Hi Rob, so this is amazing. You know, like I don't know what to call it, like video, ask training that was done. I love walking through it. I love learning how to, you know, take little Snippets and then interact with it. Like, did I want more or did I want to move on? I'm at first, I just want to move on everything, but then I stopped. It was the lecture on setting the vision and creating the safe space and you know, changing the pedestal and understanding.
Helping who you're talking to understand the weakness and asking for their time and creating that safe space so that they can talk about what their needs were and the other. The other one that stuck out was when you talked about how to ask questions to get their needs, both were super powerful. And so, yeah, I'm learning to use video ask more and more. I've been searching all over the place for videos on how to use it and videos like this on how to create the content.
 So it engages people and this was a wonderful example, I think I wish I had a link to all of these types of examples, I would take all of them and it was interesting to was I was running on a treadmill and usually I just watch YouTube videos and I step off after five minutes, you know, I play them all at one and a half speed and play the next one, but this was a little bit of a challenge because it was like a minute long lectures or, you know, discussion.
 So I would run for a minute, come back. Go to the next one or interact with it. Go back to the treadmill, so I wish maybe my treadmill had a touch screen on the monitor of that. That's all. I had really interesting stuff, and I hope other people get this and get value out of it. Thanks. Bye.

Hi Rob, so this is amazing. You know, like I don't know what to call it, like video, ask training that was done. I love walking through it. I love learning how to, you know, take little Snippets and then interact with it. Like, did I want more or did I want to move on? I'm at first, I just want to move on everything, but then I stopped. It was the lecture on setting the vision and creating the safe space and you know, changing the pedestal and understanding.

Helping who you're talking to understand the weakness and asking for their time and creating that safe space so that they can talk about what their needs were and the other. The other one that stuck out was when you talked about how to ask questions to get their needs, both were super powerful. And so, yeah, I'm learning to use video ask more and more. I've been searching all over the place for videos on how to use it and videos like this on how to create the content.

 So it engages people and this was a wonderful example, I think I wish I had a link to all of these types of examples, I would take all of them and it was interesting to was I was running on a treadmill and usually I just watch YouTube videos and I step off after five minutes, you know, I play them all at one and a half speed and play the next one, but this was a little bit of a challenge because it was like a minute long lectures or, you know, discussion.

 So I would run for a minute, come back. Go to the next one or interact with it. Go back to the treadmill, so I wish maybe my treadmill had a touch screen on the monitor of that. That's all. I had really interesting stuff, and I hope other people get this and get value out of it. Thanks. Bye.

Takeaways

2 – IDENTIFICATION

Super excited. You're here before we get started. Would you just tell me real quick? What sort of business you're working on. This is going to help me. Give you the right type of advice. Is it be to see your serving consumers? B2B you're selling to businesses or Enterprise or are you still searching for the right idea that you love? And this going to work, this is going to help me, make sure that you get the most out of what we're talking about.

3 - B2B

Customer development is at its most powerful and its most natural in a B2B sales driven context. For the simple reason that you're already having meetings with your customers. You have to you can't avoid it, right? You need to sell. You need to pitch, you need to negotiate still. There's an opportunity to carve out a bit of space at the beginning of these conversations. When you can get a disproportionate amount of learning and insight that's going to help you change. The way you build, your product is going to help you hone your pitch. It's going to get you further faster. Even if you're an experienced salesperson, and I've seen this hundreds of times.
 He's in some cases in the early stage context, your sales skills work against you. So there's something to learn for both technical Founders and sales driven Founders, but you're going to find it. So valuable once it clicks, and if you stay till the end, we've got some special bonuses for you. You'll be able to download the first half of the book totally free and there's some extra deep dive videos to go into some of the more advanced topics.

Customer development is at its most powerful and its most natural in a B2B sales driven context. For the simple reason that you're already having meetings with your customers. You have to you can't avoid it, right? You need to sell. You need to pitch, you need to negotiate still. There's an opportunity to carve out a bit of space at the beginning of these conversations. When you can get a disproportionate amount of learning and insight that's going to help you change. The way you build, your product is going to help you hone your pitch. It's going to get you further faster. Even if you're an experienced salesperson, and I've seen this hundreds of times.

