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The Fable of the Haystack and the Would-Be Tailor

nce upon a time there was a would-be tailor who sought to create the world’s finest clothing. In his grand visions, he would someday clothe presidents, kings and the wealthiest people on earth. This would make him rich and powerful. But first, to get started, he had to find a needle. Without the needle, he wouldn’t be able to begin to sew.

He went to a guru and asked “Where can I find a needle to create my most amazing clothes?” and the guru responded, “Look for it over there in that haystack. You must select two pieces of hay and compare them. Keep the one that looks most like a needle and discard the other. Do this over and over until you find the needle you desire.”

With a smile and a hop in his step the would-be tailor set to the task.

He selected and compared each long, thin piece of hay, day after day… keeping the one that most resembled a needle and discarding the one that didn’t.

After several months of selecting and comparing each piece of hay, he grew tired and returned to the guru. “I have not found the needle yet, and I am tired and poor. I have done nothing but compare hay for months and I am weary.” The guru said “This is The Way, young would-be tailor. You must compare hay strand by strand.”

After another several months, the would-be tailor had become an expert at selecting and comparing hay. He was a hay comparer extraordinaire. In fact, he began to teach others how to compare hay. He was tired and poor, fingers worked to the bone, but he was an expert.

Over time he nearly forgot he wanted to be a tailor. But he kept comparing hay, measuring his progress, teaching others, but he had never found the needle.

Then one day another would-be tailor came along with stars in his eyes, full of his dreams, and asked “What are you doing?”

The weary hay comparer explained “I am looking for a needle so that I can create the world’s finest clothes. This is how you must start too, if you want to be tailor to kings.”

The second would-be tailor stared blankly. Thought for a minute. Then he pulled a match out of his pocket and lit the haystack on fire. It burnt quickly, and when it was done he picked up the needle among the ashes and began to walk away.

Would-be tailor number one hung his head, and said in a sullen tone “How did you know to do that?”

Looking back over his shoulder as he walked away, on his path to be the world’s greatest tailor, he said “It was always about the needle. Not the hay.”

#RigorLabs

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Competitive Research 2.0: Time To Update Your Competitive Analysis

Conducting competitive research is crucial to your company’s success. It equips you with the knowledge to know industry trends, helps you understand how your competition is marketing to potential customers, and it gives you the insights into their overall strategy. If asked to conduct competitive research, most will start by going to their website, downloading their app, signing up for their newsletter, reading their blog, and then doing a side-by-side feature comparison. But if you do this you’re missing the point. What you need to know is why is the user purchasing goods/services from your competition and not coming to you?

So what’s the right way? When evaluating your competition, you need to speak with consumers purchasing your competitor’s products. You need to get down to the “why?” something is happening. Don’t just interpret for yourself why you think they’re successful or not, you’ll miss the insight. By talking with your competition’s customers you accomplish two things: 1) you learn what customer need your competition is serving and  2) you can identify if there are any gaps that aren’t being met for the consumer.

Let’s take CarMax for example. Who actually loves going through the car buying process? That’s right, no one does. When the company was conceived CarMax’s founders studied the market to understand where opportunities existed. The learned what customers hated about buying cars, and built a company that is more consumer-friendly. By doing that they flipped the industry upside down.

  • Customers hate interacting with pushy salespeople, so they simplified the customer/salesperson relationship. They did this with “No-Haggle Pricing.” Also, CarMax removed a major source of misalignment between buyers and salespeople by offering the same commission for any car sold. It doesn’t matter how cheap or expensive, the salespersion is incented to get you the car you want.
  • They also introduced “5-day money back guarantee” to help with buyers remorse.
  • They became obsessed with transparency, showing the consumer the quality of their cars. They not only show them the CarFax, but exposing every step of the extensive inspection process.
  • And finally, they listed the “Kelly Blue Book Pricing” to show that they weren’t being ripped off.

Another great example is Southwest Airlines. Every year Southwest is among the top on the customer satisfaction list. They achieve this by studying the industry, listening to travelers, and handling them in a very personal way. They also introduced Transfarency, getting rid of baggage fees, change fees, and offering free live TV.

These are just a couple well-known examples. Every day companies are being pressed by competition to adapt or get squeezed out. CarMax found success by providing transparency. Southwest became obsessed with making your travel as stress-free as possible, carving out a space for themselves. Both companies have caused entire industries to adjust to their competitive strength. And in both cases the key to the opportunity was understanding strengths and weaknesses of competitive offerings.

So I’d like to end this post with a challenge: Take a look at your industry, understand what your competition is doing well and not so well, and figure out how you can capitalize on an unmet need for your company. And in that challenge, make sure you’re talking to your competitor’s customers, they are the key to helping you learn what you don’t know that you don’t know.

