How to Find Your First Customers

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2:59Terms apply. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

3:29Here is one of the biggest challenges that a founder faces at the very beginning of their journey. Maybe it's going to sound familiar to you. You're at the stage of what's often called as, I have a solution looking for a problem. I came up with something great. Now, who needs it? All right. I'll tell you about the voices you just heard in a second, but let's just unpack the thought there. A solution in search of a problem. How could you get there? Quite easily. It's a very common problem. The thing is that entrepreneurs often set out with a great solution in mind. They have developed some solve and maybe it solves their own problem or maybe it builds off of their own expertise.

4:11But whatever it is, they've built something great. But then when they take it to market, they realize that they're not exactly sure who it's for. Who's going to pay for this? Who has enough of a problem that this is a solution that they have been searching for. This question will send you in circles. It will cause many pivots and rethinking of marketing strategies and business models. But when you get it right, when you have a great solution and you figure out exactly who has the problem, Now you are very literally in business. Today on Problem Solvers, I'm going to play for you something really unique, which is that I found a founder who is in the middle of this problem right now.

5:03And I found an expert, someone with incredibly deep entrepreneurial experience who knows exactly how to navigate this problem. And then I brought them together. I brought them together for a conversation about this, where one could help the other and everybody could listen in and learn something for themselves. All right, so let me give you some quick context on who these people are and how they came together. The voice you heard. I have a solution looking for a problem. That is Brent Turetsky. He is a passionate digital leader with decades of experience building consumer and SaaS products. Currently, he is the Senior Vice President of Product at Peloton Interactive, the leading connected fitness company.

5:45Prior to Peloton, Brent held executive product management roles in innovative consumer companies such as Parsley Health, Envision, Exo Group, and Udacity, and was a board member at Shasta Ventures, also the founder of the New York Product Conference. So in short, a guy who knows a lot about building very successful digital products. And here's who he's going to be talking to today.

6:10Keith Krach:Hi, my name is Birna Trappirikistotir, and I'm the founder of Bulbi. Birna is in Iceland and has been studying creative thinking for her PhD thesis and turned those insights into this company called Bulbi, which is a brainstorming tool. But a brainstorming tool for who? That is the starting point for our conversation because Birna reached out to me and said that she has been trying to figure out what her go-to-market strategy is. And a big part of trying to figure that out is trying to figure out exactly who this tool, this very useful tool called Bulby is for. And she's been experimenting with a bunch of different ways to answer this question.

6:57But I thought, you know, what she's going through is so common that it would be incredible to pair her with someone like Brent, to hear the right way to think through this specific problem so that we all could learn from it. I brought them together in this community that I have built on my newsletter. So I have a newsletter, it's called One Thing Better. You might've heard me mention it each week, one way to be more successful and satisfied at work and build a career or company that you love. You can find it by going to onethingbetter.email. That's a web address, onethingbetter.email. And like I said, so there's a community that's built on top of that.

7:37People can upgrade to the community and then join a whole bunch of stuff, including these regular calls where we bring the community together to talk through specific business problems. And this call was a hot seat call, which means that Pirna was in the hot seat. She was going to share the problem that she has about trying to figure out who her customer is. And then I brought in Brent, who was just kind enough to spend half an hour of his time helping out. It was just so gracious of him to be willing to do this. And it was such a good conversation that I wanted everybody to hear it, which is why I am also producing it as this podcast.

8:18So what you're going to hear is it's going to be Birna and Brent. and also on my part, probably mispronunciations of Birna's name. So I probably just did it again. So I apologize, but so valuable to hear from an expert like Brent on what it takes to get through this in search of a problem phase of your business. And that is what's coming up after this break. On this show, we talk a lot about entrepreneurs who tackled business problems and came out the other end more successful. It's about learning from those experiences so that you can grow your business the smart way. Well, now U.S. Bank is offering a new product called U.S.

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9:45So work smarter, not harder with this great credit card that puts more point earning power in your pocket. Apply for the U.S. Bank Business Altitude Power Card today at usbank.com slash bizpower. That's usbank.com slash biz, B-I-Z, power. Limited time offer. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from MasterCard International Incorporated. MasterCard is a registered trademark and the Circle's design is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. Some restrictions may apply. All right, we are back. So I'm going to just dive into it.

