Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman are the co-creators of the 30x500 Academy, a course that teaches students how to sell products that people want to buy. At the core of the course is a technique Hoy invented called "Sales Safari," a process rooted in ethnographic observation. 30x500 students are now collectively earning over $3 million per year in product sales.
Hoy is also an author and the co-founder and lead designer of Freckle, a popular time-tracking business. Hillman is also the co-founder of Indy Hall, one of the first coworking communities in the country.
Scott Hurff: What is 30x500? And what is Sales Safari?
Amy Hoy: So 30x500 is Alex and my class for creative people. They can learn to create and sell their first products, because working and doing creative stuff for somebody else for hire, it's very different than selling directly. You're insulated from the market realities. You don't understand quite what people want, except your boss.
It's very difficult to go from school and job and then freelance to create a product. A lot of people fail, because they don't understand how different it is. So our class gives them those skills that they can go and launch something and make money.
Alex Hillman: And Sales Safari really started as just one of the components of that class. When we first set out to create it, and the first version was actually called "the Year of Hustle.”
What was interesting when we started teaching that version of the class, which is everything leading up to launch, a bunch of the components of that were...we didn't think they were all that high level, but we learned over time just through teaching that things like "take notes" and "go do research on your audience" aren't really specific enough.
So Sales Safari's really become the heart of the 30x500 class. Arguably, the majority of the lessons themselves, the exercises are tied directly to it, when originally, it was just one step of many.
Amy Hoy: I don't know if it was so much one step of many as that we would say things like "go study," "go read what your audience is writing, study it and make notes. And use that." People don't understand how to go study, read or make notes.
A lot of college educated people, none of that makes sense at all.
Alex Hillman: It's step-by-step. Every component is a "here's not just what to do," but specifically how to do it. Here's the results that you get. And here's to know whether or not you're doing it right, because you're going to use those results in the next component. Things like that.
Amy Hoy: What is really is, Sales Safari is "net ethnography," combined with some close reading and empathy. Like step by step empathizing with your customer to understand them.
Alex Hillman: Also sort of a built in feedback loop. Once you start applying those Sales Safari data, you're collecting categories of notes, things like the pain that you notice in people. Not just the pains, like what the problem is, but also how they describe it.
You start collecting jargon, some of their specific detailed language and words they use to describe the problem. Elements and contributions to their worldview, their deep-seated beliefs that are unshakable. Then also the things that they talk about, they recommend. The things that they buy.
All these things where the individual data points can be valuable, but the goal of Sales Safari is to have a systematic and repeatable approach, so you can collect a ton of it. A ton of data, because without a ton of data, you can't find the patterns. Without patterns, you can't make smart decisions about the business.
Amy Hoy: Yeah, people who go and they, especially designers, developers, writers, they think, "I'm going to make a product." They get one data point or they get one potential client or customer, and they think, "All right. This is it. I'm going to do it." That's really a recipe for failure.
You need to keep doing whatever research you're doing until it all comes together. It'll seem fruitless up until the point where it immediately, like the clouds will part and a ray of sunshine will burst through. Where it will change [inaudible 00:05:07] thing and they'll go, "Of course, this is what I should be doing."
People like to go on one data point, because it doesn't take any work and because it feels right. It's bad, though. Bad idea.
Scott Hurff: What was the impetus behind doing this? What led you on this path to now?
Amy Hoy: It started when I was very young. I read like every book in the library when I was a kid. I read everything. One of the books that really made a difference in my life was "People Watching" by Desmond Morris. And then his related books, like "Baby Watching" and "Pack Watching." That gave me very, very early on the idea that you can understand people and creatures by observing them.
So, thanks, Desmond Morris!
And later on I learned about ethnography, which is, of course, what Desmond Morris was doing. Then just later on when I started doing freelance and business and stuff, it just made sense for me to focus on what were people doing and how can I get in front of them? So Sales Safari, it's something that I've been doing sort of naturally since I was a teenager. Then I started trying to teach it to my friends, because as someone who is really well-connected in the Ruby on Rails and Peachtree worlds, I just watched my friends fail and fail and fail.