 He's in some cases in the early stage context, your sales skills work against you. So there's something to learn for both technical Founders and sales driven Founders, but you're going to find it. So valuable once it clicks, and if you stay till the end, we've got some special bonuses for you. You'll be able to download the first half of the book totally free and there's some extra deep dive videos to go into some of the more advanced topics.

4 - The feedback Fallacy

The biggest mistake that everybody makes is the same. I've made it myself. You've probably made it if you've ever talked to a customer and it is to begin by pitching the product or the business idea, and this is understandable. Right? You're excited. You've got this idea. You've got this Vision. You want to tell people about it and we think go get feedback. Go talk to your customers. We think that's the definition, right? How are you going to get feedback if you're not talking about your idea, but think about this from the other person's perspective. Someone comes in. They're all excited. They say, hey, I've got an idea. I've got a
Asian I've been working super hard. I'm so excited. I'm gonna quit my job. I'm gonna do this. What do you think be honest? Wow, that's a difficult conversation. Right? There's a lot of emotions in the air here. That introduces biases. Plus they want to support you. So they're going to say, hey, that's amazing. It sounds so Innovative. It sounds so great. I'm sure it's going to be successful and you as the entrepreneur as the product Creator, you leave that meeting thinking you've gotten feedback. When actually, you haven't what you've gotten is not good data. I call this the feedback policy, not all data is good data, you've gotten compliments.
 Opinions, but what you need is real insights into their needs, their goals and whether or not they're going to buy and use the thing your building. If you want, we can take another minute. I'll tell you a little bit more and we can make sure that this is really clicked for you because this is a super important idea or we can move straight ahead.

The biggest mistake that everybody makes is the same. I've made it myself. You've probably made it if you've ever talked to a customer and it is to begin by pitching the product or the business idea, and this is understandable. Right? You're excited. You've got this idea. You've got this Vision. You want to tell people about it and we think go get feedback. Go talk to your customers. We think that's the definition, right? How are you going to get feedback if you're not talking about your idea, but think about this from the other person's perspective. Someone comes in. They're all excited. They say, hey, I've got an idea. I've got a

Asian I've been working super hard. I'm so excited. I'm gonna quit my job. I'm gonna do this. What do you think be honest? Wow, that's a difficult conversation. Right? There's a lot of emotions in the air here. That introduces biases. Plus they want to support you. So they're going to say, hey, that's amazing. It sounds so Innovative. It sounds so great. I'm sure it's going to be successful and you as the entrepreneur as the product Creator, you leave that meeting thinking you've gotten feedback. When actually, you haven't what you've gotten is not good data. I call this the feedback policy, not all data is good data, you've gotten compliments.

 Opinions, but what you need is real insights into their needs, their goals and whether or not they're going to buy and use the thing your building. If you want, we can take another minute. I'll tell you a little bit more and we can make sure that this is really clicked for you because this is a super important idea or we can move straight ahead.

5 - 📝 QUIZZ

Easy way to tell if you're asking good questions is by how the other person is responding. Which of these makes you feel like you've gotten some good insights out of the meeting that are going to help you build a better product.

6 - Correct

If I was looking at my notes from a meeting, none of these would be good data. It's great to hear that. Someone loves it. It's great to hear them. Say excitedly. I would definitely use that. A compliment does not correlate with future buying behavior and people are so bad at predicting, what they're going to do in the future. You got to cut through that noise. That doesn't mean this whole meeting was a waste. You might have gotten some good insights along the way, but don't mistake a compliment for a commitment.

7 - YOU AREN'T BUILDING A...

One of the biggest criticisms are talking to customers is actually based on a misunderstanding and it's that your customers don't know what they need. And this is true. But you are not trying to build a product by committee. You're not going out and running focus groups and collecting feature requests. What you're doing is building understanding about what your customers need. So that you can take your own Visionary leap as the product Creator or the entrepreneur and surprise them with what they didn't know they needed but it's rooted in their life. There's a famous.
 As Henry, Ford quote, supposedly that he said, if I'd ask my customers what they wanted. They would have said a faster horse, but instead he built them a car but they've never seen a car before. So they couldn't request that they speak in terms of what they know which was horses. Steve Jobs said that he never ran any focus groups before creating the iPhone. He said, focus groups are a waste of time and I completely agree, but that doesn't mean that customer understanding is a waste of time. You can bet that Steve Jobs deeply understood, the lives, the goals.
 The experience of Everyday People. He understood the frustrations with current phones. He understood the goals people had in their Communication in their lives. He had this understanding which allowed him to take the Visionary leap of the iPhone. You want to build the same thing for yourself. It's not about collecting feature requests. It's about building a baseline of understanding about your customers lives so that you can take your Visionary. Leap successfully. If you'd like, I can tell you more about this, we can make sure that you've really got it. It's an important concept and you should have it before moving on.

