Omer (00:09.280)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Michelle Hansen, the co founder of Geocodio, a SaaS product that provides straightforward and easy to use geocoding and data matching for addresses.
She's also the author of Deploy Empathy, A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers.
Now, whether you're trying to find product market fit or are figuring out how to scale your SaaS product, you know that doing customer interviews is super important and can provide tons of valuable insights.
But there's a big difference between knowing you should do customer interviews and knowing how to do customer interviews well.
Deploy Empathy is a book that helps you learn the skills of talking to your customers and learning to truly listen to them so you can pull out their hidden needs, desires and processes.
In this interview, Michelle and I have a great conversation and share tons of practical advice and tips that can help you to interview customers and potential customers with more confidence.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Michelle, welcome to the show.
Michele Hansen (01:28.530)
Thank you so much for having me.
Omer (01:30.530)
So tell us about your business, geocodio.
What does the product do, who is it for, and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?
Michele Hansen (01:38.210)
So, as you might imagine, Geocodio is a SaaS.
We started eight years ago, my husband and I, and what we do fundamentally is geocoding.
So a computer does not understand an address.
It only understands coordinates.
So at a very basic level, what we do is help people convert addresses to coordinates.
But then humans don't really understand coordinates.
So we also help convert coordinates to addresses.
And our specific niche of the industry is when coordinates are used as doorways to other pieces of information.
So, for example, if you want someone's congressional district, if you want to know census information about an area, you have to have the coordinates first.
So we are what you might describe as a horizontal SaaS.
So we have tens of thousands of customers in thousands of different industries, everything from academic researchers to insurance companies to real estate websites to companies that make software for tractors.
Omer (02:40.530)
We are going to do a separate interview where we're going to talk about the story of geocodio and how you built that with your husband.
But today we're going to talk about your book, Deploy Empathy, a Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers.
So maybe we can just start with why is it called Deploy Empathy?
Michele Hansen (02:56.380)
So the name came to me in the shower one day as I was trying to think about names for the book.
And I loved it, first of all because it's a pun and I love puns.
And second of all, really, is that.
So it's partly about using empathy and you see the phrase deploy empathy used occasionally.
But I also wanted to make it very clear to developers and technical founders that this was all also a book for them.
And that's where the pun comes in.
So it's called deploy empathy partly as someone might read that as oh, it's how to use empathy.
But then anyone with a technical background sees that and and they think of git.
So and it's like, oh, this is about deploying something.
Okay, that's something I do every day.
Here's this other thing that I can deploy in the same way that I deploy code.
Omer (03:41.320)
Love it.
How did you come up with the idea for this book?
Why did you write it?
And I guess also for our listeners, tell us why you're a good person to be writing this book.
Michele Hansen (03:50.500)
So before I was running our company full time, I was a product manager and I focused on product development and my favorite area within that was customer research.
And so when I went full time on geocodio, that's where I spent a lot of my time.
And a few years ago, I want to say about three years ago, we became investors in Earnest Capital, which is now calm company fund, which is a fundamental for originally it was small SaaS companies, but they they've branched out a bit since then and people within the fund community knew that customer research was one of my areas.
And so whenever they had a portfolio company that had a problem that could be solved or better understood by talking to customers, they would get kicked over to me.
So for several years I was having regular conversations with founders about doing customer research and I had the light bulb moment when I was mentoring a group through Founder Summit last fall and they were asking me customer research questions and I realized that I didn't have one solid resource.
I felt like I could send people, especially founders that talked about customer research, both from a comprehensive perspective of not just discovery, but also how to deal with churn.
How do you sell more to existing customers?
How do you figure out which features to build?
How do you use customer understanding for strategic level thinking and also did not assume any prior UX or product background.
So there's a ton of great books on jobs to be done and customer research, but a lot of them assume prior experience or knowledge with product or ux and the founders I was talking to didn't and so I realized I was sending these, like, long emails.
It was like, okay, so read the middle part of this book and then these two chapters over here.
But that book talks about having tons of resources, and it's okay if you don't have any funding yet.
Don't let that discourage you.
And then this podcast is really good.
