implementation.

Mary Adams, Founder of Smarter Companies

Mary trains consultants on measuring intangible capital for enterprises. Mary's service was the most abstract business I'd ever heard of. One of my first questions to her was, How do you sell that?

She asked me to think in the shoes of her target customers. Suppose you are the CEO of a company like FedEx. And you're trying to raise money for your company. What are your company's assets? Machinery, people, properties? For FedEx, it's their logistics processes and operational knowledge. These are all intangible capital. Her value proposition is attaching numbers to abstract ideas, which is what her customers are doing in their heads anyway.

"Often the best sales are done when the clients don't even know the name of your product, and you focus the discussion entirely on the problems they have and how you can solve them.

Jeff Kaplan, Director of Multilateral and NGO at Socrata

Jeff showed me that good sales means doing hard work. Spend time researching your potential customer and think about what problems they might have. Given a typical 30-minute first appointment, you can save precious client time on the introductory What do you do? question and focus on What problems do you have? to establish a rapport with the potential customer as quickly as possible.

I spent my whole Saturday designing a new homepage for this blog. Pretty proud of the result, I showed it to my wife. She couldn't stop laughing at how bad it was. Not willing to admit defeat yet, I took it to /r/design_critiques/ seeking help from this post: I've been told this looks like shit already. What can I do to un-shit it? A particular comment there (quoted below) led me to write this article:

The design is very boring and it makes you look boring as a result. In a situation like this I'd recommend to just use a good looking template: https://www.tumblr.com/theme/36149 is a good one for your needs. It's not productive at all to try and do something you're 1. not great at, and 2. not looking for work in. Hope this helps.

Is gaining knowledge by trying new things not considered productive anymore?

Before diving into that though, you're probably wondering what my awful experimental homepage looks like. I wanted it to convey a clean and succinct message but it came out more like a careless job done in 2 minutes. Here's a screenshot.

An excerpt from another comment in the same Reddit thread:

Just remember that just as you might make engineering look easy, designers make design look easy. Having Excel doesn't make me a data analyst just as having server access doesn't make someone a web designer.

Emerging from my startup experience, I learned fast to be the Jack of all trades. User experience design, customer development, product management ... I am not so naive as to think that I can just jump in and take over anything. That's not the point. The point is that having some hands-on experience opened my eyes to how wrong I was in thinking I knew what other roles actually entailed.

Take user experience design, for example. I used to think that you just use common sense, right? No, you need to understand the user, understand the system, then somehow bridge that gap between the two. Or sales. You just talk to a lot of people, right? No, sales is about understanding user demand and discovering how their needs overlap with what you can offer.

Everything looks easy from 30,000 feet up because you don't see the details. When you've never done something, you really don't know what you don't know. We don’t realize how we automatically make assumptions and over-simplify things we don’t fully understand as a coping tactic to fill in the gaps. That's a useful tactic in everyday life, as I really can't be bothered with all the details around me. But it’s not so useful when bootstrapping a business as you can easily get blindsided. Once you've done a new job or solved a problem once, you don’t guess or handwave your way around the details anymore. You become aware of what you are unaware of. That is the difference.

Anyway, I answered my own question on whether gaining knowledge by trying new things can be productive. Yes, it can. After that, you just need a bit of practice.

I've been doing customer discovery for a new venture that I'm investigating. That means going out there and talking to dozens of people in my target audience. The goal is to understand their needs and identify their pain points. I start the conversation with two questions: "what do you do?" and "what are the most painful parts about your work?" I learn something new every time I ask these questions. But there's a caveat to these customer interviews. For a person that has been immersed in their problems day in and day out, asking them to describe their problems is like asking a fish to describe water.

We fell into this trap for our first product at Spokepoint. My co-founder spoke to almost a hundred target customers. Everybody said they had that problem and would pay for it when it is ready. We spent a few weeks developing a prototype to get user feedback. We made improvements. We then tried to sell it ... Nobody bought. "But if only you had these more features..." We pivoted away from that product soon afterward.

The obvious solution is to dig into the real, underlying problems that people really have versus the problems that they think they have. Unfortunately, I don't have a magical 3-step guide to read between the lines and know what people really want to say. This comes down to a matter of communication skills, experience, and hard work. We cannot solve this fundamental problem, but we did find ways to mitigate this.

One of the best methods that we had found useful, and with credits to our lean startup mentor, Spike, are a couple simple follow-up questions to screen out problems that don't really matter to people.

When people tell you they have a problem, ask them what is
their current solution and when was the last time they looked
for a better solution.

Like I don't enjoy having to think about what to make for dinner. My current solution is to make permutations of the same things. I never bothered to find a better solution because I don't really think about it anymore. It has become my water. More often than not, people will say that they haven't looked for another solution. Some even are not doing anything about it at all! Look for the itch that people are actually scratching. Don't ask people to describe water.