Episode 3: Uri Levine
Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution with Uri Levine
Episode 03: Show Notes
As entrepreneurs, we are often so focused on finding solutions that we forget what matters most: the problem itself. And maybe we avoid the problem because we are afraid to fail, but as today’s guest eloquently explains, failure is the only true route to success! For today’s conversation, we are joined by the co-founder of Waze and serial entrepreneur, Uri Levine.
Uri has just written a new book, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, which is a practical guide for entrepreneurs on how to endure the rollercoaster of failure – faster and with more fun! Our chat explores the importance of prioritizing and documenting the problem, moving beyond mere conversation and toward building conviction, how falling in love with a problem will help you stay on mission and persevere through failure, and how to find the balance between experimentation and having a clear, focused path. Uri shares why failure is an absolute necessity and how failing faster is always better, before coaching established brands through the ins and outs of disruptions. To end, we discuss whether it’s better to solve a problem for yourself or others or both, and the extremely passionate and knowledgeable Uri Levine shows us how innovators, enthusiastic amateurs, early adopters, the early majority, and first-time users influence how you solve your organizational problems.
Key Points From This Episode:
Introducing the very passionate serial entrepreneur, Uri Levine.
When Uri first realized that the problem is more important than the solution.
His process for documenting problems, and when he first started making these notes.
How he approaches people about a particular problem.
Moving beyond conversation to build conviction.
Being elected: falling in love with a problem to endure through failure; staying on mission.
Threading the needle between experimentation and maintaining focus.
Why failure is necessary for success, and how it helps to fail faster.
The innovation dilemma: coaching established brands through disruptions.
When to invest in a disrupter versus when to become one yourself.
Solving a problem for yourself versus solving it for someone else.
Organizational problems: how solving them may become your competitive advantage.
Quotes:
“Think of a problem, a big problem, something that is really worth solving, and then ask yourself, “So who has this problem?” If you happen to be the only person on the planet, then I would say go to a shrink; it’s going to be way cheaper.” — @UriLevine1 [03:44]
“I call that the mission. So, the problem becomes the mission. And the beauty of the focus on the problem is that the problem remains the north star of your journey. And when you have a north star, then the deviations from the course are going to be shorter and smaller.” — @UriLevine1 [09:05]
“One of the biggest challenges of startups is that you go into multiple directions and you waste the time and resources and funding, and you end up without focus. And focus is critical for success.” — @UriLevine1 [09:31]
“At the beginning, when you are in love [with the problem], the good news is that you don’t listen to anyone else, but it’s also the bad news that you don’t listen to anyone else — over time, what you learn is that there is only one voice that you need to listen to: your customers.” — @UriLevine1 [12:36]
“If you’re afraid to fail, then in reality, you already failed because you’re not going to try.” — @UriLevine1 [13:27]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
EPISODE 3 [TRANSCRIPT]
Intro: “UL: And this is why you need to fail fast, because only then you can get feedback from real users or real customers and improve accordingly, and it’s very possible that if you don’t place up to them or you don’t even watch them using the product, you might be building features that no one cares and you’re wasting your time in creating complexity where essentially, what needs to be created is simplicity.”
[0:01:38.3] JU: All right. So Uri, it’s a pleasure to have you here today. I am delighted, I’ve loved the – I got your book in the mail just a few days ago and I have been veraciously reading it. Steve Wozniak is correct, it will become your bible for entrepreneurship, and I can already tell that so many of the concepts that you mention here are things that we teach our students at Stanford every single day.
Maybe just to get started, I thought it would be worthwhile if you wanted to tell folks, when did you make this key discovery that the problem is actually the most important thing? Is this something that you only looked at retrospectively or while you’re in the middle of your journey, did you actually realize the importance of the problem?
[0:02:19.5] UL: I think I realized that maybe even three decades ago, right? Because I was looking into different perspectives and I was always asking myself, “So why do they care? Why do people care?” And that was an obvious answer. They care because you solve them a problem. If you don’t solve them a problem, you don’t create value for them.