And then I had to write three paragraphs.
And then here's how you make sense of all of this.
And it was just like, it was just really jumbled.
And I realized there was like this repeated process I was going through.
And it was like, what if I heard a customer talking about a repeated manual process that was taking them a lot of time?
I might think that was a good product opportunity.
And so I realized that there was an opportunity for me to at least make myself more efficient.
And so I started out writing a newsletter and I was like, worst case scenario, the next time somebody comes to me with these kinds of questions, I at least have somewhere to send them rather than trying to bang out these really long, jumbly emails.
And maybe it becomes a book and maybe it doesn't.
And spoiler alert, it did.
But that's where it came from, right?
Omer (06:34.930)
And shout out to Tyler, founder of Calm Fund and Earnest Capital.
Previously, he was a guest on my show, I think episode 200 and early 200s.
So you can go and find that if you want to learn more about that.
One of the other things you and I had talked about before set up this interview was that I'm a big fan of Rob Fitzpatrick book the Mom Test.
So I'd asked, how does this fit with the mom test?
Is it a similar thing?
Is it.
Is it different?
And from what I recall, you told me, I think they complement each other, right?
Michele Hansen (07:02.300)
Yeah, absolutely.
They build on each other, I would say, in my research on the book.
So.
So I wrote the newsletter and I interviewed 30 readers of the newsletter as I was moving from rough draft to, well, further stages of rough draft.
And a lot of people mentioned how reading the mom test was a real moment for them when they realized that they could talk to customers and they could get something out of it.
And the Mom Test focuses on the discovery phase.
And what people found themselves needing was something for other phases.
What about after you're running a business?
What about after you found product market?
And so in some ways, I think of my book as like the 201 level of the mom Test.
And in.
In many ways, I think it's a good first introduction to the topic.
It also really gets People excited about the idea of talking to customers and makes them believe that they can do it themselves.
So definitely in the same vein.
And again, I've talked to Rob.
I think he has a lot of great ideas.
So yeah, they're definitely harmonious with one another.
Omer (07:58.460)
Great.
So we were thinking about what was the best way to share some of the ideas from the book that would be helpful to the listeners of this show.
And we came up with this idea of why don't we run through a hypothetical example of a founder who has launched, is trying to get more sales and isn't quite sure what, why that isn't happening.
Hopefully what we can do for the rest of this interview is to talk through that and just explore some ideas on what person could do to find customers, interview them, get some answers, and hopefully figure out how to start getting more sales.
So does that sound good to you?
Michele Hansen (08:39.720)
Yeah, let's do it.
Omer (08:40.920)
Great.
All right.
As I said, our founder is somebody who has built an HR related product.
It's really about remote teams and helping to improve teamwork, morale, productivity, retention, all of that stuff.
And it's a product that would be, I think, the target buyers.
Well, maybe if we think about the target company, I'd say it's probably companies that have somewhere between 100 to 500 employees, maybe a little bigger.
And this person is probably thinking that the kind of people or the buyers for me here are going to be either HR leaders who are looking at this problem, whatever that problem is from the HR perspective in terms of retention, morale, all of that stuff, or managers who are in a situation where they're now managing remote teams.
And maybe a lot of these people haven't done that before because it's pre Covid there were not as many people doing remote work.
And so now these managers have got these new sets of challenges to deal, which is not maybe as easy to tackle if they were all in the same location or face to face.
So the setup for this, and I think what we can do is you ask me questions as you want, I'll try to fill in some information about what this founder is doing or the business and hopefully we can pick your brain in terms of what this person should be doing to try and get some answers.
Michele Hansen (09:59.990)
So one of my first questions is, do they have any customers?
Omer (10:04.070)
Let's say they have less than five customers today.
They're all B2B type sales.
And maybe let's say it's early, like maybe they've got companies who have gone to the next step and have committed to trialing the product, but they haven't completely closed those deals yet.
So I'd say strictly speaking, no customers, but they've got to a point where they've got some companies who've decided to do a proof of concept, try it with their teams and seem to be engaged in using the product and potentially could be deals that they could close in the next, I don't know, let's say 60 days.
