Speaker 1: The next question is, if I'm just getting started with a new consulting business and I've thought of a problem I think is worth solving, what should I be doing as a next step? Oh, I love this question. Thanks for this one. Um, okay. So the first thing I would, I would ask is who has the problem? And that could be a vertical like dentists, or it could be, um, it could be more of a demographic type of, um, segmentation like females over 30 in the United States or, you know, and who make X dollars per year or soccer moms, you know, or it could be a psychographic, uh, segmentation like people who believe that renewable energy is, is important to them and they want to support renewable energy every possible way. So, you know, I just described like a vertical segmentation, a demographic segmentation and a psychographic segmentation. So I would say the, my first question is what segment of people, how would you define the segment of people who have this problem? This problem does don't exist in a vacuum. Someone has to have it. So who has it? How would you segment the audience down to the people who have that problem? And then if there, if there are more than one, or if it's a really broad segment, who has the problem the most, like who has the most expensive problem? That's where I came up with that name. Like everybody's got problems, but they're not all expensive problems. So who's got the most expensive version of this problem? And assuming that you can get some answer to that. And if you, if you do have an answer to that, go ahead and put it in the chat. Once you have that, and you've got a problem, I'm assuming when you say you have, you thought of a problem that you think is worth solving, I'm assuming that you have some kind of solution in mind, perhaps multiple solutions, but you, I'm assuming it's something it's, it's implied that you know, you think you know how to solve this problem, of course. So okay, great. So you've got this problem that you believe that you can solve. So what I would do next is I would take that segmentation of people. Let's just say it's people who believe renewable or, you know, people who think renewable energy is really important to them. I would connect with those people. I would ask my network, I'd say, Hey, everybody, it's me, you know, so reach out to your friends and family and colleagues who know you well, and would jump on the phone with you and say, Hey, everybody, it's me. I am considering putting together a, you know, a SAS or considering writing a book, I'm considering doing something, putting some effort into something. And but before I do that, I want to make sure that there's an actual problem there that I'm solving. I'm not just making this up in my head. So do you know anybody who thinks renewable energy is important to them? Or do you know anybody who drives a Prius, you know, some sort of outwardly evident, piece of evidence that is visible from the outside that you could presume you could like make the connection that oh, they must care about the environment, they must care about renewable energy. Anybody who has solar panels, do you know anybody who has solar panels on their roof? I'd love to talk to them about this problem, or I'd love to talk to them and to ask some very specific questions. And say, if you know anybody, hit reply, and let me know. And a bunch of people will do that they'll say, Yeah, I know somebody Oh, would it be okay to would you mind make an introduction for me? Just tell them, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you know, give them a little short, short, concise, clear explanation of why you want to talk to them, how long it'll probably take. And reassurances that you're not going to sell them anything or anything like that. It's just a research phone call. So once you set up all those phone calls, then you would talk to these people for however long it takes, you know, 510 1530 minutes, whatever it is. And say, ask them, you don't want to say, Hey, if would you buy something like this, you don't want to say that you want to ask them about things related to the problem. So let's say the problem is something like, let's say we're talking about renewable energy here. And let's say they do have solar panels, but they don't have a good way to know how much how much power they're contributing back to the grid. I don't know, just making something up. And you said, Oh, you know, you have solar panels, right? Yes, we do. The last time you checked, how much power were you sending back to the grid? And they might say, I have no idea. I wish I had a way to find that out. Like, oh, that's interesting. Why do you wish you knew that? And you'd start to have a conversation around that you're not talking about the solution that you're planning on, on putting together to address this. In fact, it's probably wrong, the solution that you're thinking of is probably wrong. It's probably not exactly what people want, or the problem that they actually have might be adjacent to the one that you think there might be a problem around there, but your hypothesis is probably wrong. And talk so you don't want to come forward with the hypothesis, say, Hey, would you buy this? Or Hey, does this sound good to you? You want to ask about the problem, not talk about the solution that you're planning. So as you're asking back and forth about this, you know, Oh, well, what do we say tracking? Yeah. How did you check to see how much power you contributed back to the grid? They might say, Oh, I would love to know that. Or they might say, I don't know. Why would I, why would I care about that? And then you can say something like, Oh, well, you know, why did you put these on your roof? Then you start asking a lot of why questions the same way you would if you were going to be putting together a proposal to do some custom project for a client, it's the same kind of thing. You want to get at their motivations, the why questions, why does this problem? Once you've identified that they, they do have a problem or the problem that you're that you're hypothesizing about, then ask them why it's a problem, because then you're going to start to figure out how much it would be worth to them to solve it. So that's where you'd end up with your pricing. So that's the very beginning. So figure out who the thing is for, and figure out what it is, who you want to help, basically figure out who you want to help. And then figure out what is the problem that you want to solve for them, or what is the opportunity they want you to capture, help them capture. So basically, the difference between sort of aspirin and vitamins, you know, sort of aspirational versus reactive. Okay, so a little bit of update at the moment, my target market is too broad, business owners and startup founders who find working with developers very difficult due to communication problems. Yeah, that's super broad. I mean, I agree that that's a common problem. But you have a fairly specific, it's pretty, I'm business owners and startup founders. That's ginormous. I mean, business owners is, you know, half the population. That could be anything from freelancers to Uber drivers to the guy who runs the local laundromat. It's way too broad. Startup founders is a lot more specific. But still, are we talking about bootstrapped? Are we talking about funded? Are we talking about, you know, how big? Are we talking about Facebook? That's a startup, right? Are we talking about, you know, I don't know, whatever, the latest flavor of the month? Are these SaaS people? What startup industry? Probably SaaS, but if they're doing a lot of software, is it blockchain? You know, who, who, when you think about it, who are the ones you won't know this without doing research, but my thought process would be like, okay, startup founders, if we were