One of the biggest criticisms are talking to customers is actually based on a misunderstanding and it's that your customers don't know what they need. And this is true. But you are not trying to build a product by committee. You're not going out and running focus groups and collecting feature requests. What you're doing is building understanding about what your customers need. So that you can take your own Visionary leap as the product Creator or the entrepreneur and surprise them with what they didn't know they needed but it's rooted in their life. There's a famous.

 As Henry, Ford quote, supposedly that he said, if I'd ask my customers what they wanted. They would have said a faster horse, but instead he built them a car but they've never seen a car before. So they couldn't request that they speak in terms of what they know which was horses. Steve Jobs said that he never ran any focus groups before creating the iPhone. He said, focus groups are a waste of time and I completely agree, but that doesn't mean that customer understanding is a waste of time. You can bet that Steve Jobs deeply understood, the lives, the goals.

 The experience of Everyday People. He understood the frustrations with current phones. He understood the goals people had in their Communication in their lives. He had this understanding which allowed him to take the Visionary leap of the iPhone. You want to build the same thing for yourself. It's not about collecting feature requests. It's about building a baseline of understanding about your customers lives so that you can take your Visionary. Leap successfully. If you'd like, I can tell you more about this, we can make sure that you've really got it. It's an important concept and you should have it before moving on.

8 – 📝 More detail

In truth feature requests are an unavoidable consequence of. Having these types of conversations. People are going to know you're working on a business. They're going to get excited. They're going to have ideas. This isn't bad. As long as you handle them the right way. When I learned this lesson, very painfully. It was with our first, big customers. And my first business, they were the first customers to pay us five Biggers. I really wanted to do everything they needed to make sure that they stayed and we're happy. And would recommend us. They had requested, a specific feature. We were building advertising software and they said, hey,
 hey, can we have an analytics dashboard? Right? It makes sense. We said, yeah, so we went home. We planned. We strategize, we whiteboard it, we built it. It took three months, all of our Engineers for three months, as 60 Grand in salaries. I showed it to them proudly. We said, we have crushed your expectations. You are going to love this. They looked at it. They said seems pretty nice. Don't know why it took three months. But thank you. And, you know, I was a little offended but it's fine. I left that Friday. They called me. They said, hey, could you send us our Analytics?
 I said yeah, it's in your dashboard. You can look at it whenever you want. It's beautiful. You can explore your data. They said, yeah, but could you just email it to me? I said, okay. I emailed it to them. Next week. Same thing. Next week, same thing. Then they said, hey, this week when you send us our analytics. Could you, please do it as a PDF and put our logo on it? And I blew up. I said, why do you want this? It's the same data. It's better in the dashboard. You can explore it and they said, oh honestly, we don't even look at the data. It's just our clients. Want to see that something's happening. And I think they'd be more impressed. If we send them a PDF with a logo, my heart dropped. This was a
 Big chunk of my funding round that I'd wasted because I didn't ask why they wanted the feature. It's one simple, follow-up question, and it turns out they didn't want insights. What they wanted was to build reputation with their clients. I could have solved that in an afternoon by hiring a part-time in turn. When someone requests a feature. The feature is not the signal, the signal, is their motivation. That's underneath so, asked a couple of follow-up questions. Why do you want that? What's this going to help you do the, you can't do now. Sometimes their feature request is, correct.
 And that is actually the best way to solve their problems. But usually, you can find a better way to solve their very real problems. Understand what's going on with them and then come up with your own solution.

