🥊 A common trait among entrepreneurs, turn your research into revenue, ...

I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.

This is the 24th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Nudge, My First Million, and Where It Happens.

What you need to know

• ❓ Ask questions to get what you want

• 🗣 Turn your research into revenue

• 🥊 A common trait among entrepreneurs

My bonus idea

• ✍️ Failure-as-a-Service

❓ Ask questions to get what you want

🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 21 mins listening)

No one cares about your startup. People care about the value you can give them right now. In essence, they care about themselves. This often applies to customers, colleagues, suppliers, and other stakeholders. Most people put themselves first. Here’s what Phill said about making people like you to get what you want.

What they say

Show genuine warmth

We make snap judgements on others. We decide whether we like them, not through conscious thought, but through shortcuts and heuristics.

When it comes to being liked, warmth trumps competence every time. You’ll never make sales or make friends if you just show competence.

Zoe Chance says you can’t fake warmth, but there are strategies to help.

She says finding something to like in every person you meet is a really good way to start, even if you don’t like the person.

Focusing on one thing you do like - it could be their hairstyle, their voice, their selection of books - will make you appear warmer.

Hearing this reminded me of the wisdom in Dale Carnegie’s book How to win friends and influence people.

In the book, Dale writes ‘You can make more friends in 2 months by becoming interested in other people than you can in 2 years by trying to get other people interested in you.’

To Dale Carnegie’s point, there is no better way to show your interest in someone than to ask them questions.

Phill Agnew

What I say

Why it matters: We’re pretty smart creatures. We can spot someone being fake a mile off. Phill’s approach of finding something, anything, that you genuinely like and complementing them is a great one.

While we’re referencing Dale Carnegie, I’ll quote another one of his famous lines - ‘Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.’ As long as you don’t overdo it, this is another small and underused hack to show warmth.

How can you use this in your day to day life? I’ve found cold emails stating with {FIRSTNAME} often have a 50% better open rate than without the personalization. Come to think of it, the same goes for product, retention and referral emails.

Between the lines: If the office versus remote debate was evaluated on a spectrum of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘I love the office water cooler moments’ and 10 being ‘Offices are dead’, I sit at 9/10. I’m not a remote maximalist because I realize there are a few drawbacks you have to consider.

One of those is the danger of not showing warmth or compassion to your colleagues. Slack can be dangerous if you treat it like a never ending conversation. You can easily slip into the habit of messaging people the next day without asking how they are.

I actively say good morning and ask them how they are. On the odd occasion, they may say they’re not good for x, y, z reason. I can then change my delivery to reflect how they’re feeling. Small things like this show warmth and gets the most out of people.

🗣 Turn your research into revenue

🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 7 mins listening)

Sam Parr’s superpower is getting people to open up. That’s why he’s such a great podcast host and why he built and sold a business to HubSpot for $20M+. Sam has a direct but charming approach that allows him to get to the point and learn whatever he wants. He shared tactical tips you can use on One Question Friday.

What they say

Make customer calls into a routine

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have calls with 10 customers for 10-20 minutes each. I’ll be on calls for 8 hours a day and go on walks while I do this to help me stay loose.

What I’m looking for is confirmation. Does this person have my problem? What type of archetype of person consistently has this problem?

Sam Parr

Sam’s customer research questions

I’ll give you some example questions: Have you ever tried to use _____ before? Oh, you haven’t. You’ve wanted to? Well, why haven’t you?

They’ll say something like ‘No good solution has ever presented itself or the brands that do seem a little old to me.’

I’d say ‘Tell me about that, why do they seem old to you?’ They tell me all the different kinds of reasons.

I use that feedback to say ‘I get this constant pattern of people saying (A) They want to use the product that I’m offering and (B) They haven’t already because of _____.’

Sam Parr

Always be closing

The second thing that I do is I try to close them. I say ‘If you used this product, how much do you think it would help you?’ Oftentimes, they’d say it would help me with X, Y, Z.

I’d say ‘How much value would that bring to you numerically? What type of revenue? What kind of time would it save you?’

They’d say ‘If I joined one of these things it would save me this much money and this much time.’

At the end of the call, I’d say ‘I’m solving this problem. I have a product already. In the future I’m going to charge _____. Right now, because you’re early, I’m going to charge _____.’

I’d end with ‘If I can make all of this happen, are you in? Do you want to try it out? Btw, I’ll refund your money entirely if you’re not happy.’

I send them a link and typically I’m able to close 80% of people.

On the calls, the first half is discovery. I’m asking really broad, open ended questions to describe if they do or do not have the problem I’m solving for.