Michele Hansen (10:37.460)
Okay, so.
So no paying customers at the moment.
Okay.
And are those trialing customers, are they friends or contacts or are they what a friend of mine likes to call stranger money, which is that people who were not personal contacts of the founder,
Omer (10:56.860)
let's say they're all strangers.
Michele Hansen (10:58.700)
Oh, okay.
That, that's really promising.
So considering that they haven't, that's an interesting scenario because.
So I'm also.
It sounds like they're going with a traditional enterprise sales process which is they're cold calling and going from the top down to reach the these HR leaders.
So there's no self service option for managers, for example.
Omer (11:21.760)
Right, exactly.
And I should say that this hypothetical scenario is based on a founder that I know, but I want to keep this fairly broad so it also is relevant to other people listening.
So I'm making some of this up as we go along, but it's based on real life.
So yeah, I think this person tried to go down the friends network route and realized that wasn't really getting them the feedback that they wanted.
And to be able to get strangers or, you know, unaffiliated companies or people to try the product was going to give them more insights.
The way they found these people has really just been about looking on places like LinkedIn, trying to reach out to people, maybe in LinkedIn groups or if they've been posting content on LinkedIn related to some of the challenges that their target market might be dealing with and their product can solve.
And maybe they've had a couple of people respond to the post, maybe they liked something about it or added a comment and that was an opportunity for them to follow up with this person, get them find out more about the product and use it.
Michele Hansen (12:24.540)
Interesting.
So they're in an interesting stage because if they had five paying customers, then the next step is fairly straightforward.
It's to interview those five customers and see why they're using the product and what they conceptualize the problem as and how they see the product as solving it, which can be pretty directly turned into marketing and sales materials.
And actually Bob Mwesta's demand side sales is A fantastic primer on doing that.
And I also refer to it as doing a happy customer interview to figure out why the people who are paying you are paying you.
So you can get more people to pay you.
Right.
Because it's easier to find more people with use cases who are well served and figure out why they're happy and then figure out how you can get more people who would be happy like that by speaking to those activities.
Omer (13:12.130)
Exactly.
Potentially they could be close.
If they can close some of those companies piloting the product then may not be that far from that next stage.
And I just realized I didn't answer your question about the self serve today.
The product isn't self serve.
So there's level of manual onboarding.
And it also relies on them having to at least get a manager of a team to get things set up first.
And then once they're familiar with the product, then they can invite other team members and get them in and start using it.
But it's not self serve.
Michele Hansen (13:47.640)
It's also an interesting phase because I tend to stress that customer research is not sales.
Right.
You use empathy in both situations, but before the sale happens, there's just less trust there.
Right.
Like people have their guard up more in a sales scenario and it's inappropriate to try to push past that.
But I would be interested to try to talk to them and try to understand.
How do they understand the problem the product is solving?
I mean, first, are they using it?
Right.
Are they actively using it on a daily basis, both in terms of the analytics that you have on how they're using it, but also do they describe themselves as using it?
And what does the company describe as the activity it solves?
And what do these potential customers describe as the activity?
And if there is a difference between those, that's something that you really need to dig into.
And also how acutely do they feel that problem?
I think that's probably one of the first things I would be thinking about is, you know, DEZ Trainor, the founder of Intercom, he has this fantastic blog post called not all great products make good businesses.
And in that he has this diagram that I refer to as the pain and frequency chart, which is basically a two by two grid of pain and frequency.
And then you rank the different problems that someone might experience on those grids.
And people are generally more willing to pay for something that is a high frequency, high pain problem.
And so if it turns out that these potential customers see that there is a problem, but it turns out if it's a low pain problem, low frequency problem, then that's a red flag.
But if it is a high paying high frequency problem, and it may be solving several different problems, are those the problems that the company is currently prioritizing both in terms of their development and in terms of their sales pitches right now?
Like, are those things aligned between where people are getting value and where the company sees itself as presenting value?
I also get thinking a little bit about Marty Kagan's framework of valuable, viable, usable and feasible, which is basically that in order to be successful, a product needs to be valuable to the customer, it needs to be usable by them, it needs to be viable for the company commercially, and it needs to be feasible for the company to build.