In truth feature requests are an unavoidable consequence of. Having these types of conversations. People are going to know you're working on a business. They're going to get excited. They're going to have ideas. This isn't bad. As long as you handle them the right way. When I learned this lesson, very painfully. It was with our first, big customers. And my first business, they were the first customers to pay us five Biggers. I really wanted to do everything they needed to make sure that they stayed and we're happy. And would recommend us. They had requested, a specific feature. We were building advertising software and they said, hey,

 hey, can we have an analytics dashboard? Right? It makes sense. We said, yeah, so we went home. We planned. We strategize, we whiteboard it, we built it. It took three months, all of our Engineers for three months, as 60 Grand in salaries. I showed it to them proudly. We said, we have crushed your expectations. You are going to love this. They looked at it. They said seems pretty nice. Don't know why it took three months. But thank you. And, you know, I was a little offended but it's fine. I left that Friday. They called me. They said, hey, could you send us our Analytics?

 I said yeah, it's in your dashboard. You can look at it whenever you want. It's beautiful. You can explore your data. They said, yeah, but could you just email it to me? I said, okay. I emailed it to them. Next week. Same thing. Next week, same thing. Then they said, hey, this week when you send us our analytics. Could you, please do it as a PDF and put our logo on it? And I blew up. I said, why do you want this? It's the same data. It's better in the dashboard. You can explore it and they said, oh honestly, we don't even look at the data. It's just our clients. Want to see that something's happening. And I think they'd be more impressed. If we send them a PDF with a logo, my heart dropped. This was a

 Big chunk of my funding round that I'd wasted because I didn't ask why they wanted the feature. It's one simple, follow-up question, and it turns out they didn't want insights. What they wanted was to build reputation with their clients. I could have solved that in an afternoon by hiring a part-time in turn. When someone requests a feature. The feature is not the signal, the signal, is their motivation. That's underneath so, asked a couple of follow-up questions. Why do you want that? What's this going to help you do the, you can't do now. Sometimes their feature request is, correct.

 And that is actually the best way to solve their problems. But usually, you can find a better way to solve their very real problems. Understand what's going on with them and then come up with your own solution.

9 - ASKING GOOD QUESTIONS WITH...

Everyone says that, you shouldn't ask your mom. If your business is a good idea, because your mom loves you, she supports you she believes in you. She thinks everything you do is great. You don't want positive feedback from a biased person. You want real insights about customer Behavior. What are people going to do? However, what I've learned is that everyone lies to you in this way. So if you go to a stranger and you say, what do you think about my product idea, they lie to you just as much? You have to ask the questions differently. This is why I call it the mom test because it's about asking questions that are
 Heard in a way where even the most biased and supportive person. Your own mother can't lie to you. There are three rules. The first is you want to ask about their life. Not your idea. You don't say, what do you think about my idea? It solves? This problem? Isn't that amazing? Instead? You say Hey, you have this problem in your life, right? I mean, even that's a little bit biasing but at least opens the topic they go. Yeah, you say what are you doing about it? What did you do? Last time? It happened? Talk me through it. What did you try? What worked? What didn't work from that response? You get to figure out if they actually cared you get to
 Figure out if it's something they complain about, but aren't willing to solve or whether it's something they're actively trying to solve in spending money on, you can get a much better understanding of their mind, which lets you figure out if they're going to want your product. The second rule is don't ask hypotheticals in the future. Don't say, would you ever they say? Oh, yeah, I would definitely use that or yeah, I could see myself using that or even worse. They could see other people using it. All these hypotheticals in the future aren't real. You need to look at their past Behavior. What they did last time. It's a very similar style of questioning from the
 the first rule you're trying to dig into their life. The third rule is talk, less. Listen more, the more you're talking, the less, you're learning. You got to get them started, bring them on to the topic. You care about then. Just let them tell that story. Take good notes. You're going to need to review those later. So those are the three rules of the mom test. If you'd like, we can take a minute right now, put this into practice.

Everyone says that, you shouldn't ask your mom. If your business is a good idea, because your mom loves you, she supports you she believes in you. She thinks everything you do is great. You don't want positive feedback from a biased person. You want real insights about customer Behavior. What are people going to do? However, what I've learned is that everyone lies to you in this way. So if you go to a stranger and you say, what do you think about my product idea, they lie to you just as much? You have to ask the questions differently. This is why I call it the mom test because it's about asking questions that are

 Heard in a way where even the most biased and supportive person. Your own mother can't lie to you. There are three rules. The first is you want to ask about their life. Not your idea. You don't say, what do you think about my idea? It solves? This problem? Isn't that amazing? Instead? You say Hey, you have this problem in your life, right? I mean, even that's a little bit biasing but at least opens the topic they go. Yeah, you say what are you doing about it? What did you do? Last time? It happened? Talk me through it. What did you try? What worked? What didn't work from that response? You get to figure out if they actually cared you get to

