This past week was about one thing: interviews.
Each day, I spent several hours perched in front of Zoom’s all-seeing eye, interviewing potential users and customers, and walking through prototypes for feedback. In general, the feedback was lukewarm, which - when you factor in optimism bias - is a helpful signal: the product specs aren’t right yet.
At dusk on Wednesday, I found myself Zooming with a young, energetic entrepreneur from Israel. He had multiple successful start-ups under his belt and I was grateful he took my call.
As the sun set outside our cabin’s window, I did my best to sell my prototype’s feature set. Here is where project leaders see delivery estimates. Here is where P&L owners see learning curves for various team members. Here is the learning center, and the adaptive curriculums.
The entrepreneur watched patiently, smiled, and then responded with a simple question: “Who is your target persona?”
“Well, any company with an offshore team. Basically, no company seems to have cracked the code. My beachhead will likely be midsize consulting firms just figuring out their offshore operating model. But the goal is to serve any corporation that works with teams across multiple timezones.”
“No. Not what company: who - what human being - are you trying to serve?”
Gosh, Citizen’s United did a job on me!
Who was I trying to serve? The dashboard was for c-suites; the project management tool was for project managers. The learning center was for offshore team members. Who was the first customer, the primary customer?
The entrepreneur wheeled around, and half crouched near a bookshelf in the background. He plucked a colorful title: “Value Proposition Design.”
“You need to read this,” he said, as he pushed the book cover in front of the camera.
Up until that point, I had been mostly thinking about customer segmentation in terms of industry and company size (e.g. small engineering firm vs large accounting firm vs midsize healthcare company).
Size and industry does matter. Engineering firms sometimes offshore to China just to build closer relationships with the factories that build their products. Healthcare companies sometimes offshore billing admin to the Philippines just to save cost. The operating models, needs, and pains are different.
But the human beings within those firms are just as critical to segment as the firms themselves. There is not a single company “brain.” As we all know, humans within the same organization can have completely contradictory goals. And those opposed goals can all be perfectly logical.
Value Proposition Design offers a helpful framework for thinking about which humans contribute to a buying decision in an organizational context:
Value Proposition’s chief thesis is that a product’s “value map” must directly address some - though not all - the pains, gains, and jobs to be done for the target “customer profile.”
Bottom line: I am now paying more attention to the human “who” as I continue my research, and I hope more detailed customer profile mapping will help me hone in on the right value map.
As an aside, I’ll just note the joy of this part of the start-up journey: when someone recommends a book and it feels useful to read, you just block off a few hours and read it. What a luxury!
And when the book makes a recommendation (like, “use social media to perform cursory customer research”), you find yourself staring at VC-pitch-deck-ready gems like this:
More to come next week!
Update Feb 27, 2022: The entrepreneur-mentor of this post is Yarin Gaon: founder of Meitar Army Gear (Israel’s largest online store for army and military gear), Sms4Cash.net (Israeli website monetization company), and ePays (Israel’s second largest credit card company).
I didn’t mention Yarin’s name in my original post because I hadn’t asked his permission. Now that I have, here is his website with contact info in case you want to work with him directly.