Understand the situation of the person who needs your product and then call that person out, says Ryan Singer

We hosted Ryan Singer for an Ask-Me-Anything Session on our Slack community on 15th November 2022 at 13:00 EDT.

Best of the excerpts from the AMA session are:

Q: Hi, I am building a product which offers a wide range of functionality for a business. The product would be the single place to run their daily operations, scheduling, payroll and marketing. With all of these modules within the product what would be the best strategy to price them? Should we create plans and limit access to certain features or should we make these as addons. For example: say a customer uses our product to run their operations and scheduling and uses an external tool for run marketing campaigns. Should we offer the marketing module as an addon? Or should we offer it as part of one of our paid plans? Which one would have the lowest impact on PLG?

Ryan: To the first question , I would say a first step for them would be to watch the Shaping in a Nutshell and try to identify if they are overshaping or undershaping or both, and where.

About pricing strategy, and product strategy in general, it's important to start from the customer's struggle and work backward. There are very different approaches to bundling, as you said, and there's no universal answer to what is best.

The best place to start learning how to work backwards from the customer is a book by Clayton Christensen called "Competing Against Luck."

That will set you down the path to frame the customer's situation in terms of the job they're trying to do. A big part of that when it comes to pricing is to look at the buying process. See how existing customers are buying and what they consider to be part of the package that they need at the point of purchase.

One of my mentors, Bob Moesta, has a great quote, "Context creates value." The value of how much they are willing to pay, and for what, depends on the context they are in. So you need to understand that first.

After Competing Against Luck, a good step to get deeper into thinking about sales and product from the customer POV is Bob's book Demand-Side Sales 101.

Q: Hey Thanks for your time

I've been "eating glass and staring into abyss" for the last two years or so. What would be your advice for a guy like me, who wants to overthrow the whole industry and make next Slack, Basecamp, and Jira combined? Is it crazy nowadays to aim at being the next giant with zero investments?We have only one developer besides myself. I am trying to minimize the features as much as I can. We ship only the stuff users absolutely need. Our product can bring value already. We use it ourselves.

Ryan: Have you started selling it?

A: I've started doing marketing a few month ago. As of now, I don't have paying?customers. I only pay for my product myself??I am doing it to make sure charging?works.

R: Most important is to find one person who needs it. Rather than broadly marketing,????I would try to find someone in your network who has the same problem as you, and?help them get it set up 1:1. In my experience those 1-1 sessions are the best way to?find out if there is product market fit. And then, if you can see you have something?that at least one other?person values enough to pay for, then it can make sense to?start marketing.

Q: Yes, I see. In other words I should try to "manually" find first customer who would?really need my solution.

R: Exactly. First, do it in a way that doesn't scale.?What you need first is to understand the qualitative, cause and effect details of the situation you are improving.?All the little things that make it work for ONE person.?That's where all the hard work?is!

Once it works for one person really well, they will tell others, you can tell the story, you can make a case study about it, lots of possibilities appear.?One other tip is to?focus on the problem that it solves, not the solution, when you try?to talk to people?to find out if they might need it.

For example, I don't try to get people to use Shape Up by saying "it's a new product?development process." I ask them "are you noticing that as you grow, projects are taking too long to finish?"

Q: This is a really awesome piece of advice. I've already noticed people don't realize the problem quite often. Gently steering them to understanding of the actual problem can help a lot.

R: About the problem, think of it as a matter of recognition. If the problem is actually?happening to them, and it actually matters, your task is to?help them recognize it?

And know they can do something about it.?And be open to finding out that the?problem is a little different than you think.

Q: Hi?@Ryan Singer, Thanks for the AMA session. I am starting into coding and as you've worked on all levels of the software stack, I'm would love to hear how you started out? Did you come from a design/programming background or something else?

Ryan: Hi Anna. I started in the late 90s. I wanted to make software, but I didn't know how to code. I was really interested in user interface design first. So I actually got started by making interfaces in no-code database tools, like FileMaker and Microsoft Access. There are of course modern equivalents to those.

When you understand the relationship between a database and a "view" or the interface to getting information in and out of that database to the user, you already see the whole loop that most everyday software is built on.

Then from there you can go either deeper into the front end or backend or both. I first learned web programming (HTML/CSS), and then later got into "real" programming with Ruby on Rails.

Many people in the old days got started with PHP because it allowed you to get everything working from a single file. Today, Remix is a modern version of that.