And so maybe it turns out that the product is valuable, but maybe there's a usability issue with how they use it, or maybe they're selling to the wrong people in the organization.
Should this be a self service tool that managers get to?
Should it be going to the CEO and like really what is that problem they're solving and are they solving it for the right person in the organization?
That's where I would start thinking mostly.
Mostly.
I have more questions.
Omer (16:35.640)
Yeah, I'd say there's two maybe challenges right now.
Number one is that it's a struggle finding customers who will even trial the product.
And these could be people who are saying, yeah, I have these problems, I want to improve remote teamwork, I want to improve retention, et cetera.
But when it comes to actually using the product, they're not quite.
Maybe it's a positioning thing that it hasn't exactly landed in terms of people understanding, oh, okay, this is how it will help me and why I should be using this.
And then I'd say the second challenge is there's probably like even of the five customers or pre customers that they have, not all of them are engaged.
There's one or two that seem to be using it well and the others have onboarded, but there isn't a lot of activity there.
So it's almost like, okay, there's this onboarding challenge as well.
And then how do you actually get people to use this thing frequently?
Going back to what you talked about with the problem and.
But before you get there, it's like, how do I go out there and figure out why if these people and these companies really have these problems, what is it about this product or the way I'm marketing this product or telling them about this product or positioning it or whatever isn't quite landing?
Michele Hansen (18:01.640)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of different people pieces there.
Could it be a value problem?
Could it be a positioning problem?
It could also be a problem in terms of existing solutions.
And actually that's one of the first things I'm interested in is what are people currently using to solve this problem?
And is that something they're paying for?
Is it something manual?
Are they doing it with spreadsheets?
If they were to pick one problem they were solving, and because you described a couple, but it sounded like maybe retention, we're all hearing about how tight the labor market is, especially in tech, we're going to focus on that one.
Okay, what are they currently using for that?
Leaving the product entirely to the side.
What do people currently use to solve that problem?
What do those processes look like in some ways?
Actually might just use the discovery template for a script and find HR managers or HR leaders to talk to, not to pitch them the product, but just to understand what is their current way of solving this problem and how acute of a problem is that for them.
And ideally you can do that after getting a sense from the people who are trialing it what that problem is.
But it does seem like there's a misalignment here between what the company thinks it's solving and what people want to be solved.
There's something missing.
And like it could be that they have a great platform, but they're solving a problem that isn't very painful for people, or they don't understand that's the problem being solved.
Or if you're looking at it from a jobs to be done forces perspective, what are the things that push and pull people to and from solutions and anxieties and habits.
I would analyze that just from the looking at the problem itself, not even looking at the product, and just see what are they currently solving for that and see if you can interview trialing customers from that perspective and just try to understand, like, what are they?
What were they previously using?
What caused them to be curious about trying something new?
There's more to be dug in there and it doesn't necessarily have to do with the product itself.
Yeah.
Omer (20:17.120)
So I think that there's definitely some good stuff there.
I think that the problem there is that there probably aren't in terms of a sample set, there aren't many.
You could look at one or two companies or teams who are using the product and maybe there's some questions that they can ask there.
I totally agree with that.
I think on the other side, I'm wondering if it would make sense for this founder to go out on LinkedIn, because that might be a good place to find these type of HR leaders or managers and maybe interview a handful of them, whatever that number is, to try and answer some of those questions that you just talked about.
If we were helping this person to come up with, plan on how to get there, what are some of the things we can advise them in terms of, okay, how to find people to interview, how to do the outreach, how to think about doing the interview.
What are some practical things do you think we could give them to think about?
Michele Hansen (21:05.700)
Yeah.
So the first thing would be to talk to as many of those five people who are trialing, which, given how white glove it is at this point, hopefully it's all of them, and see what they understand the problem is that you're solving.
It might be interesting to approach it from a switch perspective from jobs to be done as a recent customer, even though they're not actually a customer, but taking that perspective on it, and see what they understand the problem the product is solving is, or the problems it's solving.
