Tim Ferriss' success shows the value of building real things for real people rather than creating abstract approximations that represent what's real. The lessons of getting real apply directly to startups who want to avoid the trap of unshaped work and indirect understanding of what customers are truly desperate for. Check out Mike’s interviews with Steve Blank for more learnings on product-market fit.
Tim Ferriss:
The only way I could write the book and not sound like a stilted pompous Ivy League grad was to envision writing it for two friends of mine, one friend who is trapped in his own startup, and then another friend who had taken an investment banking job.
Mike Maples:
This quote from Tim Ferriss highlights a crucial lesson of greatness that applies not just to books, but to startups as well. Greatness comes from getting real. Let's talk about why.
The 4-Hour Workweek has now sold over four million copies, but the way Tim succeeded was counterintuitive. Rather than write a book intended for various audiences, he wrote a book for just two of his friends. Tim didn't design his book to achieve an abstract goal or appeal to an abstract audience. He got real. When you get real, you deal with the real problem you're trying to solve, rather than dwelling on your ideas about the problem. How could Tim's lesson of getting real help your startup build a winning product?
There are three main takeaways. First, build for real people. Tim mentioned that he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek for two people, a friend who worked on Wall Street trying to make sense of his life, and another friend in a struggling startup. This anecdote triggered my own memories as a product manager earlier in my career. When I was at a startup called Tivoli, we had a product that helped large companies roll out SAP faster.
At that time, many companies struggled with this because SAP was a very complicated and challenging product to deploy. One of our customers was Oskar Klavins at NOVA gas. He had the exact problem we were trying to solve for a growing niche of customers. I had a picture of Oskar that I would take to product team meetings. I would put it in front of my monitor whenever I wrote a requirements spec. When I got stuck on a problem, I called Oskar. When we argued in a product team meeting about how to prioritize a feature, we called Oskar.
You see, there is no real person in the world named persona. Building a product for someone who exists on paper but not in reality results in unshaped work. Creating something for a real person forces you to deal with the reality of what matters, not just your idea of what matters.
It's worth pointing out two nuances here. The first is that you should be very careful about the real person you pick. You want to find the best fit person in the whole world for whom you're building this product. Choosing the wrong person will lead you down the wrong path, but picking the right person is a gold mine.
The second nuance is that of course you want other inputs, but it's better to use them to sanity check. Too many startups survey a sample of opinions from lots of different people. In my experience, this doesn't work as well as going extremely deep with one or a few people and using other inputs to sanity check your problem-solving approach. You want your approach to the product to feel as real and visceral as possible.
Second, test real ideas in the real world. Jason Fried of Basecamp says that getting real is about skipping all of the stuff that represents real, charts, graphs, boxes, wireframes, whiteboard drawings, and instead building something that resembles the real thing.
In Tim's case, you might remember that he created different covers for his book and put them on shelves in Borders bookstore in Palo Alto. he watched from the background to see which covers drew people in and which did not. He ran fake Google ads to see if would-be customers would prefer to click on Drug Dealing For Fun and Profit as a title, or The 4-Hour Workweek. Too many teams believe an agreed upon functional spec represents real agreement. It does not. It creates the illusion of agreement. To know if your ideas will genuinely land, you have to help people see them in the wild, in situ.
Third, enlist real believers. Because Tim knew who would be in his initial audience, it helped him identify the real people who would influence them. He went to trade shows to meet bloggers that he knew were influential to his real audience. When he met with them, he treated them with respect, engaged them in a conversation and listened to their feedback. He created a real conversation because selling can't just be a one-way discussion. It's tempting to focus your early energy on getting coverage in The New York Times. When it happens, it's the icing on the cake, but not the real foundation of success.
The real work of starting a movement comes from creating a groundswell of real believers who are real people and who feel a connection to what you're doing in a visceral way. Tim understood that bloggers his friends cared about were more directly influential to the initial audience he was trying to reach, and he also understood that he was more likely to get coverage from the mainstream press after he had traction in the first place.
Why is getting real so useful? When you solve visceral problems for real people, you tap more directly and with more empathy into the issues that will resonate with a broader audience. Ironically, by targeting one or two people, you develop a better understanding of the big ideas that will matter to all of your audience.
This is another way of describing how Paul Graham advocates for doing things that don't scale. Getting real gets you to the right product faster because it lets you focus on what's essential and eliminates the trap of creating wasted features that nobody wants. Getting real causes you to be more focused in your hiring because it highlights what needs to be built and when with far more clarity. Getting real allows you to avoid the trap of building something people don't want and then trying to sell it to them after the fact.
So what does this mean for you? How can you apply getting real in your startup? First, determine a real user you're building your product for. This seems obvious, but I bet many of you listening right now don't have a clear, shared understanding of the answer for your own startup.
Second, have precisely named customer targets when you try to nail a market niche. When you think about the market segments you wish to target, can you name the exact people? Too often, startups can't. They are too indirect. Their targets are too imprecisely defined.
Third, resist the urge to hire people too quickly. Even if you have access to more than a hundred of the best developers on the planet, it's almost always a bad idea to hire ahead of understanding what is essential to build. Hiring ahead of what's real causes people to develop their opinion of what the right product is. You'll have personality clashes, communication breakdowns, people heading in different directions because you won't have actual agreement about what matters most.
Finally, as a leader, do everything you can to encourage people to get real in their conversations. Do you want to implement Salesforce to track leads? Have the person in charge show you a drawing of the fields or a simulated report of what the finished implementation would look like. Even if it's written in a Sharpie, even if it's written in crayon, far better to do this than to write a spec in words only of what's going to be done. Resist exhaustive descriptions of what could be done and align what really needs to happen with the time you can devote to making it happen. If someone suggests that the quote unquote user won't want this, ask them what the real person who represents the ideal user said in their own words.
You know you're getting it right when you have product market fit before you launch the product. Tim knew he had product market fit for The 4-Hour Workweek before it even hit the stores. He knew the phrases and the memes and the ideas that would spread. He understood the big idea behind the book, nothing stopping you from achieving this with your own product. And this is one of the important learnings that Tim can offer us that's counterintuitive.
And while you're at it, why stop there? You can apply the lessons of getting real to many different aspects of your own life, getting real as a way of cutting through the noisy confusion of the world and getting to what matters. Getting real has a way of making your relationships more alive. When you get real in all phases of life, you might stumble into surprising results.
Thanks for listening to this lesson of greatness. If you found this episode insightful, you might enjoy my interview with Steve Blank, whose work on customer development is at the foundation of product market fit. Here's a preview of Steve's insights.
Steve Blank:
The real metric though for usability apps and for enterprise is that someone's pupils dilate. And if that doesn't happen, that's not product market fit, and you need to be asking the why.
Mike Maples:
You can find a link to that interview in the notes for this episode, or find it in our archives at greatness.floodgate.com. I appreciate you listening and I'd love to have you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. And until we catch up again, I hope you never let go of your inner power to do great things in whatever matters to you. Thank you for listening.