 Figure out if it's something they complain about, but aren't willing to solve or whether it's something they're actively trying to solve in spending money on, you can get a much better understanding of their mind, which lets you figure out if they're going to want your product. The second rule is don't ask hypotheticals in the future. Don't say, would you ever they say? Oh, yeah, I would definitely use that or yeah, I could see myself using that or even worse. They could see other people using it. All these hypotheticals in the future aren't real. You need to look at their past Behavior. What they did last time. It's a very similar style of questioning from the

 the first rule you're trying to dig into their life. The third rule is talk, less. Listen more, the more you're talking, the less, you're learning. You got to get them started, bring them on to the topic. You care about then. Just let them tell that story. Take good notes. You're going to need to review those later. So those are the three rules of the mom test. If you'd like, we can take a minute right now, put this into practice.

10 - 📝 Reflect (Insight 3)

I want you to just take a minute to Think Through where you're at with your own customer. Learning. Have you been having these conversations? If so, have they been useful or have you been screwing something up? If you haven't been having them? Why not? What's scaring you? What's stopping you? Once you identify these mistakes, these emotional objections that are preventing you from from going out. And having these conversations. You'll be able to solve those problems, but you got to know about them first in the text field. I just want you to write what's been going wrong with your customer conversations. What mistake you making? Even if that problem, is that you're not having

11 - Framing the meeting for learning

This is a somewhat strange style of conversation to have because you're asking someone all these details about their life, but it doesn't fit into a common category of meeting. It's not a pitch. It's not a demo. What is it? Well, you need to explain that. You need to create the context which makes them feel safe and comfortable to have this type of conversation. The structure. I like to use is Vision framing weakness. Pedestal asked, the vision is what you're trying to improve in the world with your business or your product, but it's not.
 Your product idea. For example, you might say, hey, I'm trying to improve education for stay-at-home parents who are trying to homeschool their kids. That's a vision. But you haven't told them exactly what the features are. The product, are. You haven't gone into a pitch? The second part. The framing is basically just clarifying that you're not trying to trick them or sell them anything. So you might say, we're still super early in the process. We don't have a product to sell you. This isn't a pitch meeting. But then, what is the meeting? This is where the next part, the pedestal and the weakness comes in. You're lowering yourself. You're showing, you don't have all the answers which
 Our intuitive as it is, is actually really appealing to the other person because it shows that they're going to be able to help you. Meanwhile, you elevate their experiences. So you might say, I'm having so much trouble. Just understanding the day-to-day experiences, a parents were dealing with homeschooling for the first time and this transitions into the ask. They've got this unique experience. They can use to help you to solve this problem for you. And so, you say, if you were just willing to spend 15 minutes, talking through your experience, your struggles, your frustrations, how you've been dealing with this stuff. It would help me out so much. I'd be really
 Be grateful that is a perfect introduction. Email. You won't get a hundred percent success rate, but for people who know you the success rate is close to 80%. If it's warm contact, if it's a cold contact, it increases your success rate from 0 percent to around 20%, It's really transformational because people understand the you're not a Time waster and this opens up this safe space, where they understand why they're telling you about their life and they don't feel threatened or tricked. If you want, I can tell you more about it. Make sure it clicked.

This is a somewhat strange style of conversation to have because you're asking someone all these details about their life, but it doesn't fit into a common category of meeting. It's not a pitch. It's not a demo. What is it? Well, you need to explain that. You need to create the context which makes them feel safe and comfortable to have this type of conversation. The structure. I like to use is Vision framing weakness. Pedestal asked, the vision is what you're trying to improve in the world with your business or your product, but it's not.