And then from there, then go out on LinkedIn, find people and see, okay, interview them about that specific problem, which may be a different problem than the company thinks it's solving, or that may only be a subset of the problems the company thinks it's solving.
But then from a discovery perspective, just understand what are they currently doing and where are they frustrated with that?
Where are they happy with that?
Where are they spending a lot of time?
Where are they spending a lot of money?
You'll probably need to compensate them in some way.
Usually a 25 or $50Amazon gift card is enough to get someone on the phone for half an hour.
If you're solving a problem that you know, if, if it's painful enough for them, they will want to talk to somebody who's experiencing it.
But if you have trouble finding people who will even talk to you about it, that's a sign that the problem you're solving is not a particularly painful one.
So if people want this problem to be solved, they will be willing to talk to you.
And an Amazon gift card should be more than enough.
And just looking at it from a discovery perspective of trying to understand, not pitching them the product, not trying to sell them on the product, and just really understanding the problem.
Because I think it sounds like there's a mismatch here.
Omer (22:49.220)
Yeah.
Okay, so let's say that LinkedIn is the place that they're going to try and find or recruit some of these people to interview.
And I guess the first step would Be okay, you need to get, you need to get clear about who that target customer is.
And so maybe they go after, okay, people who are head of hr, HR directors or whatever for certain types of companies with a range of employees, between a hundred and a thousand employees or something like that, so they can build some sort of criteria and figure out, okay, these are the type of people that we think have this problem and that our product can help solve.
What's a good way to reach out to these people?
I know in the book, I can't remember exactly, you'd given somebody's example of some message they include in their connection request as an example that had worked well.
Michele Hansen (23:44.040)
Yes.
So there's.
So I don't do LinkedIn reach personally, but there actually is a founder who is actually even a similar stage.
They have an early prototype, they have early customers on it, but really reaching out to a lot of leaders and different companies that they would like to be customers of theirs.
And so I include some examples of those templates in the book.
And the founder I talked to, his name is Chris Forster and his company is called streampay, he really recommended guides from the company Demand Curve.
And I mentioned that also to sort of show that the book is not intended to be a comprehensive guide, but rather a signpost to other places as well, so to lots of other books that you could explore about this.
And I believe he recommended that sending a connection request without a message in it got him a higher rate of people responding to the later messages.
And so then reaching out to those people and trying to set up a 15, 30 minute call with them.
And again, I think the key metric here is not just the number of phone calls, but if people are accepting your requests and then you send them a message and then you never hear back from them, that's a sign that either the problem you're solving or the way you are framing that problem is not a problem for people.
So there might be a positioning problem, but that's something to pay attention to.
But really the goal here is to get five people.
And a lot of different research points to five people being enough to at least get an early sense of direction.
And you may hear five different things from five different people, which is a sign of a very broad scope.
But usually there's some themes.
And so it's worth regrouping after those five and seeing what have you learned and how does that contrast with how you understood the problem before you talk to them.
Omer (25:36.670)
Okay, I just found it in the book with the example there where you'd written his most successful method with the connection request was.
I hope you're doing well.
I'm doing research as a tech startup founder on how innovative publishers are reaching new audiences and generating leads.
I'd love to talk with you about this.
If you have 10 minutes for a quick call, I'd very much appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's similar to what I've heard Rob talk about in the mom test, that generally people like to help.
And if you're putting them in a position where I think Rob describes it as putting them on a pedestal, that they're an expert in something and you're looking for some advice or some guidance and you need some help, many people would be open to helping if they can.
I think I have heard about this before from the demand curve example of not sending a message with your connection request on LinkedIn.
And I think that's because so many people send.
They do a copy and paste of stuff they found online in the connection request.
I was very impressed by your LinkedIn profile.
Michele Hansen (26:33.180)
Right.
Omer (26:33.500)
As an example, as soon as you see those, you're like, oh, yeah, all right, okay, I'm not gonna bother with that one.
But when you sometimes just get, you know, a random request and there isn't even a message in there, and that person looks normal and it doesn't look like they have anything to sell you, maybe they're just in a relevant space.
Sometimes it's easier just to.
To say yes to those people.
But let's go with your goal of trying to get five interviews.