working together on this, like on a weekly basis, I would say, all right, startup founders, I know a bunch of startup founders. They're all different in many ways. You probably know some, I probably have other students. I know I have other students who have, we could probably make a list of 45 startup founders who would take your call then, and they would all be different. So I'd say to make a spreadsheet of all of these people and, and talk to them about, you know, try and set up a quick phone call. I don't think it has to be too long where you try to explore this particular problem, just like I said before. So, you know, think of some symptoms that stem from bad communication with your developers, like features implemented improperly, or release cycles are way too long, or, you know, wasting a lot of money on, on staff augmentation. So think of some symptoms and, or maybe they're like a lot of turnover, they can't keep developers happy and they're quitting. Like what are the, what are the obvious business problems that stem from bad communication between management and developers? And just keep asking about that. Don't even decide what you're going to do about it. Don't even be thinking about that yet. Just see if there's a real problem there. Like you and I agree there's a problem there, but is there a problem there that someone's going to spend, is going, is there a solution to that problem that you can offer that's credible enough for them to pay you to do it? Because it strikes me as one of those things that people just kind of throw up their hands and be like developers, you know, they're just speak Greek, you know, it's like the, it's like being a beekeeper. You can kind of keep them happy, but you really can't tell them what to do. So, you know, I agree that there's a, there's a epidemic problem of like business people trying to talk to developers and vice versa. That's definitely, that's definitely big. So I would explore that with these people and figure out which ones have the most expensive version of that problem, if they recognize that it exists and, and from them, I would be very careful to capture all of the emotionally charged language that they use. So you jump on the phone with somebody and you just simply ask, Hey, how many, you have a bunch of developers, right? You know, like my friend, Bob, who introduced us said, you're managing six teams of, of, of, you know, two developers plus a designer across all of these business units. Oh yeah. You know, VP of engineering or whatever. And I've got 16 leads that report to me, each of them has a team of three. So, okay, great. Well, that must be a, how do you guys communicate to use Slack or email or what do you guys do there? Like, Oh, blah, blah, blah. We have weekly standups, whatever it is, or daily standups. And you just talk to them about, about communication with the developers and look for them to express exasperation or use words like hate or drive me crazy, or I absolutely love, or, you know, I, it would, I'd be over the moon if, and you can ask all sorts of questions. You don't want to lead the witness too much. You know, you, you don't want to sort of, you don't want to pull them in a direction where you're kind of hoping they're going to answer in ways that support your plan. That is not what you're doing here. What you're doing here is exploring the problem from every angle and capturing all of the emotions from the person you're interviewing to, to be like, okay, I get it. You want to build an empathy with that person. Like, okay, I see, I see, I understand how you see the problem. That's what you want. Because if, you know, people being what they are, it's probably, there are other people like that person who have that problem and are going to, the, the words that this person uses are going to trigger the same thoughts from other people who are in the same situation. So unless you have, I don't know the answer to this, but unless you have experience managing developers and having a hard time communicating with them, you won't, you won't be able to just guess what these other people who are in some, you know, somebody else's shoes, you can't just guess what they think. You need to put yourself in their shoes and you do that by talking to them and listening, you know, with empathy to try and capture all of the pains that they're experiencing in the way that they experienced them. And then set about fixing those specific things. Uh, okay. See if I missed anything here. Working with director. Okay. So the problem is very broad and the target market is very broad. So I would, the first thing I would do is forget about business owners and go straight to startup founders just to pick one because business owners is too vague to even know where to start. But if you say to, if you reach out to your network and you say, Hey everybody, do you know any startup founders who, you know, Hey everybody, it's me. Do you know any startup founders? Because I'd love to talk to them about how they communicate with their developers. Like what are the communication channels they use for their developers? And it could be for, and the reason that you want to have that conversation could be that you're thinking of addressing this problem with a piece of software or you're thinking about, you're not trying to sell them anything. You're thinking about designing something to fix this or you're thinking about writing a book about it or you're interviewing people for an article or you'd like to get people on a podcast where you interview them about communicating with developers. So there are all these different ways that you could sort of frame the conversation. It's for an article, it's for a book, it's for a podcast, it's for a product I'm considering making, it's for a service I'm thinking about making, it's for a SaaS that I'm thinking about making. All, you know, whatever the reason is and just have a very non-threatening invitation to send to these people through your network and get on the phone with them and start asking. And you don't need to focus it down too much at first. It'll start to focus itself. You'd be like, Oh, interesting. All the Silicon Valley ones that are already have a seed round, but don't have series A yet. They're the ones that are really suffering. But maybe they don't have any money to solve it. So I'll go up a level to people who are going for a series B or whatever. I'm probably making these names up. I'm not really into the VC space, but you get the idea. You want to just optimize for conversations, talk, talk, talk to these people. And you might find out that they don't really see this as a problem. They just think that's the part of the beast. Cost of doing business. Developers are hard to communicate with. They might just not be willing to pay for a solution, but you could find while you're talking to them that there is, you know, they might say something like, now, you know what I really want is a Slack bot that would allow me to do X, Y, and Z. So maybe you're like, Oh, maybe I can make that instead. Maybe you don't care. Maybe you do. But you'll, you know, if you talk to them like in that way, the sort of empathy and not pushing them to what you want to sell to them, but instead just really trying to put yourself in their shoes. That is where I would start to, if I was, if I was going to start over in consulting, that's what I would do. Yeah. And this is the kind of thing you can do while you're still at a full-time job or doing, doing whatever you're, however, you're currently making money. This is something that you can do on the side on lunch breaks and things like that. So it's, it's good groundwork to lay, say, if you're still at a full-time job, you can do it in advance and sort of test your hypothesis before you even take the risk of jumping ship.