I'm like, "Um, you don't need to be failing."
When we launched, my husband and I launched Freckle, a software as a service in 2008. Software as a service grows really slowly in terms of revenue. In 2010, I decided I had to quit consulting, because it was making me want to murder everyone. So like how can I make some money? We had shipped JavaScript workshops, which is like 50 grand at that point.
I decided that one of the most valuable things I could teach was the business stuff. Because we launched workshops. We'd launched e-books. We've launched software as a service, which was growing nicely. It's just slow. I sold so many big consulting contracts to difficult clients and got them to do what I wanted. I clearly had a skill that people lacked and I wanted to share it with them.
That was the very first Year of Hustle. I was like, "Hey, Alex. You want to help me?" Because I knew Alex has a lot of the most important worldviews in common.
Alex Hillman: My background...Amy and I had some similarities in the fact that we've done the employment track. We've done the freelancing consultant track.
Amy Hoy: And then we did the impossible.
[laughter]
Amy Hoy: Separately.
Alex Hillman: As it were. What's interesting is...or it's two things. One was Amy and I were friends for a number of years before we started working together, so this was not a business partnership forged out of necessity.
It was more of a "Hey, we do have a common interest and a common set of skills in terms of being able to connect with an audience and help them do something that's important to them." That's what made us successful as both employees and freelancers, honestly. The thing that was always my angle as a freelancer was when everyone was out there selling their code, I was actually getting to know the business that I was trying to serve and say, "Here's what I think will actually make the work you're about to pay me to do pay for itself in a multiple." And wrote it. Nobody does that.
Amy Hoy: It's partially nobody does it, because they just think like a cog at all times. But also I found one of the basic reasons I hated consulting was the clients really don't...I mean, they say they want that, but they don't really. They ignore you. They hire you and they pay you, but then they ignore what you say.
Alex Hillman: The move to Amy and I working together on this came from the same frustration of both having created successful businesses beyond our freelance. Amy had been able to launch Freckle. It was young, growing at the time.
I had Indy Hall. Also young and growing at the time. And saying, "How is it that we've created these things and seemed to have dodged all of these bullets that take so many other people out. What can we share from what we have learned to help people avoid the failure rather than just lean into it and accept it and say that these lessons are necessary battle scars in order to be successful? That's ridiculous.
Amy Hoy: Yeah. We share our idea that some X can't be taught, whatever it is. X can't be taught. It's done by people who are crappy teachers.
Alex Hillman: Amen.
Amy Hoy: Alex, you didn't explain what Indy Hall was to the [readers].
Alex Hillman: Sure. Indy Hall is a coworking community and space. We're one of the first in the world, which puts me in a distinct position to say that there legitimately were not people doing what we did when we started. I had to learn a lot from outside influences and things like that to figure out how to make Indy Hall work.
For those of you who know about coworking and maybe have visited a coworking space, one thing that I'll urge you to do next time you set foot in a coworking space is look for one thing in particular and that's whether or not people in that coworking space are actually interacting with each other. Are they talking to each other? Do they walk up and say "hello" to their neighbors and things like that? Or do they walk in. The drop down their computer and they put in their headphones and not talk to anybody?
One of the things that sets Indy Hall apart and the thing that I think we work the hardest at since the very beginning is we're not so much a place to work, although absolutely, I think one of the best places to work, we're a place to meet people who you wouldn't otherwise meet. Really a community more than anything else. More of a club and a clubhouse.
And eight years later, we're still growing strong and evolving and doing all sorts of things. But the interesting thing about my experience in building Indy Hall and community building is the practice that we both do at Indy Hall and we teach other coworking spaces and things like that.
It's got a lot in common with Sales Safari. That's not something that I talk about a whole lot. But its a lot of the same components of observation at scale, pattern watching, close listening, building empathy, and then, I guess, the part that's a little bit different from 30x500 in many ways and a lot of the businesses that 30x500 helped people create is when you create a product business, generally speaking your customers are not aware of each other. They're not super aware of each other.