[0:02:41.1] JU: And so where in your own entrepreneurial journey did you start making note of problems, and do you have any practice for documenting those problems? Viewers of our show know I am obsessed with this question of creative practice, so I’m always eager to dig into the individual behavior, documentation, routines, et cetera.
[0:03:02.5] UL: So I would say, the best practice is when you get frustrated – and for me, it’s always a triangle, right? So you get frustrated and then you ask yourself, “Why is that so? Is that the way that works? Is that has to be the way that it works? Is there a way that I can change that?” And for a second I would say, when I get frustrated, I allow myself to remain frustrated for a little bit longer.
So I would start to think about, “Is that my problem or is that really the problem?” And then I would basically, if I would, I would try to imagine that this problem actually other people have, that then I would go and ask that of people and for me, it’s always it would start with a problem and I would say, think of a problem, a big problem, something that it’s really worth solving and then ask yourself, “So who has this problem?”
If you happen to be the only person on the planet then I would say, go to a shrink. It’s going to be way cheaper than doing this.
[0:03:58.1] JU: Right.
[0:03:59.6] UL: But if a lot of people have this problem then go and speak with those people, and understand their perception of the problem and only then, go and build the solution. There are two things that are going to be happening. Once you get their perception, you know what it is that you want to build but there is more into that. You feel like those people actually sent you on a mission to solve that problem.
[0:04:24.4] JU: That’s beautiful.
[0:04:25.5] UL: This is where you fall in love with the problem because you feel that you were just being elected to solve that problem for those people.
[0:04:35.2] JU: Okay. So I love that word, “Elected.” It’s almost like there’s this evangelical campaign, kind of a mission and at this point, I think it’s actually worthwhile, there’s a bunch of different directions we could go in. One of the things that you reminded me of is how you talk to people.
And Dan Pink who is on the show recently, he talked about how the way he workshops, whether a book direction is valuable is dinner parties. He just raises the topic. For example, his last book is about regret and he said the way it started was, he’s sitting at his daughter’s college graduation, thinking about regret, and then he said, “That would be an interesting idea for a book.”
And he said, he just made a mental note, “In the next few dinner parties I attend, I’m going to ask people their thoughts about regret.” I’d love to hear when you say, you get frustrated and the next thing is you talk to people to see if they have a problem, do you just walk up to people at Starbucks? Do you think about dinner parties? What’s the approach to actually talking to people about a problem?
[0:05:32.2] UL: So you know, obviously, the first circle is going to be your closest friends, right? Family, friends, and so forth, that you meet on a regular basis and then you can ask them but for a second, I would say and I would make that even a better practice and I would generally speaking, look, if you can define your target audience and question yourself more and more about that target audience.
So who are these people, right? And then you really want to go and speak with different people from different groups of that you just described to yourself and for a second I would say, you have to speak to a hundred people and the reason is –
[0:06:10.3] JU: Yeah, I agree.
[0:06:11.3] UL: People that you don’t know. Speaking to people that you do know, you know what? They’re probably your friends because you are very similar. You are very similar and you might have discussed that before but if you will tell me, “Okay, I’m going to solve a problem for truck drivers.” This is awesome, go and speak with truck drivers, right?
[0:06:32.2] JU: Yeah.
[0:06:32.4] UL: If you go and speak with your friends, it doesn’t make any difference. If they’re not truck drivers, they don’t know.
[0:06:37.3] JU: So you say a hundred users. At what point do you become convinced that you’ve identified a problem that matters? And further, maybe, let me caveat by saying, you know, David Ogilvy once said, “Consumers don’t say what they think, they don’t feel what they say, and they don’t do what they say.”
And so I know that there are boundaries to how much weight we can put on a conversation. How do you think about moving beyond conversation as a means of building conviction?
[0:07:09.0] UL: So I say, go and speak with a hundred, right? But you will end up speaking with way less because you will get consistency in the answers way before that point and as soon as you feel that, the conviction is when you feel that you are being elected to solve that and people are telling you, “Go ahead and do that for me.” And if there are multiple people and that multiple might be seven or 10 or 15 and that’s about it, right? And then you’ll go on your mission and you go with the conviction that you are fulfilling your destiny.