10:26The first voice that you're going to hear is Birna, who is going to give some background on herself and her business Bulby. And then I'm going to bring Brent into the conversation. Brent, of course, like I said just before the break, is the Senior Vice President of Product at Peloton Interactive and has held just so many executive product management roles and just really knows his stuff, as you'll hear. Okay, let's kick it off with Birna.

10:53Keith Krach:I'm a creative thinking expert. I've been studying it for my PhD thesis and just super passionate about creativity. And what I learned is that the best way to come up with a good idea is to come up with many ideas. and I've been facilitating workshops and teaching about creativity for over a decade now. And I realized that people often learn about the exercises they can use to enhance their creativity, but then they don't follow through on using them. So I thought, okay, I'm going to create a tool that's going to help them come up with many ideas because we are more trained to converge where we are more picking out which ideas to go forward with.

11:34Keith Krach:So the tool that we created is to help people come up with many ideas. And our first hypothesis was that those people that are constantly creating content, they for sure need ideas. So we thought that the first customer segment would be content creators. But then ChatGDP came to market and we thought, OK, no, this is probably not our group anymore. So we thought it was going to be marketers, people like ad agencies and marketing people. and then we started to go into that direction and we realized that people that identify themselves as creative they don't want help with creativity and it has also been researched and we figured out okay this is not our group so then later on we started speaking with CEOs here in Iceland and and speaking with a lot of people and they showed a lot of interest in Bolvim and we were like, okay, this is exciting.

12:31Keith Krach:And they talked about pilot projects and things like that. But then nothing happened. And then we read the book, The Mom Test, and it changed my life. And I realized that people, they just want to be polite and they tell you that your idea is good and it's interesting and things like that. But we were not solving a real problem in their life. So we started to do the mom test and I've been interviewing a lot of people and grabbing the opportunity where I can speak to people and learn about how they are solving problems, how they are solving challenges, how they are innovating. And we've identified four potential groups that we could help with this tool that helps people think in more different ways.

13:16Keith Krach:And the groups that we are currently looking at, it's product development teams that work online. So it's a remote company that we are focusing on. and they need to brainstorm together. And then another group is that we think that what we have heard is that leaders, they often want their employees to think outside the box. And this can be a tool to help them with that. So we can help them solve that problem. And then the third group is facilitators and coaches. And then they want to stand out and have valuable solutions with their clients. And then the final group we have are executives and leaders.

13:55Keith Krach:So these are four groups we are currently thinking about and that have been the results from our mom test interviews. I think that the moment that you're identifying here, the moment that you're in right now, Berna, is a really relatable one, which is you've built something great and you're not sure who needs it. And that's the thing that you're now listing off is all these great pieces on who needs it. And Brent, this is something I hear quite a lot from a lot of entrepreneurs. It is the founding story of so many journeys that I end up writing about in Entrepreneur Magazine. But before Berna goes any further in this journey, what are you hearing?

14:29And what do you think entrepreneurs should be and Berna should be thinking about in this particular moment? First off, Berna, thank you so much for sharing the story of Bobby so far. And it's wonderful to meet the rest of you in this room. My wife's an entrepreneur. I've been an entrepreneur at multiple phases. It is tough and also exciting. Seeing you all get together is a wonderful way to support each other through this journey. So now back to your question, Jason. And you're at the stage of what's often called as I have a solution looking for a problem. I came up with something great. Now, who needs it?

15:02And this is this challenge where you have a theory. You have a theory of where you could use this. But you've got to figure out how to translate the theory to reality. It's an exciting moment. It's a tough moment. It's often a surprising moment. When I think about building any kind of enterprise from a product perspective, there tends to be three different phases that you could use. I'm going to use a model called the GEM model that I learned from my boss a long time ago named Gibb Biddle, who does a bunch of product speaking. The GEM model stands for GEM, growth, engagement, and monetization.