They may be aware of them from testimonials or they may bump into each other. Even if you've got a mailing list or something, a discussion list or support forum or things like that, but Indy Hall's this kind of bizarre business where the customers are extremely aware of each other to the point where the majority of the value that you get as a paying member of Indy Hall is actually coming from other members.
Which means as a business owner, my senses for listening and understanding people where they actually are needs to be very, very good. Otherwise, we react to what we hear versus what we see and make bad decisions that a lot of other shared work spaces do.
Amy Hoy: What Alex didn't say is that Indy Hall and there's where Alex is sort of like the "godfather" of coworking communities, because so many of them have made the same stupid mistakes and then had to shut down because they didn't serve and focus on their customers first. They instead focused on the extraneous baubles, like fancy desks and a fancy space.
Then they were like, "Well, how do I fill this space?" Which if you spend any time in entrepreneur forums, you know people make things. They're like, "Well, how do I get people to buy it?" It's the same thing.
The same problem people have in Indy Hall. Alex did it the opposite way, which is why he and I are such a natural fit.
Alex Hillman: If you think about starting a business with venture capital or really any stage of funding before there's money coming from customers, what happens is you set a scale. You pre-dictate a scale that the business needs to be in order to be successful. You have more venture capital, you take on at really even a "favorable" rate or valuation, that transaction dictates a necessity for growth. That's what people say makes a startup a startup.
But it changes the kind of decisions that you make and who you serve. Instead of serving the customers, you serve the size of the container that you created for that business to continue to fill and do by hook or by crook. Unfortunately too many people lean towards crook in order to make it work or you fail.
And so many businesses fail at a totally reasonable profitable scale, because they never are able to hit that imaginary bounding box.
Amy Hoy: They're over-leveraged from day one.
Alex Hillman: If you look at a coworking space as a physical manifestation of the exact same thing. If you start with a 20,000 square foot space, now having to have memberships to support a 20,000 square foot space and then some before you can ever consider yourself successful.
We take the inverse approach and teach the inverse approach, which is have members before you even have the overhead of a space. Let the membership and its growth and its needs and its way of supporting each other dictate the size and other attributes that are far more important than the size of the space itself.
Scott Hurff: How did you apply the rough principles of Sales Safari to building an offline business?
Alex Hillman: For my short answer, and then I'll want to hand it over to Amy, is that not much changes with the exception that everything slows down. You lose a bunch of really valuable tools, like "search" and "copy/paste." You rely on your ears and your brain.
The one thing that I tuned that...I mean, this is expert level Safari in so many ways, is the ability to disassociate what someone is saying from what you interpret them saying. And remember what they actually said, not what you think they said.
That's something that's much easier to do online when it's written, because you can literally copy and paste what they said. When you're talking to people, man is that hard.
So you're at a bunch of disadvantages to try and do this offline and it's slow. But I'm curious what Amy has to say about this.
Amy Hoy: The other issue, we don't need to invent in person Safari, because ethnography and whatnot have already been invented. Safari was my invention to take those into Internet form.
When you're in person, it can be also...most people cannot observe while they're engaging. It's very difficult. Not only difficult to disassociate, but literally, you have to have two parallel running processes in your brain, and they both have to be working at full speed. Very few people can do that. I think even with training, very few people can do that.
Two, if you're in a local user group, for example, and you're like, "Oh, they get these people that have these problems." And this user group, assuming even that's accurate, you then think that, "Well, they all must be this way across the entire world. All the different user groups, every "Rubyist" must have this problem.
That could be so untrue. You have a local maximum in a lot of ways. Like literally local and you might have just reached the peak of what's local and it may not be anywhere else the same.
Alex Hillman: Which isn't inherently a bad thing, but it's a limitation you need to be really, really aware of.
Amy Hoy: Right. When you're serving an actually local market, which is what [inaudible 00:19:02] does, it works so much better, because it doesn't really matter if people in Tucson, Arizona have the same concerns about working alone as a freelancer, because they're not going to join Indy Hall.
If you serve a local market, then local Safari is the absolute best thing you can do.