[0:07:42.8] JU: In a sense, that sense of conviction is so important, right? Not because you’re self-aggrandizing but because as you – and I know and as you describe so eloquently in the book – this is a journey of failure after failure after failure. You know, we don’t have time to say all the failures but if you don’t have that sense of election, then you’re never going to endure.
[0:08:05.2] UL: Exactly, and this is why I say, you have to fall in love, right? Because when you fall in love, the good news is that you're not going to give up, right? You are not going to listen to anyone else that will tell you that this is stupid idea, and trust me, I heard that so many times. You are not going to give up because of the challenges, right?
You simply keep on going and heal, until you probably build some sort of a traction and then you are refueling yourself with the traction or you’re refueling yourself with the team that the team is actually committed to the journey the same way that you are. And what happens at this phase is that you are becoming committed to your team.
[0:08:43.9] JU: Yeah and all of a sudden, you become a merry band of brothers and sisters. People, who – you have a cause. And that’s really a different way of saying it that we often say at the d.school is it’s not just a problem, it’s a cause. And when you have a cause, you can enlist enthusiastic collaboration from a merry band of collaborators.
[0:09:04.0] UL: Exactly, exactly, and I call that the mission, right? So the problem becomes the mission and the beauty of the focus on the problem is that the problem remains the north star of your journey. And when you have a north star, then the deviations from the course are going to be shorter and smaller and you will keep on going towards the objectives and towards the right objectives, most of the time, right?
And one of the biggest challenges of startups is that you go into multiple directions and you waste the time and resources and funding, and you end up without focus, and focus is critical for the success.
[0:09:44.3] JU: Can we talk about that really quickly? Just the focus thing because I think there’s actually something fundamental here that a lot of people misunderstand, which is in the early stage, you actually need to commission a lot of experiments, right? You need to be exploring in order to understand what’s worth doing. How do you think about the balance of experimentation on the one hand and recognizing you’re going to go into a lot of different places, and focus on the other hand? How do you thread that needle?
[0:10:10.4] UL: There are a couple of challenges. One is, I mean, this is really in the case that the problem is clear, right? If the problem is clear, then your mission is to solve that problem. What you're saying is that you will need to experiment multiple alternatives in the solution, right? And multiple features in trying to figure out product market feed and that is going to be a journey of failures, but the mission that you have signed up for is going to remain the same.
So add this to what keeps you focused. What keeps you focused is, “I’m trying to help drivers to avoid traffic jams, that’s it.” Okay, and you’ve clearly defined I’m trying to help them to avoid traffic jams every day. So your target audience are the commuters that are driving to their work, right?
[0:10:56.6] JU: Right.
[0:10:58.6] UL: And what we’re trying to do is provide them with something that will help them to avoid traffic jams and this is it, and that remains the north star. So obviously, throughout the journey, you would change multiple things in the solution and you will change multiple things in the way that you approach the market and you will change so many things, looking for something that works, right? But the north star of the problem and the target audience remains the same.
[0:11:24.5] JU: You talked about persistence and focus and having to iterate. One of the people that I admire, a woman named Annie Duke who just wrote a book called Quit. She wrote a book called, Thinking in Bets, and then another book called Quit, and she and I were speaking the other day and she said – I referenced James Dyson, because I was reading her book, she said, and wherein she really espouses the need to stop moving in a direction, “Quit.”
And I said, “Well what about somebody like James Dyson? You know, it took him 5,127 variations before he got it right.” And she said, “I hate it when people bring up James Dyson.” There’s always this question I would say, right? Where a founder, you have a vision, you have a mission, you believe and you talked earlier about it, it doesn’t matter if people try to discourage you, you know it must be done.
How do you think about persistence and then, at the same time, the evidence or feedback or naysayers, or whatever it may be that tell you, “You should stop doing this.” How do you know when to listen to the, “You should stop”, the chorus, and how do you know when to be like Ulysses and strap yourself to the mast and say, “I’m not going to listen to anybody because I’m going?”