And let's say our founder goes out and makes connection requests with, let's say, 25 good targeted people who seem to be a good fit, who.
Who they believe is the target customer.
And let's say they get a 20% response.
So they've got five people who have come back and agreed to be interviewed.
Where do we go next?
Michele Hansen (27:13.440)
Yeah.
So in the book, I have a discovery script for exactly this scenario where you're trying to understand how somebody perceives a problem.
And this is really where the word empathy comes in, because you need to check your own perspective of a situation or a problem or a business opportunity and try to understand how is it that they perceive the problem, how do they experience it?
The interview is entirely about their perspective of the problem.
And that script is a starting point for those conversations.
Omer (27:46.090)
Okay, I know in the book, you also talked about helping founders prepare for doing these interviews.
Can you just talk a little bit about that?
Because here's what I've seen when I talk To a lot of founders who are either doing these sort of interviews or want to start doing them.
And there's a number of things I see over and over again.
On the one hand, they almost assume they're supposed to be selling on the interview because they're like, I don't have my product ready yet or I don't have anything to show them.
And it's, well, actually that's good because then you talk about them and their problem without having to mention your product.
The other thing I think is people are often, they're just not sure what they're supposed to do on the interview.
Maybe they haven't had that experience before.
And once people break it down and they realize, okay, I, this is not about selling, this is just about listening.
These are some of the areas that I'm trying to explore.
And actually if I prepare for this, it's actually not that hard because most of the time I just have to listen and ask the right types of follow up questions.
So how do you recommend helping someone get prepared who's in that situation isn't really sure how to approach these interviews?
Michele Hansen (28:46.350)
I love that it's not about selling, it's about listening.
Might have to quote you on.
I think founders are such an energetic, such a competent bunch, usually, right, Usually very smart people.
And oftentimes because we have to pitch our companies and whatnot.
Used to being in situations where we have to prove how smart we are and prove how good our ideas are.
Right.
Whether that's to investors or to customers or to friends and family who think we're crazy for doing this.
And I think that makes us talk more rather than listen.
But as you said, going into a customer interview, you need to listen more.
And when you do talk, it's very important how you talk.
And this isn't really taught very much.
And this is a big focus of the book is teaching people how to talk so that people will talk.
How you ask a question is almost more important than the questions you ask.
I find that founders and people going into interviews in general, they tend to focus a lot on the questions they're going to ask and making a script and having questions to ask, but you're not going to get very good results.
Not very good answers if you don't ask the questions in the right way and you don't follow up in the right ways.
And this is where I found a big gap in a lot of books on customer research, because there would be five bullet points on how to conduct an interview.
And one of the bullet points is ask gentle follow up questions and mirror their phrasing.
And then that's it.
It's like, well, what does that mean?
What does mirroring mean?
What kind of follow up questions?
What do you actually say?
And so there's a whole part of the book devoted to that.
But building rapport with the person is the most important thing you can do.
And what you were saying, selling someone is the fastest way to destroy rapport.
The second fastest way is to interrupt them.
And so it's vitally important that you don't sell them.
If they're interested in what you're making, they will tell you, they will ask you if they can buy it.
They will ask you how they can get it.
You won't have to sell them.
And of course you can always email them later.
And so that's a huge focus on the book is building Rapport.
Because I tend to think the questions that you ask about all the things we talked about with that previous founder of what are they currently using to solve the problem and how do they think about it and how frequently do they have this and how much are they paying to solve it and all these sorts of things.
Those questions are the first half of the interview.
And the second half is where the real magic happens, where they actually tell you what's really going on and what they think about things.
Which comes after what I call the reaching for the door question, which is you basically do a fake out of getting off the phone and to what you were saying that Rob mentions in the mom test.
There's also something that Robert Cialdini found in his book influence.
Elevating someone to the position of teacher is one of the most, the strongest ways to influence someone.
But so halfway through the interview, saying, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
I really appreciate it and I've learned so much from you.
Is there anything else you want me to know?
And waiting until it's uncomfortable and waiting for them to fill the silence.
And if you're an NPR listener, this is something that Terry Gross does.