 Your product idea. For example, you might say, hey, I'm trying to improve education for stay-at-home parents who are trying to homeschool their kids. That's a vision. But you haven't told them exactly what the features are. The product, are. You haven't gone into a pitch? The second part. The framing is basically just clarifying that you're not trying to trick them or sell them anything. So you might say, we're still super early in the process. We don't have a product to sell you. This isn't a pitch meeting. But then, what is the meeting? This is where the next part, the pedestal and the weakness comes in. You're lowering yourself. You're showing, you don't have all the answers which

 Our intuitive as it is, is actually really appealing to the other person because it shows that they're going to be able to help you. Meanwhile, you elevate their experiences. So you might say, I'm having so much trouble. Just understanding the day-to-day experiences, a parents were dealing with homeschooling for the first time and this transitions into the ask. They've got this unique experience. They can use to help you to solve this problem for you. And so, you say, if you were just willing to spend 15 minutes, talking through your experience, your struggles, your frustrations, how you've been dealing with this stuff. It would help me out so much. I'd be really

 Be grateful that is a perfect introduction. Email. You won't get a hundred percent success rate, but for people who know you the success rate is close to 80%. If it's warm contact, if it's a cold contact, it increases your success rate from 0 percent to around 20%, It's really transformational because people understand the you're not a Time waster and this opens up this safe space, where they understand why they're telling you about their life and they don't feel threatened or tricked. If you want, I can tell you more about it. Make sure it clicked.

12 - 📝 DEMO Screencast

Just in case you think that this is only something that works for me. I wanted to show you a couple examples of emails that were sent by other people. There's two one was sent to send me warm contacts one was sent to complete strangers. So the first one by Alistair was sent to a newsletter of 312 people that he built by blogging. What I love about it is how clear he is about. The ask going to be 15 to 20 minutes of your time. I'm not selling anything. I'm interviewing you about these topics for this reason. That might sound a bit forced, but actually, it works really well because the other
 Person can figure out whether this is something they want to be involved in or not. And he goes a step further and says I'm going to publicly credit you. So this elevates them even more. Really nice email. He said that out of the three hundred or so people. He sent it to 20 of them said yes and signed up for an interview with him. That's pretty wild and that's plenty of customer interviews off of a relatively small mailing list. The second example from Alex, is almost even more impressive. He reached out to complete strangers through Reddit with direct messages. He only reached out to 12 people.
 And six of them said, yes, because of the way he structured his Outreach, what he did brilliantly is he really spent the time to understand who they were and why this would or wouldn't be relevant for them. The message, he sent was very personal. It showed that, that he understood who they were. And this is part of elevating them onto that pedestal, because you're not saying I need to talk to someone. I don't care who it is. You're saying, I need to talk to you, in particular. I understand who you are, and I understand that you can help me if you want to beautiful.
 Structured message, and it was highly effective.

Just in case you think that this is only something that works for me. I wanted to show you a couple examples of emails that were sent by other people. There's two one was sent to send me warm contacts one was sent to complete strangers. So the first one by Alistair was sent to a newsletter of 312 people that he built by blogging. What I love about it is how clear he is about. The ask going to be 15 to 20 minutes of your time. I'm not selling anything. I'm interviewing you about these topics for this reason. That might sound a bit forced, but actually, it works really well because the other

 Person can figure out whether this is something they want to be involved in or not. And he goes a step further and says I'm going to publicly credit you. So this elevates them even more. Really nice email. He said that out of the three hundred or so people. He sent it to 20 of them said yes and signed up for an interview with him. That's pretty wild and that's plenty of customer interviews off of a relatively small mailing list. The second example from Alex, is almost even more impressive. He reached out to complete strangers through Reddit with direct messages. He only reached out to 12 people.

 And six of them said, yes, because of the way he structured his Outreach, what he did brilliantly is he really spent the time to understand who they were and why this would or wouldn't be relevant for them. The message, he sent was very personal. It showed that, that he understood who they were. And this is part of elevating them onto that pedestal, because you're not saying I need to talk to someone. I don't care who it is. You're saying, I need to talk to you, in particular. I understand who you are, and I understand that you can help me if you want to beautiful.

 Structured message, and it was highly effective.

13 -  PRE-LAUNCH COMMITMENTS

Of course, at a certain point, you're going to have to start talking about your product. It's unavoidable. If you want people to eventually buy it and use it. The solution is simply to ask for a commitment, which is just something that they're only going to give you. If they have intention to purchase and use your product. You got to be a little bit creative about this. It's different for every business is going to change over time as you advance to later stages, but the four main categories to think of is you can ask for their time like a clear. Next meeting with a well-defined agenda, you can ask for
 Our reputation which for businesses, that's an introduction to their boss, to their lawyers, to their technical team. You can ask for their money. This is the most exciting. Obviously, this could be deposit pre-order letter of intent. And then the last one is specific to selling the big businesses, but it's secrets about their buying process. The fourth commitment is only applicable to Enterprise sales, but they have these complex budget. They have lots of stakeholders, anything. The other person is willing to tell you about these internal secrets in their buying process. You you can be pretty sure that they're serious and that you're heading in the right direction.
 No.