[0:12:36.2] UL: So at the beginning, when you are in love, the good news is that you don’t listen to anyone else but it’s also the bad news that you don’t listen to anyone else, right?
[0:12:44.1] JU: That’s beautiful, yeah.
[0:12:45.7] UL: Is that you have, you have to be in love in order to go into the share and you don’t listen to anyone else. Over time, what you learn is that there is only one voice that you need to listen to: To your customers. Your customers, your users, and for them, you have to listen all the time and this is what is going to eventually make you successful.
We think of the startup journey as three definitions of it, right? It’s going to be a long rollercoaster journey of failures and for each one of them, there is a conclusion. And so for the journey of failures, there are two conclusions. One is that if you’re afraid to fail, then in reality, you already failed because you’re not going to try.
Albert Einstein used to say that if you haven’t failed, that’s because you haven’t tried anything new before. If you don’t try new things, you will fail, that’s it. The second conclusion of that is that the faster that you fail, you increase the likelihood of being successful because you actually have enough time to make another experiment and another attempt and another experience and another attempt and another iteration and another version of it.
And if you will just imagine that there are twin sister company startups that they started the same day and have exactly identical teams and they are making progress in the product development. And then one day, one of them is saying, “You know what? I know the product is not ready but I’m going to go to the market right now.” and the other one is saying, “I know that the product is not ready, so I got to keep on iterate that until it’s ready.”
From this point on, the first one is moving way faster that is going to make the difference, right? And this is why you need to fail fast because only then, you can get feedback from real users or real customers and improve accordingly and it’s very possible that if you don’t listen to them, you are building or you don’t even watch them using the product, you might be building features that no one cares and you’re wasting your time in creating complexity where essentially, what needed to be created is simplicity.
[0:14:53.7] JU: One of the challenges that entrepreneurs bring to us a lot is because we talk about the value of iteration and rapid failure and things like that, how do you think about markets where whether rightly or wrongly an entrepreneur feels, “I don’t have very many at-bats. I can’t afford to fail. I’m trying to sell into a major hospital system. There’s only 200 hospitals.” Or something like that.
And so what I’ve seen is that some entrepreneurs, depending on their market, will resist the premise of experimentation because they can’t afford to experiment almost. They can’t afford to damage that one relationship because it’s only one of 20 possible relationships. How do you think about that?
[0:15:32.2] UL: So let me say it for one, right? And this is really dramatic to understand. You have nothing to lose and therefore, you have to experiment. So I would say, go to that hospital as soon as possible, and then what will happen is that if they sign up to your story, they actually would like that product to work and even if it’s not working, they will allow you the time to do the iterations in order for that to work because they sign up for that at the very beginning.
You promised them a value, and they want to believe that this value is important for them and if it’s going to take you a little longer, they will be very disappointed through the journey of the iterations but eventually, they will be happy. They will be happy because of the value that you create for them. Now, if you think that you can actually get to a ready product without iterations, without doing that with the customers, you will never get there.
Now, occasionally, I would run into customers or the entrepreneurs that will tell me, “But if the product is not good enough – this is embarrassing level product, I will hurt my brand name.” I would ask, “What brand name? You don’t even have a product. You don’t have a brand name and you don’t have customers. Wait a minute, you don’t even have customers yet.” And so yeah, the thought is that the first customers are always the one that are going to highlight the way for you and if they fail, then you learn faster.
[0:16:58.9] JU: So this brings us to a really interesting question because a number of our audience are entrepreneurs or innovators inside of large organizations. And whereas it’s true what you just said that entrepreneurs starting from scratch doesn’t have a brand name, a lot of companies feel like, “Well, we can’t experiment because of our image, because of our reputation.”
“Well, there’s no way we could put our logo on this low-resolution website because what if it doesn’t work?” How do you think about someone who actually does have a brand that could be damaged by experimentation?
[0:17:29.6] UL: This is going into sort of an innovation dilemma, right? But it’s way more complex for that because you look at the hub and let’s take that into the extreme, not just innovation but let’s say disruption and disruption happened, and let me just define that for a second.