A: Thanks a lot, Ryan. Really appreciate it. Currently, I learning HTML/CSS over?freecodecamp.org.

R: That's a good start!

Q: Hey?@Ryan Singer, thanks for being today with us.

1. As a Serial Entrepreneur what you can suggest to people who run their business, top advice from you?
2. What you can wish yourself 5-10 years ago?
3. What you can advice for the bootstrapping product startups
4. Product management question. Need your feedback about our estimate process with story points.

• We have following scale:?XS - 0, S - 1, M - 2, L - 3, XL - 5
• Scope of required work:
• Technical complexity of the task:
• Possible risks:
• Testing
• For each parameter, a score is given and at the end summed up.
• If the task turned out to be more than 8 story points, then it is divided into 2 and each part is evaluated from scratch.
• Developers consistently close the issue at 8 story points per sprint.

Ryan:

1. Focus on helping people one on one. Find things that make a difference in specific situations for specific people.
2. Focus more on the human beings around me and not only on the technical solution.
3. Get into your customers shoes as much as possible.
4. I've never seen story point systems work. I don't think they are real.

• I find it much more effective to start with a time box as a constraint.
• Give yourself a deadline, say ... 4 weeks. Then ask yourself, what are the things we can think of that we know we could finish in that amount of time? That changes an estimation task into a design task.
• Fixed time variable scope is how the really effective teams work that I've seen.
• (You can get a taste for that by checking out my video on YouTube called Shaping in a Nutshell)

Q: Hey?@Ryan Singer,Thanks for doing this. I have a few questions as well:

1. I have tried a few tech businesses on the side and every time I burn myself out over the course of a few months despite the good initial success and lose motivation. Do you have any recommendations for tech burnout?
2. What advice would you give to a 30 year yet-to-make-it entrepreneur?

Thanks again

Ryan: Hi Hari. As far as I understand, burnout come from doing things that you don't enjoy that you don't really feel to be meaningful. If there's a good reason for doing something, if you think there's meaning in doing it, then it's sustainable.

About making it as an entrepreneur , I think it's more about necessity. If you for some reason don't want to work for someone else (like me), then you try to see if you can come up with a way to be independent. Doing that requires finding something specific where you an help other people.

It's not about starting a business or being an entrepreneur in my opinion, it's about (a) having some skills and (b) being able to identify a problem that you can help with in the real world.

I check myself on those things :

I ask myself, what skills do I actually have? What do I need to learn to improve so I am more capable?

And sometimes I know I have the skill but I have to admit to myself that the problem I was going after doesn't seem to be real or I haven't understood it well enough.

You can flip between those two modes of questioning to try and see where you want to change something.

Q: Really insightful, Ryan. Thanks. Few follow-up questions:

1. Do you think money can be a good motivation for being an entrepreneur? I try not to but it would be a lie to say that.
2. How you kept yourself & your team motivated when you were leading Basecamp?

Ryan: Personally I'm not motivated by money, because I think I could make more money if I had a job. The reason that I am working for myself is because I want time. And I think I can make enough to survive while having freedom over my time.

If money is what you want, then I would consider all the options. Maybe there are better ways to make money than being an entrepreneur. Of course it depends on your situation.?

About staying motivated, I was excited by making something that helped people. The fact that people used it and cared about it was fun for me. And I liked trying to crack the puzzle of whether it's possible to do things in a better way than everything else out there.

But people are motivated by different things. What's important is to understand, for you, is it more about people / social interaction, is it more about learning, is it more about feeling accomplished ... is it about needing to step up because of a family or life situation, etc.

I would recommend looking back at your past jobs and projects, and try to find 3 times when you were really unmotivated, and unpack what was going on. And 3 times when you were energized and excited, and what was going on.

And look at the differences in the situation and the environment and the context you were in. To learn about yourself.

Q: @Ryan Singer?I am a creator of a personal finance app for the Mac called GreenBooks (https://greenbooks.app).I know the product is good, because my many users tells me how it’s the best they’ve used for their particular purpose. However, people who manage their money using a traditional app like this is harder to find these days, but they do exist. I have also identified my audience to be of an older kind, definitely not tech people for the most part. All of my sales so far come from people discovering the app from the App Store. I’m wondering if you have any suggestions for things I can do outside of the App Store to get people to notice my app, going through my landing page. YouTube video is one thing I am experimenting with, and I have started creating a few tutorial videos:?GreenBooks I’m sorry I can’t give you a clearer idea about my marketing effort. My head is all over the place when it comes to marketing.