Of course, at a certain point, you're going to have to start talking about your product. It's unavoidable. If you want people to eventually buy it and use it. The solution is simply to ask for a commitment, which is just something that they're only going to give you. If they have intention to purchase and use your product. You got to be a little bit creative about this. It's different for every business is going to change over time as you advance to later stages, but the four main categories to think of is you can ask for their time like a clear. Next meeting with a well-defined agenda, you can ask for

 Our reputation which for businesses, that's an introduction to their boss, to their lawyers, to their technical team. You can ask for their money. This is the most exciting. Obviously, this could be deposit pre-order letter of intent. And then the last one is specific to selling the big businesses, but it's secrets about their buying process. The fourth commitment is only applicable to Enterprise sales, but they have these complex budget. They have lots of stakeholders, anything. The other person is willing to tell you about these internal secrets in their buying process. You you can be pretty sure that they're serious and that you're heading in the right direction.

(B2B/B2E) Information about their buying process

14 - 📝 Reflection

Before we move on, just take a second to thank for your business, for your idea. What would be the right commitment for you to ask for at this particular moment in your journey to figure out, if people are serious.

15 - FEEDBACK: What was most useful?...

As a final piece of advice. I just want to say to treat this like a scale or a craft that, you're going to have to practice. You're going to make your mistakes. That's okay. If you were learning to skate board, you'd fall over start with the friendly first contacts where you're not so worried about the consequences of having an awkward conversation as the skill develops and it will develop quickly. You can start having the more serious conversations with the bigger customers who are more important to you. Give yourself time to learn at this point. If you're willing to share, I would love to hear what was most useful to you. And of course, any other
 A feedback. Do you have to share?

As a final piece of advice. I just want to say to treat this like a scale or a craft that, you're going to have to practice. You're going to make your mistakes. That's okay. If you were learning to skate board, you'd fall over start with the friendly first contacts where you're not so worried about the consequences of having an awkward conversation as the skill develops and it will develop quickly. You can start having the more serious conversations with the bigger customers who are more important to you. Give yourself time to learn at this point. If you're willing to share, I would love to hear what was most useful to you. And of course, any other

16 - RATE THE EXPERIENCE

If you don't mind taking one more moment to rate this video course, from 1 to 10. Where would you put us? Did we nail it or did we miss the mark a little bit?

VideoAsk CTA

Hey, don't worry. I get it. This does not for everyone. It's not for every business. However, if you enjoyed the interactive video experience, click here. Learn more about how video ask may or may be helpful for your business and thank you so much for watching. I wish you the absolute best with your business ideas.

FINAL CTA: Do you want...

To download your free chapters to find the in-depth add-on videos, click this button. There's a ton of resources there for you to explore. And that's it. That's the end. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I hope you find this scale to be useful.

19 - B2C

Building products for consumers has both advantages and challenges. The advantage is that they're everywhere and they're really easy to find. The disadvantage is that it's harder to learn from them. Oftentimes the consumer with a consumer product that they don't know if they're going to buy and use it until they're holding it in their hands, which means you often need to build more of the product up front. However, that doesn't mean that learning is impossible. It just means you need to be more strategic, more clever, and able to work with more incomplete data. Still partial learning is far better than zero learning.
 And it's going to reduce the number of iterations and mistakes that you need to make later. I'm going to give you four or five Big Ideas that I hope you'll find helpful. You're going to combine these customer conversations with the other learning tools. You've already got prototypes user testing analytics taken together. They'll give you a much better picture and if you stay till the end, there's some nice bonuses. You can download the first half of the book for free and there's also some video deep, Dives to help you learn even more.

Building products for consumers has both advantages and challenges. The advantage is that they're everywhere and they're really easy to find. The disadvantage is that it's harder to learn from them. Oftentimes the consumer with a consumer product that they don't know if they're going to buy and use it until they're holding it in their hands, which means you often need to build more of the product up front. However, that doesn't mean that learning is impossible. It just means you need to be more strategic, more clever, and able to work with more incomplete data. Still partial learning is far better than zero learning.