But on the other hand, people then take that kind of thing, if I say that kind of thing, then they think, "Oh, I'm going to go to my salon and see what struggles they have." But that doesn't show you the full picture.
I cannot tell you how many friends and early on students before we learned to discourage them, went and said, "All right. Well, my local bar, restaurant, salon has this stacked scheduling problem. I'm going to make software for it." They think they identified a problem that they were going to solve, but they didn't understand salons at all. They watch them misuse pieces of paper to do this rough scheduling, but they didn't understand that these people never buy software, ever. If they bought software, they wouldn't have this problem to start with.
We have seen staff scheduling issue for local businesses come up four or five times over the past few years. It's always a failure, because you can observe someone doing a task and not understand the bigger context. And the way that you understand a greater context is long term observation, like many different intervals.
Alex Hillman: Then the other part to that is if you ask them to show how they use it, you're instantly at a disadvantage, because they know you're watching over their shoulder. That instantly creates changes, even if they're micro-changes in how they use it, because they're trying to show you something, instead of doing what they normally do in order for you to observe.
There's an element to Sales Safari where there's a very intentional distance and a lack of participation. People need to not know that you're there watching. That sounds really creepy to say it that way, but the reason for it. This is professional lurking if you want to look at it that way. You're there to watch what they do and say when they don't know that you're there.
Amy Hoy: It's not that they're doing it in private. It's a public forum and mailing list and such, but they aren't performing for you.
Alex Hillman: Exactly. It's what do they say unprompted?
Amy Hoy: In ethnography, I consider this a Margaret Mead problem, right? Margaret Mead was this famous anthropologist who screwed up big time, because she went to these remote villages and she asked the villagers, and especially the teenaged girls what their lives were like. And then she came back with these insanely sensationalized tales of crazy sex lives and everything. They were just totally putting her on.
It wasn't true. In people studying circles, Margaret Mead is a cautionary tale. In fact, she's probably the cautionary tale, because she took the word of her subjects instead of observing what actually went on. Very gullible. And you don't want to become a martyr.
Scott Hurff: So why do, in your experience, why do people misrepresent or sometimes lie or sometimes just say something to get you off their back? Why is it that asking people isn't reliable?
Amy Hoy: I don't think it's usually...I think it's rarely on purpose. I think it's rarely on purpose. People don't understand what they do all day. They don't pay attention to what they do all day. As a designer, I can tell you. It's just absolutely fact, because if I explain all these problems with enough software people, like, "Oh, but it's not so bad! Oh, that's just email or whatever."
I'm like, "Well, what about if it looked like this?" They're like, "Oh, I never thought of that. I never thought that maybe I should have a people view that will show the files Bob sent me, so I don't have to search for 'Bob.' And then click every email with that."
Alex Hillman: To Amy's point, there's a numbness to some pains. But the other side of it is, it's people really ultimately train themselves to not think about it or to think about it in a certain and specific way. Or they've heard a certain thing that they think they're supposed to say.
Again, it's not an intentional act of deception. That's extremely rare. It's more that you're relying on them to be reliable. That's statistically, that's not going to be the case.
They're not aware. If they were so aware of their problem, there's a good chance the problem would be solved by now.
Amy Hoy: That's why every programmer makes their own tools, and they're all terrible. I'm a programmer. You all know what I'm talking about.
The other thing. If there's research that shows this, experts don't understand how they do what they do. They can't verbalize it.
When you start observing it, they start trying to explain it while they do it. Their performance worsens a lot.
Scott Hurff: I also remember the example you gave in a talk a while ago of the Walkman focus group.
Amy Hoy: Oh, yeah.
Scott Hurff: Where they said, "We want yellow." And then they all picked up black.
Amy Hoy: Yeah. All the kids were asked by Sony, "Which one is cooler? Which one would you want to buy? The cool sporty yellow Walkman — I think it was Discman — or the black one?" And then they were like, "Thanks for doing our focus group. Here's two tables worth of Walkmen. Pick the one you want." And they almost all picked black.