15:35Anytime when you're refining a product, you can say, how can I go get more customers? How can I better engage the customers I have? Or how can I make more money from the customers I have? And you've got to be intentional about what you're doing. Right now, you're very much at this engagement phase, which is how can actually get people to use the product that I have. And that's in general the first stage to be at. If you want product market fit or you want to grow, you need to know what you're selling to whom and that it solves a real problem. It always starts with the user and the use case and how to engage that user.

16:07And that's an exciting phase. It's where you are. And it's also unpredictable. You've now come up with a solution, something that solves a problem that you've seen in your experience of facilitating brainstorming. And gosh, why can't other people just see it as brilliantly as you see it and know that they should just use it because it will solve their problems the way that you've been solving for them. This is such a hard stage. And it's really this sort of down and dirty roll up your sleeves part where you are the salesperson, you have to bring it to these different user segments and take it from theory to reality.

16:45And you're going to be surprised who uses it. As I think about these segments, remote product development teams that need to brainstorm, they've been hammered with SaaS stuff for the last three years. Lots of features have been built. We've seen products like Miro be a new class of product that my old company Envision had a product in this area. There's a number of these that are, they're trying to support online brainstorming and there's new exciting tools and plugins going there. is brainstorming a feature for an existing tool set or should it be a standalone platform? You know, would probably be better as a selling it to Miro and having them as a cool feature versus having people actually buy a whole new platform, onboard all their users to it.

17:28I don't know. I'm thinking having leaders who want to get their folks to think out of the box. Then you need to go to L &D champions inside of corporations and talk about what are their problems and trying to find pilot studies for them to use to say, okay, use my product for free, see if this solves the problem for you. Facilitators who want to add value, this seems like it could, that they have real problems that they want to add value. They're charging money for it. If you can help them make more money, that could be viable. Get in front of five of them, give them the tool. And then this last group of leaders who believe that diverse groups should collaborate.

18:04One of the critical things of this phase is getting in in front of the users. You've built something, you've got to get people to use it. You have to make sure they use it. My worry when you say, you hear that leaders want this type of thing is they're not the user. They say, oh, I want my people to go do something. If they're going to point you to someone and that person doesn't share the same feeling, they're never going to use it. You have to find the person who's, you know, you break down a door to use your product because it's also a problem for them. It's either going to save them time or get them better results to help them make more money.

18:35um yeah good point bernard what do you make of that bernard had shared with me and thanks bernard for all that bernard had shared with me by email when volunteering for for this hot seat that you've been working to keep expenses low and get the word out so that includes writing articles i'm just reading from your email that you sent me offering insights on podcasts speaking at conferences writing posts on linkedin and some cold outreach and email marketing so that definitely gets the word out, but do you feel like that's accomplishing the thing that Brent is saying here now, which is getting directly to users?

19:07Keith Krach:Yeah. Yeah. So we were wondering, we have all those four different groups that we believe could be the potential user. And we were thinking about getting the word out. And this is our hypothesis. But when we get traction, we could see where does it lead us? like who is reacting to our material, who is interested in learning more about how to brainstorm the best way based on many decades of research and who is interested in learning, who is interested in really getting new and better ideas and becoming a better version of themselves. And also I was thinking about the adoption curve because of course we are a startup and the vision we have in our mind is really different from what the product we have today but who is who could be an early adopter like where should we focus and we believe like coaches and trainers facilitators could be the early adopters more likely than for example leaders and so we're thinking about yeah reaching to them and I was just curious also like it's to me it's so big like where to start and what should be my next steps when we have this.

20:21Keith Krach:And yeah, and also like, I knew that you should not create a product before you know whose problem you're solving. But like in the beginning, we thought we were solving a problem for someone and we got all the data behind it. But then the world changes so fast. So what to do when you already have created a product, but your hypothesis was wrong with who's the customer. It's so difficult at this early stage, which is why to the extent that you can get in front of people in real life, those facilitators who you think are going to use it and both need it, but will also be the ones personally using it.