 And it's going to reduce the number of iterations and mistakes that you need to make later. I'm going to give you four or five Big Ideas that I hope you'll find helpful. You're going to combine these customer conversations with the other learning tools. You've already got prototypes user testing analytics taken together. They'll give you a much better picture and if you stay till the end, there's some nice bonuses. You can download the first half of the book for free and there's also some video deep, Dives to help you learn even more.

20 - NO IDEA YET

If you're still searching for an idea, you're actually in an incredible position because you can explore, you can take your time. You can find something. That's perfect. If you've read a book about modern entrepreneurship, pretty much, everyone gives the advice and nobody follows it that you don't want to start with a product idea. You want to start with a customer's problem that you think you can solve the way it works. Is you pick a few Industries, you pick a few customers and you get to know them in the same way you would, if you had an idea but you start by understanding them and your unrestricted. By this, this baggage of already being stuck on a
 A product idea, of course. You don't want to be wasting your time. So I'm going to give you four or five Big Ideas that you're going to find really helpful to get the most out of this discovery and learning stage. And if you stay to the end, there's some free goodies. You get the first half of the book, The Mom test, and there's some video deep dives into the advanced topics if you'd like to go there.

If you're still searching for an idea, you're actually in an incredible position because you can explore, you can take your time. You can find something. That's perfect. If you've read a book about modern entrepreneurship, pretty much, everyone gives the advice and nobody follows it that you don't want to start with a product idea. You want to start with a customer's problem that you think you can solve the way it works. Is you pick a few Industries, you pick a few customers and you get to know them in the same way you would, if you had an idea but you start by understanding them and your unrestricted. By this, this baggage of already being stuck on a

 A product idea, of course. You don't want to be wasting your time. So I'm going to give you four or five Big Ideas that you're going to find really helpful to get the most out of this discovery and learning stage. And if you stay to the end, there's some free goodies. You get the first half of the book, The Mom test, and there's some video deep dives into the advanced topics if you'd like to go there.

1. INTRO - HOOK: Main...

If you've ever listened to advise about how to build a business or create a product that people love you've probably heard that, you need to go talk to your customers. And this makes sense. You want to build something that people want to buy and use. Unfortunately, it's a little bit trickier than that. I fell for this mistake in my first business. I went to the customers. I said, what do you want? They told me I built it. They didn't use it. This was a disaster, right? We ended up going out of business after three years, even though we had great investors and it was my mistake because I'd been expecting customers to tell me the truth. When actually as the product Creator or the on
 Tripping or it's your job to find the truth to work around these biases. To get honest actionable feedback. You do that by asking the right questions in the right way. Once I figured it out during my second business life, got so much easier. I've now been building businesses for 15 years. I wrote down everything. I learned in a short book, called The Mom test, how to talk to customers and figure out of your business. Is a good idea when everyone is lying to you, they teach it all the top universities. They use it at all the big accelerators. This is the Practical handbook on how to get the most out of your customer learning.
 It's a Wonderful practical handbook and I'm going to give you all the Big Ideas right now.

If you've ever listened to advise about how to build a business or create a product that people love you've probably heard that, you need to go talk to your customers. And this makes sense. You want to build something that people want to buy and use. Unfortunately, it's a little bit trickier than that. I fell for this mistake in my first business. I went to the customers. I said, what do you want? They told me I built it. They didn't use it. This was a disaster, right? We ended up going out of business after three years, even though we had great investors and it was my mistake because I'd been expecting customers to tell me the truth. When actually as the product Creator or the on

 Tripping or it's your job to find the truth to work around these biases. To get honest actionable feedback. You do that by asking the right questions in the right way. Once I figured it out during my second business life, got so much easier. I've now been building businesses for 15 years. I wrote down everything. I learned in a short book, called The Mom test, how to talk to customers and figure out of your business. Is a good idea when everyone is lying to you, they teach it all the top universities. They use it at all the big accelerators. This is the Practical handbook on how to get the most out of your customer learning.

 It's a Wonderful practical handbook and I'm going to give you all the Big Ideas right now.

Charles Elwood