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How to Launch Advanced Tech to Mass Market Users

Something pretty great happened last Tuesday in Culver City…

ntroducing advanced technologies to consumers is a tricky business. If you go to fast, offering a product that is too hard to grasp or requires too much behavior change, it’s highly likely the products will miss the market and fail. A classic example is the Apple Newton, but there are tons of others… 3D TV, Google Glass and Nintendo Virtual Boy to name a few.

But there’s also a cost for moving too slow, and being a laggard in introducing new technology to your users. For the first year (at least, maybe longer) the Microsoft Surface was “an iPad-like device” and only measured against its competitive rival. Undifferentiated follower is a very challenging market position.

So who has done it right? When have products found the not-too-early-but-not-too-late balance, yet still packed in a lot of advanced tech? What principles can we draw from that?

This was the discussion in Culver City last Tuesday, and the answer to this question is what was so great.

The event was a dinner salon, hosted by CTO Mixers and RigorLabs. It consisted of ~15 people from LA’s tech and product creation community, all joined together to entertain, challenge and educate each other on their views regarding the adoption of advanced tech such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality and blockchain.

The question posed to the group was simple: How do we make great products on these advanced technologies and not make the big mistake of missing the market?

We talked about this for more than two hours… arguing points, sharing experience and then coalescing to a few critical statements we can all take back to our companies to help us all build better products for our users.

Understanding Number One: Use Metaphors. Companies that get the timing right take complex technologies and simplify their introduction to users, often fitting new things into an existing metaphor. NEST is a thermostat. An AI-based computer stuck to your wall with predictive capabilities and a computer built-in… but to customers the metaphor is simple.

Understanding Number Two (related to #1): Watch User Elasticity.  Users only have so much elasticity for adopting new tech, so you have to understand where the balance of old metaphor and new concept lies. The key to this is to test and measure what your market can absorb – how quickly they can move forward into the future with you.

Understanding Number Three: We CAN Use The Past As An Indicator. There is nothing inherently different about the current emerging technologies that require any modifications to #1 and #2 above. Gutenberg’s press blew people’s minds. They couldn’t imagine the new future when knowledge could be mass produced. They stood at the precipice, looking at the impact of advancements and wondering how it was all going to turn out. But ultimately there was consumer adoption and the world changed. No different that the tech advancements we are pressing forward.

Understanding Number Four: There IS a Change Afoot For Product Creators. There is a difference today, as compared to the past. Tools to create experiences are advancing faster than consumer integration of the tech. Running an AI is exponentially more difficult than operating a printing press. So the burden is on product creators to keep upping our game.

BONUS – Understanding Number Five: This Isn’t An All-or-nothing Round. The stakes are high, companies need to get this right to compete and stay relevant. There is a competitive imperative to integrate AI/ML, VR/AR and Blockchain… but it is going to evolve. There is time to get this right in the next several product cycles and years.

This was the collective wisdom of a highly engaged conversation between some of the brightest tech and product people in Los Angeles. It may be right, it may be wrong.

What do you think? Does this help you build better products or understand how to introduce these technologies more effectively?

Do you want to participate in the Salon Series in the future? Reach out and let me know…

 

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Announcing RigorLabs

Your customers can help you 5x your revenue growth. You just have to know how to listen.

Friends, I am really excited to announce the launch of RigorLabs.com.

Two months ago we released the Frequency Group Product Intelligence Report to help people build better products. Thanks to everyone who helped with honest, critical feedback. The response was really encouraging and we learned quite a bit. So we’re going to spin a new company out of Frequency Group to address the opportunity.

Interest for this kind of service was clear and strong.

And it’s not a surprise. Forrester Research finds that customer experience leaders grow profits 5x faster than laggards. Deloitte reports that customer focused companies are 60% more profitable.

But it’s tough to get a consistent view of customer demand, unless you’re Google or Facebook with the ability to focus entire groups on product research. For most companies, product research is, at best, done by product managers with a million other things to do, and at worst is an afterthought.

Across the board, we’ve found that many, if not all companies building apps and websites for consumers can benefit in some way from having an external service to conduct studies and benchmark their customer demand. Benefits show up in better roadmaps, more confidence around new features and more clarity around user acquisition to name a few.

So RigorLabs is a pure research and analysis company, focused on bringing clarity to the question of product/market fit, and driving lower acquisition costs, greater user engagement and higher customer LTV.

We conduct the user conversations for you, summarize and analyze the feedback, and give you benchmarks so you can tell how your products progress over time. We measure your competitors so you know exactly where you stand. We also give you the raw data so you have the detail available if you want to go deep on your own.

If you’re interested in knowing more there are details at RigorLabs.com or hit me or Greg up.

Thanks,

Gerry