This is actually where I learned this from somebody who used to work for her that she will ask a question and then wait until it's uncomfortable and then someone will fill it with the most interesting thing in the interview.
And so in that first part of the interview, when you're asking questions and you're gently following up and you're mirroring what they say and rephrasing what they've said and whatnot is building rapport with them.
So that when you get to that point of asking them, is there anything else you think I should know?
That then they open up to you because they trust you.
But if you start the interview by selling them, by saying, oh, it's so hard to keep employees now with everything being remote, isn't it?
And you keep trying to solve your own right, you keep trying to validate your own perspective on it instead of saying, so what's it been like for you?
I mean, keeping employees around during COVID that's gotta be hard.
And just letting them talk, you will get to that point of that reaching for the door question, and then they.
They will tell you everything.
I mean, it's pretty amazing the things people have told me at that point.
Omer (33:01.660)
I've experienced something similar doing interviewing people on this show is that a lot of times I'd interview founders who have told their story many times before.
And so they almost have, like, it's not scripted, but they have the same sort of answers prepared.
There might be a point, it doesn't always happen, but there might be a point where I asked them a question they weren't expecting, and you get that pause and then they give you an answer that they haven't thought about really answering before.
And often that's where the gold is.
It's not easy, but I think exactly the kind of thing you're describing, you
Michele Hansen (33:33.940)
get that gold by building rapport with them, by building trust.
And most people aren't used to being listened to, both in our daily lives and from companies.
And so when you're talking to someone who's genuinely listening to you, it's really different and it builds trust very quickly.
Omer (33:51.230)
There's a chapter in the book called how to Talk so people will talk hidden away in the middle of the book.
And I think you actually describe it as, this is the most important chapter in the book or the section of the book.
And you talked about signposts, but all the signposts in the book, to me, actually pointed back to that chapter.
Before you're going to do this, make sure you read the chapter on how to talk so people will talk.
So I think in many ways, whether you think you're good, we're doing these customer interviews, or you're doing it for the first time, that's something you don't skip that part.
Go through it and really try to digest what's in there, because I think there's some really good advice.
Like, for example, one of the points you made in there was like, ask for clarification.
Even when you don't need it.
Right.
I love that because that.
Can you just explain that because there's so many benefits just to doing what you just said there?
Michele Hansen (34:36.970)
Yeah, I.
You find the more you do this, the more you find that the way people, People do things are often not how you would do them and that there is gold in that.
And so, for example, let's say that you have an E commerce site, for example, and someone says, oh, and then I, I just put in my credit card and you say, oh, so you put in your credit card which is mirroring, but basically you're asking for clarification.
And then.
But did they use one password that auto filled it?
Did they have to go find their credit card?
Was their credit card in some other part of the house?
And then it was actually in their purse, but they left it in the car and then they got distracted and they started doing laundry.
Oh, and that's why they abandoned their cart and they forgot to buy the thing because they started doing several other things.
Right.
The process is not always as straightforward as we think it is.
And the Jedi level of this is to rephrase and clarify wrong.
And so to restate things in an order that is incorrect so that they then go on to elaborate and correct you.
And when we correct people, we tend to over explain things.
And when you're interviewing someone, you want them to explain as much as possible.
So it's incredibly effective.
Omer (35:43.510)
Yeah, I love that.
And I think that the question then becomes is, okay, I do this interview, but how do I actually get to the next stage and get to showing them my product or getting them to trial it or to buy it or whatever.
And there's two things that I've seen, but I'd love to hear your perspective on this.
One is if you sort of remove the product and the pitching and all of that stuff and you just go through these interviews, the more you do them, the more you're going to get clarity on what are the problems that these people actually care about, what are the things that they've tried to solve in the past, what are the things that they're actually trying to solve now, and how painful is it for them or isn't.
And I think just those types of insights you can take back and say, actually we're leading with this thing, but that's low on the list.
And it's this other thing that's way more important.
And if we were talking about that first, we might get more people's attention as an example.
So there's a Whole bunch of stuff that I think you can get from these interviews.
And you talk about that later in the book in terms of how to actually analyze the interviews, figure out what to do.