The last few minutes I sell them. If they balk at it, then this isn’t really that big of a problem or need.

Sam Parr

What I say

Why it matters: The obvious learning here is that you can use Sam’s questions as a skeleton playbook for your own customer interviews. They can help you to understand your audience and the severity of the problem you’re trying to solve.

The less obvious takeaway is to do things at level 12 intensity. Rather than do a lot of things half heartedly, do a few things incredibly well. Sam strongly believes in selling before you do anything else. Early sales can often be the greatest signal that you’re tackling a problem worth solving.

Between the lines: If you want to go deeper on customer outreach and discovery, Sam has referenced The Mom Test multiple times on the pod. I’ve not yet read it myself - partly due to the amount of podcasts I listen to - so if you take his advice and read it, please reply with your favorite takeaways.

🥊 A common trait among entrepreneurs

🥇 First place (4 min read vs 1 hour 11 mins listening)

Everything is good in moderation. The same goes for rejection. If you lead a life without rejection, you’ll be less resilient to change. On the other hand, too much rejection can knock your confidence and turn you into a pessimist.

Sahil Bloom, Greg Isenberg and Tom McLeod sat down on Where It Happens and unpacked why the ability to handle rejection is a key trait of successful startup entrepreneurs.

What they say

The boxing analogy

Most of the time being a founder is like trying to avoid being punched in the face.

You can take a lot of body blows - things like people saying no, the app didn’t ship on time - but you’re probably not going to get knocked out by that. You’re really trying to avoid the one that puts you on the mat.

There’s something about resilience and get-back-up-edness.

Tom McLeod

Always be learning

I like that analogy a lot. You encounter the glancing blow in life and almost get knocked out, but you somehow dodge it slightly.

There are two types of people. There’s the person who’s like ‘Phew, it missed me. I’m good. I’m cool.’

Then there’s the person who’s like ‘Why did that happen? Why did I almost just get knocked out? What did I learn from that? How did I leave myself open to it?

You’ve got to bet on that second person to win in the long run. You learn so much more from those glancing blow situations if that’s the approach you take versus just feeling fortunate for not getting knocked the hell out.

Sahil Bloom

Failure is key to success

We’re always going through repeats of childhood loops, right?

If you never fell, you never learned to walk efficiently. If you never missed a shot, you never became a better basketball player.

Finding a person who’s had a streamlined tailwind the entire time, they’re going to fall hard whenever actual adversity shows up.

At some point you will be challenged. That’s a tough pill to swallow if you’ve never really been in the ring (to keep the boxing metaphor going).

Tom McLeod

What I say

Why it matters: People struggle with change. Period. It’s very difficult to train flexibility and resilience. The best way to learn how to roll with the punches and adapt to change is to have experienced uncertainty and knock backs in the past.

Most of you reading this are entrepreneurs or leaders at a startup. My advice to you is to incorporate a few interview questions into your hiring process to see what kind of change or adversity candidates have experienced and how they managed this. You’ll find this is indicative of their strength of character and how well they’ll navigate change at your startup.

Between the lines: One stat epitomizes the importance of resiliency - 43% of US Fortune 500 companies were founded by a 1st or 2nd generation immigrant.

If you or your parents immigrated to another country, you’d have experienced adversity firsthand, or at the very least, you’d be privy to your parents’ hardship.

Even a move you’d think of as easy, like the UK to the US, still involves adapting to a new culture and starting again when it comes to making friends, building your career, and life in general (trust me, I’ve done it).

It’s no wonder that US immigrants build far more companies in proportion to their population.

My bonus idea

You never truly learn until you make a mistake yourself. My wife would testify that about me 1,000 times over (sorry Mary Alice)! The important thing is to learn from and never repeat your mistakes.

The best way I do this is to write. I write the outputs of my experiments, good or bad. I write why a product launch was successful. I write a post mortem if something failed. But, not everyone likes to write. Not everyone is good at organizing their thoughts and structuring their learnings.

This is where FaaS comes in. Failure-as-a-Service. It’s Roam Research for your personal failures and lessons learned. You can send voice recordings or complete a form that includes situational context, what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what you’ve learned.

FaaS will then document every lesson so that it’s easily discoverable when you face a similar problem in the future. That way, you remember the lesson and you relive the pain of that experience. You’ll never make the same mistake twice.

Shoutouts

When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:

• Crypto Rabbit Holes is a weekly-ish newsletter which explores interesting ideas in web3, and breaks down projects that are leveraging blockchain technologies to meaningfully change how we live, work and play.

Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.