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by Roberto Zoia

Reality Check

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When thinking of a new product or service, it’s normal to make some assumptions about our potential customers and their needs.

Feedback from real customers is essential at this stage because it grounds us to reality and allows us to shape our product or service according to our vision but with the customer in mind. Otherwise, we can end with an incredible product or service that has no real use.

Dan Norris, in his book The 7-Day Startup: You don’t learn until you launch takes this approach to the extreme. Launch fast, fail fast. You don’t have to agree with everything he proposes in his book, but he certainly has a point.

Link Roundup

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Two quotes I took note of this week:

As the traveller who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
— Margaret Mead, via Ma.tt

The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago. Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book. Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.
— Tyler Cowen, How to read fast

What I Think Is All There Is

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How good are we at considering information or opinions that don’t agree with what we think?

I recently attended a conference by a world-renowned speaker. For context, the talk was in Lima, Peru, about how can the industry in Peru become more competitive. This speaker has published eight books and has spent the last five years researching his next one.

There was a panel of five industry leaders to comment and ask questions after the talk: three businessmen, a journalist, and a former secretary of the Treasury (Minister of Economy, as it’s called in Peru).

The speaker’s first point was that one of the reasons countries in Latin America don’t level up with first world economies is the trap of self-complacency. That is, thinking that while we are not the top economies in the world, we are not that bad either. And thus, we take no action towards becoming better. We feel no urge to become more competitive. Meanwhile, the top economies in the world –the speaker explained– never think they are good enough. They are ruthlessly seeking to become more competitive and efficient.

He also elaborated around the idea that we are in the presence of world-wide trends that are inescapable, and that they will be here faster than we think. For example, automation is coming, he said, and in part is already here. After five years of research, and hearing what experts around the world think on the subject, his conclusion is that this trend is going to affect not only first-world economies but also medium economies like Peru. We have to choose now where we want to be in the next years.

What surprised me was the reaction of the panelists. Most of them said something like this: “very interesting, Mr. X, but this doesn’t exactly apply to us. We don’t think this will affect Peru so severely.” (And thus, we, as industry leaders, will make nothing about it.) The people in the panel were not dumb. They know the industry well. Each one of them are successful in their fields. How is that they uncounsciously fell in the trap of complacency that the expert they hired for the talk had just explained?

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains that we tend to judge situations based on the information in front of us, honoring only the inside view. What we know, what we feel comfortable with. What you see is all there is, says Kahneman. At the same time, we unconsciously neglect to take in account the outside view as evidence, even if it could provide us with a baseline of reality to our judgments. “Information is routinely discarded when it is incompatible with one’s personal impressions of a case. In the competition with the inside view, the outside view doesn’t stand a chance.” (p. 249)

We should develop some kind of mental vaccine against this cognitive bias.

Did I do my best to…

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There is so much written about the importance of focus to achieve your goals, that it can be distracting.

It’s easy to deceive ourselves by thinking that working hard all day long means working in the right things. A simple tactic is to use some kind of metric to check, every day, if we are advancing towards our goal, spending our time and energy in the right things.

In his book Triggers. Creating Behavior That Lasts, world-class coach Marshall Goldsmith shares a straightforward technique he’s been using for years. He calls it the “daily questions”. Every day, at the end of the day, he asks himself a series of questions. This questions have been crafted to reflect his priorities, the change he wants to achieve.

The first versions of these daily questions asked directly if he had achieved a particular result or taken specific action. Later, with some experience and better understanding of human nature, he changed the formulation to ask if he had done his best possible effort towards that particular result or action. For example, Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? Goldsmith considers this simple mean so important, that he has a person hired to call him every day and ask him the daily questions.

It doesn’t have to be the daily questions, but focus goes in hand with some kind of review at the end of the day.

(Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash.)

Owning your Content

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Every now and then something happens that calls our attention about platforms and content. For example, the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytics scandal. Or some time before, Medium enforcing a paywall around their content.

As several people have pointed out, if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.

Medium has an excellent publishing platform and offers visibility to those who publish there. But they can’t offer it for free forever. Facebook is no different. I’m surprised by the number of businesses selling their products only through Facebook. I understand, it’s where you target audience is! But it’s Facebook who controls your content, who sees it and when. And it’s Facebook that decides that you need to pay to “boost” your post to your audience. Facebook’s priorities and goals are very different than yours.

Something similar could be said about relying only on LinkedIn for your professional profile1, or selling your products through Amazon. Although the situation with Amazon is slightly different because you are paying Amazon for fulfillment, storage, etc. But if your niche is lucrative enough –and Amazon has precise data about everything that happens on their platform–, nothing stops Amazon from launching their own brand and competing head to head with your business.

Put your work in a platform where you are the customer, not the product. If you are in for the long term it’s not only totally worth it but indispensable.

  1. Have you ever wonder who LinkedIn customers are? Again, if you are not paying for publishing your profile on LinkedIn, then you are the product that’s being sold to headhunters and other interested parties. ↩