People's vision of themselves is different than how they actually are. That's humanity for you.
Alex Hillman: And also, this is something I've learned through Indy Hall is that people rarely -- this is bizarre -- people so rarely act in their own best interest. It's really bizarre.
It's not that they are intentionally self-sabotaging. It's that if there are habits at play, that they generally aren't aware of that habit. They will simply revert to the habit.
The example I can give you is that people choose to work in a coworking space generally because they don't want to be by themselves. Otherwise, they could stay at home, right?
Yet so often, given the opportunity, if they come into a coworking space, the first place that they will choose to sit is by themselves. I like to think of it, it's like when you get into an elevator by yourself, you stand in the center. The second another person walks in the elevator, you both go the opposite corners.
It's a personal bubble thing or I'm used to sitting by myself, so I think I'm going to sit by myself.
It takes an outside influence, which in the case of a coworking space is me and my team, doing choice architecture and design to help our members, our paying customers get what they actually came there to get. Because if they are left to their own devices, often they won't.
Scott Hurff: That's fascinating. Do you find that peer pressure plays a role as well? Is it like a so-called societal norm in the context of where they're at? Or is it just, "Hey, I'm awkward being social, but yeah, I want to be. I don't want to be by myself."
Alex Hillman: I think it depends. I'll say all this. There's not a right or a wrong way to work in coworking space.
You work however you're most productive. But what we know is the people who get the most value generally do a handful of certain things. That comes from observation.
If we can help people choose those things for themselves, that's one of the other elements that we teach in Sales Safari. One of the Sales Safari derivatives is our copy writing techniques, which are designed to be persuasive. It's not about getting somebody to do something they wouldn't already do.
Amy Hoy: No, never.
Alex Hillman: It's getting them to make a choice that is in their best interest. If it's not in their best interest, it doesn't work.
That's the beautiful thing about it. It's not persuasion for the sake of getting people to do something detrimental. You can't plant a seed in someone's...you can't plant an idea in someone's head and simply have them do something that is against their best interest. If you can, it's evil. But that's not what we're setting out to do.
Amy Hoy: But most people aren't that good.
Alex Hillman: Yes. That's just it. You have to be very, very good at it.
Amy Hoy: Really, really hard.
Alex Hillman: In order for that to be effective. And most people just aren't that good.
Amy Hoy: Thank God.
Alex Hillman: Master manipulators.
Alex Hillman: It's true. But it comes down to, when you think about sales and copy writing, writing persuasively, even if it's not a sale in terms of money changing hands, but getting somebody to do something. Writing an email that people will read. Writing a blog headline that will get somebody to read the rest of the article, you have to think about why reading the article is in that person's best interest. And then show that to them.
Because they're not going to do it on their own.
Amy Hoy: It's this idea that people walk around looking for solutions to their problems. No. People walk around trying to tune out their problems, because they don't expect that they can solve them. You have to reflect back to them. "Hey, this is the problem that you're having. You know, it's a big deal, but also we can fix it together."
That is the heart of my copywriting technique.
Scott Hurff: That’s a good segue. What’s the process that helps you understand what would make someone read that email, use this product, read that blog post?
Amy Hoy: The key is you start by observing what they actually already do. You don't try to persuade a vegetarian to buy Omaha Steaks. You look at what they actually do in real life on the Internet. What they read. What they share with each other. The problems they discuss. What things that they ask help for. How they help others.
And then you get in there with something that already fits their behavior and their worldview. If people don't watch videos or they exclusively watch videos or you find they pay more for videos, then you'll want to consider giving them videos.
The process is essentially figure out what hurts them. Reflect that back to them in a very empathetic, understanding way. And then offer them assistance.
So you don't say, "Hey, I can help you with that!" Say, "What if you didn't have to restart Skype five times during your podcast?"
Scott Hurff: That would help.
Amy Hoy: Great. Yeah. Or just the little tool we started using the other day called "Line In." So you can actually hear yourself on your own monitor while you're recording stuff.
Scott Hurff: Oh, imagine that.