Disruption is changing the market equilibrium. It’s changing the behavior, it’s not about technology. It could be about technology that leads to a new product. The new product has actually changed the market equilibrium but it could be new price. Like Gmail is free. Before, we used to pay money in order to have a mailbox, right?
[0:18:03.7] JU: Right.
[0:18:04.4] UL: When Google introduced Gmail, it was not good enough and they did multiple iterations until it become good enough. Good enough and free wins the market. No one can compete with that. By the way, Waze is free, right? And it was the first one to be free and this is one of the reasons why pretty much everyone else that was trying to do navigation have lost the battle, and maybe it’s new business model or different reasons for disruption, right?
Disruptors are always newcomers. They are the one that have nothing to lose. Existing businesses barely disrupt their own market, right? We can say, “Okay. I can name a few examples but really, very few.” And at the end of the day, they don’t because they have too much to lose but it’s way more complex than that, right?
[0:18:51.9] JU: So is there any advice that you’d give? Like say to a listener today who’s inside of a large organization, is the answer, “Sorry but you can’t experiment. It’s too much to lose” or what’s the answer to someone who’s got a reputation, who’s got a brand behind them but who’s job is supposedly to do something new? Should they quit?
[0:19:09.5] UL: No, they should do that differently. They should actually either invest in a startup that is doing that or spin something off and do that as a separate sub-organizations for three main reasons. Number one is about to have equal management. If you want to disrupt, then you need to start with a statement saying, “Whatever we are currently doing is wrong, and look, I have a hard time to tell that to myself.” If I am alone in the room and there is no one else like now if you –
[0:19:38.8] JU: You just whisper, you barely whisper it to yourself, right?
[0:19:41.4] UL: I can and if you think of organization, it’s really a challenging one. So this is one challenge. The other challenge that turned out to be even more significant, when you look at how long does it take for companies to create significant value, it’s a long journey. If you take Google and Amazon and Netflix, that they’re about finding five-ish close years or Tesla and Facebook and Airbnb, which are about 15-plus years and you look at the aggregate value that they have created and you ask yourself, “How much of this value was created in their first decade versus the rest of the time?” The rest of the time is maybe six years for Tesla, right? This is it, right? It’s 17 years for Google.
[0:20:28.8] JU: Right.
[0:20:29.4] UL: And then you look at them and say it’s a very small fraction in the first decade because what happened in the first decade is that the companies were startups. They were looking for raising capital and then product market feed and then growth and then business model and this takes time. It takes usually about 10 years to figure out all of those.
[0:20:50.7] JU: And most organizations don’t have time to wait.
[0:20:53.9] UL: The problem is even bigger, right? You were going to start something and in the next decade or in the next seven years or whatever, there will be downturns, right? There will be challenges period for the corporate and then the board is going to say, “You know what? This division that is bleeding cash for the last five years, let’s shut it down.”
[0:21:13.0] JU: Right.
[0:21:13.5] UL: And so you lost opportunity to actually create the impact. If you are trying to do that by yourself and in particular, if you tried to fund that by yourself, now, the way not to fund it by yourself, spill that off and invest as long as you decide that you want to invest and in general, I would say, look, all the corporates in the world needs to ask themselves a critical question once a year, right?
What will make me irrelevant? Now, if you can answer that, there is someone else that can answer that as well, and yet somehow, they might be building something that will make you irrelevant.
[0:21:47.9] JU: Going back to your point about ego, it’s a deeply humbling question to even consider and so most people, it’s like they want to keep in their peripheral vision but they don’t even want to look at it, right? I don’t even want to think about irrelevancy. Sadly, what I have observed maybe as you know, I’ve been at Stanford now 13 years leading capacity-building efforts and organizations all over the world.
Many times, the leaders who can affect change, their time horizon is, “In five years, I’m out of here anyway. So if I just make sure that nothing happens in the next five years -” Well if that mindset prevails, that’s doom for the organization ultimately because then nobody is asking the question, “What’s going to make us irrelevant?” The only question that most people are concerned about is, “Will our performance continue during my tenure?” which is a very different question.