20:58And how can you get people to actually use the product and give you that feedback? Or can you watch them using the product? Someone needs it more than other people. Who's got the biggest pain point? Is there any software out there that people love that you saw much better? Maybe that can give you a signal of God who needs this. or but one thing is for sure is that you're going to need to be both a salesperson and the user researcher until you have that confidence that i know this user in this box really needs me and if i give it to them i solve their problem again which is either making more money saving time coming up with a you know a better widget that they need to do until you have that confidence about who really needs this it's going to be hard to go bigger than that yeah and what would you

21:43Keith Krach:recommend would be that like if you were in my position what would you do to figure out who needs it who needs it and like how can reach them i would as the sort of chief salesperson i'd reach out to my network and say hey does anyone need help solving this problem that i think i can help you with or a problem like that it a blast that goes generally no people aren't going to listen to as well as if you reach out to your network and try to go to places where people know you, know your expertise. For example, you've said that you've been facilitating workshops for a decade in this area. Do you have any people that you've worked with in academia where you're getting your PhD or clients that you've worked with who might be interested in piloting this type of product?

22:34Has anyone met at a conference who has a job like you have in doing and facilitating those brainstorms where you could say, hey, I know that you do this for a living. You and I have talked about facilitating creative processes. I have something that I think could make your life easier. Would you be willing to try it? By using your personal connections, one is you can understand them better. They can understand you better. And they'll give you the benefit of the doubt to try something new. and then they'll also give you real feedback in terms of the mom test they won't just be nice yeah maybe i'll use it and then ignore it that they will you'll say please give me the hard feedback i'm willing to basically put my time my company's time into building something beautiful for you to make your life easier and then but to do that you have to be real with me about what's working.

23:24Keith Krach:Yeah, good point. So I'm actually going ahead of myself, so I should not start with content to figure out who's reacting to my content. So that's not the best experiment, but to reach out to my network and ask people in my network to introduce me to someone that I could learn from, and they could do pilots. I think that'll be the fastest way for you to get in-person experiences with potential customers of getting them to use it, letting you observe them use it to see what's working and what's not working and to trust you to solve these problems. Yeah, good point. So I can find someone from each group and see how they react and what they say.

24:05Or try three in each group where you have a strong intuition that you could give them value. Yeah, good.

24:13Keith Krach:Absolutely, really good. And when I'm done with that step, what's the next step since I have you. I can learn from you. Let's go to market. Ideally, you start to sharpen the picture of, gosh, I can solve this problem for this user that delivers them this amount of value. And if you get closer on what that is, you can better clearly communicate the value proposition you have. You could also understand how to acquire this customer. So are they students? Do they work in companies where they can pay directly? can you get product-led growth where you sell it to one person and they'll bite other people in general it's helpful to start small as you're say as you're both selling and listening and eventually as you get a stronger perspective on these types of things you can start letting the product sell itself but you're not there yet that's okay this is the old products start like this yeah yeah wonderful yeah and when you mentioned product-led growth we were thinking like If we can solve problems for facilitators and coaches, they would share it with many people, and those people might realize they could use it for all the other things it's possible to use it for via product growth opportunity.

25:30When there are natural areas for person-to-person sharing and then storing those documents, so either you're a process workflow or you're a document store or an end product store, those are natural ways of pulling in other people where they either want to share with others or they want to create accounts to maintain things. But sometimes I see companies trying to be greedy where because they want to try to drive so much growth that way, they overstate their value and they try to be too precious of owning the customer relationship that creates friction in the product. Sometimes people don't want to create another account in order to access a file or so does.

26:11So this is why the first phase is very much where are you delivering value and then leaning into is that naturally a shareable service or not.

26:22Keith Krach:Yeah. Good point. Thank you. I have been watching the comments and thanks everybody for sharing. I would just want to throw out something that Rochelle had written. Rochelle had run a workshop in this community a month or so ago. Hey Rochelle, good to see you. So Rochelle had asked, have you found anyone who has paid for a solution to this problem and the solution was inadequate? I thought it was a really interesting way of identifying potential customers because they've already signaled that they're interested in a solution to this kind of problem and they could tell you what was wrong with what already exists in the marketplace.