Ryan: That's fantastic that you have users who love your app. You are in a lucky situation for marketing, because you have found something in the real world where the product and the market are clicking in that case. (Assuming they also pay for it).

What you can do is start to go backwards from what is empirically working. Just as a quick example, You said that your sales are mostly from older people who are not tech. I would interview them and ask them what else did they try and why did this work better than the other things for them. And then, say?exactly those things?on your marketing.

Everybody's marketing says the same things

"Simple easy fast"

But if you say, [I don't know what your customers will tell you ...]

but if you describe that this is for older people who are not technical but use their words, so it resonates then you will be talking about something that nobody else is talking about which means better SEO, clearer messaging, and probably cheaper keywords etc.

I recommend checking out this course on customer interviewing https://learn.jobstobedone.org/

And also there is a new book from Claire Sullentrop called Forget the Funnel that is about similar themes, focused on marketing. The key point about marketing is to first understand the situation of the person who needs your product.

Then CALL OUT THAT PERSON in everything you do.

Say "Hey are you over sixty and struggling to understand your accounting now that your income sources are more complicated before?" or whatever it is. Another good book is Competing Against Luck. It will help you think about this the right way.

Q: I see, yes I have begun having Zoom meetings with customers and worked on my landing page message. I need to do more in that area, for example, one thing I need to emphasize is privacy, and I have a good story about that.

But my main challenge is, if I have the perfect site with best message, how do I get people to visit the site in the first place? It’s a question of how to find a channel that brings in traffic (without paid ad) when nobody knows about my site. There are so many advice on things I can try (SEO, back links, reach out to influencer, produce video content, social media), is the approach just to try them all because I can never know what works?

Ryan: I will be honest with you. I don't think your message is perfect. I am looking at your site and I don't see anything about what you told me is happening in real life. Messaging comes before everything else.

Nothing else works when your messaging is generic. Because you can't stand out from everybody else saying the same things. Focus less on what people?want. Focus more on the situation they were in BEFORE they bought your app. What changed?

Why did they need it THEN on THAT DAY and not six months earlier?

You want to understand the cause and effect of why they bought your product instead of something else on that day. Then you can tell that story to other people

Q: I see, exactly, that simple isn’t it : ) easier said then done of course. I will conduct more interviews focusing on exactly that question

Ryan: Very good. That course I linked will help with the specific interviewing technique to do that. It's like a friendly criminal interrogation??To find out what really happened, the story behind the "crime" — but the crime is the purchase

Congratulations on the good work with your product.

Q: @Ryan Singer?thanks for doing this. If you can share your thoughts on the leadership development of engineers.Are there any resources, tips or advices on what should be the conditions to develop engineer leaders?What should you look for in people to build up a strong engineering leadership team?Anything you could share on the topic would be great. I believe that building a tech product nowadays it extremely challenging not because of the coding, or sales, or product-market search but because building the right product team is tough as f*ck.

A: Hi Michael. What's an "undeveloped" engineering leader look like?

Q:

• devs leaving the team
• devs are not growing from Jun to Senior
• can not build an engineering team, all hires not a fit
• not efficiency development process
• moving from one platform to another
• always refactoring

Ryan: First thing I would do is look at the system around the devs. What inputs are they getting. Have a look at this Shaping in a Nutshell - YouTube and see if anything resonates:

I've seen lots of cases where constant refactoring and lack of delivery was because nobody was defining clear projects that the dev team would be able to successfully execute in the time box they were supposed to.

If you first debug your shaping — overshaping and undershaping — THEN you will know that it's not a "garbage in garbage out" process, and that there is a performance issue with the devs because they have good inputs and process.

Clearer shaping can also help you to set clearer expectations for the devs. So that they have metrics to improve against.

Of course it's hard to answer this with just a few statements over a chat. When companies really get into challenging situations with this, it can take a quarter of consulting to fix it. I recently did that with a team in Detroit.

You can see some backstory on that here:?fintech_devcon 2022 | Stop going in circles & ship work that matters with Ryan Singer & Chris Spiek

In that case study, the product team was extremely frustrated with the engineers. But it turned out that the product team wasn't shaping good inputs for the engineers. They ended up bringing a lead engineer into the product group to more rigorously shape the projects they were going to go after. And it transformed the situation.

For more such ask-me-anything sessions join us on Slack. Visit:?Blkns.co?for more info.