[0:22:36.9] UL: I agree that’s possible but I think that and for a second, I would say if it’s not the management, then the board should, right? And the board should ask that question and look in general. You don’t need to look at it every day. You need to ask that question as once a year but then you need to actually be true to yourself and basically say, “Yeah, I can figure out something that will make me irrelevant.”
[0:23:02.1] JU: Just to follow up on that, say you ask that once a year. How do you then operationalize what happens next? So say, for example, the answer is AI just because that’s the answer for everything, right? But the answer is AI. Then what I don’t think a board or CEO does is go, “Okay, AI.” What do they do when the answer to the question becomes imperative? Do they commission exploratory teams to begin to address that existential threat? What happens next?
[0:23:28.0] UL: What he should do is invest in someone that will make you irrelevant. So for a second, I would say, if I would be Google and I look at the ChatGPT today, I would say I have to invest in that and I have to invest in a few other competitors for that because it might make them irrelevant.
[0:23:46.3] JU: And don’t worry about trying to build something to compete, you mean. How do you think because you know, Jobs famously or Bezos, a better example, this is one of my favorite on an origin story nerd and Bezos, here’s the origin story of the Kindle. Bezos saw what the iPod did to CD sales on the Amazon store, okay? So physical CD sales start declining and Bezos had a thought.
He said, “If somebody does that to books, we are screwed.” So the second thought was, “We should do that to books.” He didn’t actually invest, to my knowledge, right? He said, “We should be the ones to disrupt ourselves.” So I guess to me one of the questions is, when do you invest in a disruptor versus become your own disruptor?
[0:24:29.7] UL: So if there is someone already in the market there are probably multiple players in the market that are doing that. Then the challenge with them is that they already made significant progress that you will need to go through the same journey as they did regardless of how much money you’re going to put in, right?
[0:24:47.8] JU: Right.
[0:24:48.3] UL: So if someone helped me, “You know what? I’m going to build another brace” and I would say, “You know what? Go ahead, be my guest.” What really is unique for companies is, and this is going back into the journey of product market fit, which is long, it was five years for Microsoft, it was 10 years for Netflix, right? It was –
[0:25:09.8] JU: Right.
[0:25:09.9] UL: Five years away, it’s always a long journey. What happened during this period of time is those multiple of tents that you are trying different thing. And so when you figure out your product market fit, what you really know, the knowledge that you have is not what’s working. It’s what doesn’t work. All the rest of the experiments that we have done over the years, those are the ones that don’t work.
Now, if you are going to start from scratch and you don’t have that knowledge, you will need to go through a similar journey of trial and error like multiple times, multiple iterations and so if there are already players or competitors in the market that have figured out somewhat or major progress, then you shouldn’t build your own. If there is no one there, build your own.
[0:25:58.5] JU: Yeah.
[0:25:59.1] UL: You are the first one essentially.
[0:26:00.4] JU: Yeah. The last question for me, I know I’ve told you I’ve promised to be respectful of your time, going back to the premise, falling in love with the problem.
[0:26:09.5] UL: So for a second, I will stop you for a second. I would say, look, I’m home. There is no one here, I have plenty of time.
[0:26:17.6] JU: Okay, you’re good. Okay, good. Well, our listeners like the three-hour-long saga episodes, we can do that too but the question for me, and this is something that I personally struggle with. I work at the d.school, I teach human center design, one of the questions that I personally wrestle with as I interact with founders and entrepreneurs, et cetera, is to what extent should you be your own target customer or feel the problem yourself versus to what extent should you take yourself out of the equation and try to find problems that other people are experiencing?
We’re talking about need finding versus what a design thinker might disparage as me finding, and yet, what I’ve seen is many founders build something that really works for them. So I’d love to hear how you think about feeling the problem yourself versus vicariously for someone else.
[0:27:08.1] UL: You mentioned earlier Steve Wozniak, the great Woz that actually wrote the forward to my book and I met him seven, eight years ago at the conference in Latin America someplace, and we were both speakers at the conference. And we had dinner the night before and I wanted a selfie with the great Woz, right? And I took my iPhone and you know with an iPhone when you take a picture, you can click on the screen or you can use the volume button to take a picture.
