Rob Fitzpatrick has been running small businesses for over 13 years and he’s joining me today to share what he’s learned about customer research, why it’s so important, and how we can do it effectively.
Rob Fitzpatrick has been running small businesses for over 13 years and has written multiple books about what he’s learned along the way, including ‘The Mom Test’.
His first company was a scalable startup that went through the Y combinator accelerator and Rob is now building software to support indie nonfiction authors. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:
- How Rob found out what he was doing wrong in his sales pitch.
- How Rob wrote his book ‘The Mom Test’.
- Why any sales pitch needs to start with a problem.
- Why you need to know your customer like you know your best friend.
- The goals you should focus on in any customer conversation.
- Why customer research is so important and when you should be doing it.
- Common objections to doing customer research and why they’re not valid.
Resources:
- The Mom Test
- The Goal
- The Phoenix Project
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany
- Songkick
- Never Split the Difference
- This is Marketing
- NxtStep
- Podcast Chef
Connecting with Rob Fitzpatrick:
Connecting with the host:
- Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
Quotables:
- 15:01 – “What you want to be is a learning machine where you’re trying to figure out; I think you’re going to love this, do you love it, oh you don’t quite love it, let me go back to the product, let me understand why you don’t love it.”
- 16:36 – “People always expect customers to tell them what to build, it’s like hey customer do you like this, what should I change, what should I build, what features does it need? And what I learned is that that just doesn’t work.”
- 19:21 – “You shouldn’t ask anyone for their opinions about your ideas rather you should frame the question in such a way so that even the most bias person, your mother, can’t lie to you.”
- 39:43 – “Customer conversations aren’t like math where you can hear the theory and immediately do it perfectly, there more like skateboarding or poetry where you gonna fall over or mess some stuff up a few times.”