How To Find Your First Customers

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. 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.

1:59Here 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 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.

2:41But 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.

3:33And 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.

4:15Prior 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. Hi, my name is Birna Trapp-Berikistotir, 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.

4:59But a brainstorming tool for who? So 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. But 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.

5:44I 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 have 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. People 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.

6:17And 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. So 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.

7:00So 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.

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8:30That'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. The 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.

9:20Okay, let's kick it off with Birna. 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 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.

10:05So 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 We thought, okay, 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.

10:46And 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 Bolbim and we were like okay this is exciting 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.

11:36And we've identified four potential groups that we could help with this tool that helps people think. in more different ways. 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.

12:21And then the final group we have are executives and leaders. 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, Verna, 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.

12:54But before Berna goes any further in this journey, what are you hearing? And 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 it's 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. You're at the stage of what's often called I have a solution looking for a problem.

13:27I came up with something great. Now, who needs it? And this is this challenge where you have a theory. You have a theory of where you could use this. but you got to figure out where how to translate the theory to reality and that is a it's an exciting moment it's a tough moment it's often a surprising moment when i think about building at 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 gibbiddle who does a bunch of product speaking the gem model stands for GEM, growth, engagement, and monetization.

14:05And anytime 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 I 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.

14:38And 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.

15:15And you're going to be surprised who uses it. As I think about these segments, remote products 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? would probably be better as 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.

15:58I 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.

16:34One of the critical things of this phase is getting in front of users. You build 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 you 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 better results to help them make more money um 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?

17:37Yeah. 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.

18:51And 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.

19:28And 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 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.

20:48For 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? Has anyone met at a conference who has a job like you have in 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.

21:26They 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. 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.

22:04So 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. Or try three in each group where you have a strong intuition that you could give them value.

22:41Yeah, good. Yeah, 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.

24:00When 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.

24:41So 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. 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.

25:25Brent, I see you nodding your head. Is that a good filtering mechanism that people should be thinking about? It can be really helpful as you're thinking about what kind of value you add. If you're either helping people make money, solve a problem or save time. If you exist in a category where there's other products and you know that compared to other products, you can either deliver the same value cheaper, deliver the same value faster, or come up with better results, it can help you then recognize these are potential customers, these are potential value propositions, these are potential folks to go after.

26:01Absolutely, that's a great way of targeting people. My guess is, though, is if it were that easy, you would have started there. You probably would have gone to Google and said, collaborative brainstorming software, who's doing well, what are people using today? Gosh, I should just go after selling to those people. as well since you didn't mention that i'm guessing it's not that easy no exactly yeah there are not so like the problem i would like the solution i want to bring to market is to help people think in different ways and there are not many products there it's more like you mentioned nero it's about gathering ideas but what we want to do is to help people overcome biases because we have so many biases that reduce our creativity and there's so much going on that that is not supporting us seeing new and valuable ideas.

26:50And especially now with this fast paced society, people start to think more in the same direction. And I want to help people think in different directions. And there are not many products there, but there's so much in the beginning. We were looking at reports that said like world economic put creative thinking as the skill that will grow the most in importance in coming years. And also, it's at the top of so many top lists, and it's a valuable thing. And there are so many courses on creative thinking, and it's a large industry to teach design thinking and all those things. But so there are really few solutions that help you with this different way of thinking.

27:33Building on what Rochelle was saying, are there audiences of people paying for tools in a related space, I don't know, like a Miro user conference or message boards about Miro or other collaboration software where you're hearing people talking about pain points. Imagine someone says, what stinks about Miro? Or what do you love or hate about Miro? And you go look at those Reddit comments and then five people say, gosh, I wish it did some kind of feature. It helped me overcome bias. You could reach out to those people on the message board and say, Hey, tell me more. Is this, how much of a pain point is this for you?

28:12And what situation did that happen? Take that feedback and then try to adjust how you talk about Volby and then go back to potential customers and with this new lens to see if they're, that makes them more interested in it. Hey, Brian, I'm just being mindful of time and want to get you out of here for your next meeting on time. So I would love if you could just give us a couple of concluding thoughts, maybe go with any direction you want, but I'll just throw one out, which is I really love the gem model that you had shared. And I have a longer version of it in an email that you had sent, which I can share with everybody.

28:45But maybe as you think about growth, engagement and monetization, what that looks like early and then how you eventually want to get to it. Maybe if you want to share where entrepreneurs tend to get, tend to stumble in executing that model or where you think people might be needing to put their most effort and attention. Sure. At the beginning, it's figuring out who's the user that you're solving a real problem for. And so that's very much about getting those diehard users. And that's about what we talk about is engagement. Build something that people will use. Many times people think about growth to get started before they're clear on the problem of the user they're solving it for.