So I used the volume button and he said, “Finally” and I said, “Finally what?” He said, “Finally, someone using it the way that I meant it to be.” Like actually today, most people are actually using the screen but the evolutions of the iPhone was that the camera came from digital camera, right? So remember the digital camera?
[0:27:57.3] JU: Yeah, of course.
[0:27:58.2] UL: We click right here.
[0:27:59.7] JU: Right, right.
[0:28:00.2] UL: So that’s why it was built that way in the beginning. Now, the reality and this is really important to realize is that we are different users and we’d products even in different way, and I will get to that in a second because this is one of the most important chapters in my book is understanding users. But when I say earlier you need to go and speak with a hundred people to understand their perception of the product so you will get out of your problem.
Now, most of the entrepreneurs will start with their frustration, with their problem, right? They will go ahead and say, “This is a real problem” right? “It’s real for me, therefore, it must be real for everyone” right?
[0:28:39.6] JU: Right.
[0:28:40.0] UL: Well, that’s why you need to speak with those people in order to realize that this is really the case but when you are building a product, it’s a different story, right? And for a second I would say, different users are different types of users and I would only refer to their ability to adapt to something new, right? So you know something new is not necessarily new technology, it’s just a new product.
Then I would say if you take all of the population then you will have normal distribution. If you take any large number, you will have normal distribution. This is it, right? No one is going to beat and in this normal distribution, we will hear about 2% of the population that we will call them innovators. They are enthusiastic amateurs, they are going to use something because it is new. That’s it.
[0:29:27.2] JU: Yeah.
[0:29:27.9] UL: And then the next focus is going to be about 15% of the population and obviously we can discuss that, what does it mean in terms of success and standard deviations but it is not important at this phase. What is really important about this group that is called early adopters is that as soon as they will figure out that there is value for them, they will adopt the new product and use it.
The next group however, the early majority, which is about one-third of the population, even if they understand the value propositions, they are not going to adopt something new because their state of mind is don’t rock the boat. “I am doing exactly fine up until now. I don’t need any changes and therefore, I don’t want to adopt anything new unless someone is going to guide me and take me by my hand and show me how to use the new things.”
In that state of mind, there is only one way for you as a product developer, as a product lead, as a CEO, as someone that is dealing with the product, there is only one way for you to understand that, watch those users and ask them why, and this becomes the most important tool for understanding users in your product development, in your trying to figure out product market fit, this is what you have to do.
Now, the reason that it’s even more challenging is your next user is a first-time user, and you cannot experience the first-time experience for the second time, right? It’s like the first kiss.
[0:30:59.1] JU: Right.
[0:30:59.8] UL: It was – it’s only once. That’s it.
[0:31:01.5] JU: Right, it’s impossible. You have so much context, you have so much baggage.
[0:31:04.8] UL: Exactly. And this is why you need to watch them. And if they don’t do what you expect them then you have to ask them why and you will discover amazing things. You will hear things that I didn’t know that I can do that, right? You will hear things that it was not clear or the copy was not right, the place of the bottom was not right, or you ask me something to do, you asked me for a piece of information that I don’t know, right?
So let’s say that you’re building, I don’t know, an application to help you with your car. It would ask you, “Okay, what is the make and model of the car I’m in?” Many people talk now with the car or whatever it is, right? And so when you ask people stuff that they don’t know, they feel embarrassed and they feel like idiots and no one wants to feel like an idiot, and so they would basically turn off the application and just eject.
[0:32:03.1] JU: Wow. It’s like the example that you – I mean, it’s similar to the example you gave in the early days of ways in your book that people tried it once and it didn’t work for them, and the early users and you had to discover a way to get them to try it again once the system had gotten smarter but it’s really hard to override someone’s behavior once they feel stupid, right?
[0:32:23.8] UL: Exactly.
[0:32:24.8] JU: Yeah, that’s fascinating.
[0:32:26.3] UL: That’s right, they feel that they are stupid or they feel that you are stupid, they don’t want to be part of the equation.