The other thing I've seen, which has been interesting is that I work with some founders recently who were going out and doing these types of interviews and they initially they thought they should be selling and then once they became comfortable with that and said, we're not going to do that, we're not going to tell them about our product, we're not going to pitch it, we're just going to listen, we're just going to ask questions.
When they started talking to the right type of people with the right type of problems, as you mentioned earlier, those people started asking about the product.
They'd say, okay, can you tell me more about this product you're building or you have or how could that help solve my problem?
And so they would come back and say, we're trying not to talk about our product, but people keep asking us about it.
And I was like, well, that's a great sign that you're going in the right direction, you're talking to the right people with the right problem, and that's okay to do, but it's not it.
It needs to happen.
When that customer you're interviewing is ready to have that conversation and you can
Michele Hansen (37:42.460)
always go back to them and do what I call an interactive interview, which is basically screen sharing with them and walking them through something.
Whether that's maybe you don't even have a product yet, but you have a landing page or you have a wireframe walking them through it, or rather allowing them to walk you through it and asking them, so what do you think would happen if you clicked on that or look at this page and tell me what you think it can do, or what do you think this product does?
Can be incredibly illuminating.
Omer (38:12.800)
Yeah.
And going back to our founder and this hypothetical case study, I think something like that along the process somewhere would be really helpful because once you've got to the point where you've had enough of these interviews and you understand the problems and maybe how you need to position what you're doing in a different way to get their attention and you're now getting more people interested in trialing the product, you've got that second thing because it isn't self serve.
And we talked about, well, maybe there's a potential issue there in terms of once even you've helped them on board, they're not really, not everyone is actively using it.
And so why is that?
And to be able to go back and do what you described where do a screen share.
And rather than demoing, I think that's the distinction.
Rather than demoing the product, it's asking them what they're seeing and how they would use it or what they think something would do.
Right?
Michele Hansen (39:02.530)
Yeah, exactly.
Understanding how they perceive the product.
Omer (39:06.930)
Yeah.
Is there a word for that?
An undemo.
Michele Hansen (39:10.030)
Undemo, yeah.
It's funny because like it's like usability testing, but it's not like I, I call it an interactive interview or a screen share test or a screen share interview.
I haven't really prototype testing, but it's also shares a lot of qualities with interviewing.
Shares qualities with usability testing.
I don't know if there's really a word.
So I kind of came up with interactive interview.
And also for some people the having a landing page or a prototype or something up because act like this neutral third party in an interview.
And so if you're nervous about interviewing, it can be this thing for everybody to bounce off of.
If it gets awkward, you can be like, can we look at this menu over here?
What do you think you might do there?
And just deflect it.
Omer (39:52.040)
Yeah, love it.
Well, look, we could keep talking for, for hours on this because I think there is so much to cover.
But if people want to learn more, they can go and check out the book.
They can go to deploy empathy.com to get more on the book or go to Amazon or wherever to find it.
And if people want to check out Geocodio, they can go to Geocode or Cod, like the fish Geocod IO.
Right.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Michele Hansen (40:17.240)
They can email me michelleployempathy.
Com or just reach out to me on Twitter.
I'm there all the time at mjw.
Omer (40:25.400)
Hanson, thanks for getting this stuff out of your head and into a book because I think it can help a lot more people.
Just having gone through the book myself, I think there's a ton of, as the title says, very practical information.
Preparing recruiting people, actually doing the interviews and then figuring out what to do with that information.
And I thought it was quite neat.
At the end of the book you have this cheat sheet where you talk about if you're trying to validate an idea, go back and use these parts of the book to construct what you need to do next.
If you are trying to figure out why somebody isn't buying your product, go and do these parts pieces.
I think that was a nice touch to add to the book because it's almost like there's a whole bunch of ingredients there and best practices and things that you can do and the way you put them together or use different pieces will depend on whatever situation you're in.
So yeah, I really like that.
Thank you so much for joining me and good luck with the book and look forward to speaking to you soon and talking about the story of Geocodio.
Michele Hansen (41:18.470)
Thank you so much for having me.
Omer (41:19.830)
Cheers.