[0:32:31.6] JU: Right, the stupid equation, get me out of there. So you’re making me think of something slightly different but it’s related, a personal kind of a pet passion of mine is this idea of internal innovation built for an enterprise. So a lot of times innovation gets touted as it’s some new thing for customers. Whereas if you think for example about AWS, probably the canonical example, it actually started as a tool for internal developers at Amazon, which then became externalized.
I just saw an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning, it’s what made me think of it that it said that the IPO market is down but car valves are actually increasing. So a lot of organizations based on public disclosures they’re finding value in car valves. I wonder how you think about in the context of your book, in falling in love with the problem, problems that enterprises are aware of. It’s strange, right?
For example, take Google. User problems Google is aware of maybe around like autocomplete, finishing a search query, et cetera but it also has intimate familiarity with people management problems. And the way it solves a user search query is a user-facing innovation. The way it solves a people management problem is an internal innovation. They tend to monetize the search query innovation but there’s no monetization of the people management.
I mean, perhaps through the people. How do you think about problems that are organizational? Because I feel one of the greatest probably unrealized asset classes in modern America or in modern corporate life is the problems that they have solved for themselves that they’ve never considered their other customers of than just our organization. Do you have any thoughts about that or reactions to that?
[0:34:24.1] UL: So you’re right. In many cases, organization will basically say, “Okay, we have this problem. We are going to search for a solution someplace else. The reason those solutions are someplace else are going to be like my own” right?
[0:34:34.8] JU: Right, it’s tons of IT spent to that effect.
[0:34:37.9] UL: And then you say, “Okay, this is becoming my competitive advantage” right? And you don’t think about externalizing it. Now in many cases, it’s quite obvious that if you’re a large organization in any area, right? Then your competitive actually had the same niche.
[0:34:54.9] JU: Exactly.
[0:34:56.2] UL: You don’t want to sell them that solution.
[0:34:58.8] JU: The irony is like take for example AWS, whereas Netflix is a competitor to Amazon Prime, they’re a customer of AWS, right?
[0:35:07.7] UL: Right.
[0:35:08.5] JU: So there’s I think in tech, there’s this weird understanding that we’re going to have all sorts of weird relationships where sometimes, we’re customers of each other, sometimes we’re competitors with each other but I would say in many, probably more legacy business areas, the lines are much more clear.
[0:35:24.8] UL: The bigger challenge or the real issue is that it’s the IT that builds the new solutions for internal customers, right? Usually, it’s IT, maybe someone else but that someone else is building a solution and they don’t have the business sense or the entrepreneurship spirit to go ahead and go and take this product out and make it a product for other customers. And then on top of that, what happens is that in many cases, the corporates don’t want to share that with their potential competitors.
So they end up with building a solution that is absolutely amazing and in the rare cases they’re actually externalizing it.
[0:36:06.2] JU: It’s the exception rather than the rule, for sure. You see it for example with major league baseball had the problem of streaming video before many other industries did and they created a small technology that ended up becoming a separate organization called BAMTech, which is now owned by Disney and valued at roughly four billion dollars. No one ever conceived that a major league sports association developed a technology that would be a multibillion-dollar technology, right?
[0:36:38.8] UL: Exactly.
[0:36:40.2] JU: Anyway, that’s fascinating. I mean, obviously, we’re kindred spirits. We could talk for hours about this stuff. I love your book, I just want to make an extra plug, this is an incredible book for entrepreneurs who are looking to find their way and looking for pragmatic practical steps that they can take to getting through, as you said, the long rollercoaster ride of failure faster and with more fun, and I commend you for writing it.
I wish you all the best of luck and I thank you for being with us today.
[0:37:07.7] UL: Thank you, I appreciate that.
[0:37:09.5] JU: Can you let folks know where they can find you, follow you, and learn more?
[0:37:13.8] UL: Obviously, on LinkedIn but also on my website, urilevine.com, and you can find the book at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, or any store.
[0:37:22.3] JU: Excellent. Uri Levine, thank you for joining us today.
[0:37:25.6] UL: Thank you, I appreciate that.
[END]
The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.