Amy Hoy: Yeah. It's like you have to start recording and then stop recording and then reopen it and listen to it, what you just recorded, to be sure that everything's correct. Why do you have to take all these steps?
So what if you didn't have to take all these steps? What if you could do it simultaneously? Hey, here's the app!
Alex Hillman: By the way, it was incredibly hard to find the solution to that problem. I was someone who was looking for it. This is a great illustration of what Amy was talking about before. I knew the problem that I had. I knew that I wanted to solve it.
What I didn't know was how to describe in the way that the person who had created it was marketing the product was describing it.
Amy Hoy: They didn't do as good a job as I did just right now.
Alex Hillman: Right, exactly. If they had, I would have typed a couple things into Google and boom! They would have popped right up. There's a natural SEO to this as well. If I'm trying to guess what way would a product maker describe their product in order to find it, you're making me do double the work. That's why I'm never going to find you.
Versus let me type in the problem that I have in the way that I would already describe it, and poof! There you are.
Scott Hurff: What I love about Sales Safari is that it takes advantage of the fact that we're now at a time where all this stuff takes place online for the most part. There are some communities that don't hang out in forums or link sharing sites or Reddit or whatever, but it takes advantage of the fact that, hey, by and large, the vocal members of some community are talking about the problems they have.
Alex Hillman: This is the thing to put all of that in perspective. I think you're totally right. Is that in order for someone to go on the Internet and ask a question of a group of strangers about how to solve their problem is a very strong indicator of the level of pain they're in. Even if it seems like very little pain to you. Like, "Oh, that's so simple. Here's how to fix it." It's awesome that you think that, but that's clearly not where they're coming from.
Otherwise, they would have fixed it by now.
So keep that in mind, that in order for people to post a problem they're having for help to an Internet of strangers, that's a clue right there.
Amy Hoy: Huge clue. Yeah.
For example, my husband Thomas is like a lot of people. He just kind of goes along. Like, "Why are you hanging socks on the drying rack this way? If you hang them this way, they'll dry faster." He's like, "I've been hanging socks this way for 30 years. I don't care."
So you can't really help Thomas, no matter how much he needs the help in these areas, things he doesn't care about. But if he were on a forum asking how to maximize his hang dry time, then you would know it was time to sell him one of those crazy octopus hanger things that they sell in places where they don't have dryers.
That was a weird example.
Scott Hurff: No. Sock drying is a perfectly legit example.
Amy Hoy: The struggle is real.
Interviewer: I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the so-called Lean Startup mentality, that's been permeating startups everywhere. It's something that people kind of take it as blind faith these days. Any thoughts on that?
Alex Hillman: I think it's important to think about the Lean Startup, before we even get into what it is and why it doesn't work, talk about the problem it tries to solve. Right? The problem it tries to solve in theory is not very different from the problem we're trying to solve, which is ship something that people actually value.
And to avoid wasting time and effort and money and other finite resources on getting there…It's advice being given at the level where you're just tweaking an already broken decision. An already broken system.
Where the Lean Startup really leads with the genius idea that came from inside of you, and says, "Here's how you will take my Lean Startup magic fairy wand and if you tap it on the right people's shoulders in the right direction, you'll magically make a sale."
Scott Hurff: That was beautiful.
Alex Hillman: You like that?
[laughter]
Amy Hoy: Please say "fairy wand" again!
Alex Hillman: Fairy wand.
[laughter]
Alex Hillman: But that's how I've been describing 30x500 as the antidote to that feeling of tapping people on the shoulder with your "do you want this wand?"
[laughter]
Alex Hillman: It's getting weirder, isn't it?
And avoiding that entirely. So Amy, do you want to pick up and run from there? How's that for a set up, by the way?
Amy Hoy: Basically, Lean Startup is Cinderella. Cinderella is going to keep scrubbing different stoves until someone comes and nominates her to be a magical princess.
Alex Hillman: It's not that Lean Startup can't work. It's that it works on...it's like, what's the term in programming? Eventual consistency. Lean Startup can work given an infinite amount of resources and time to maybe finally make a match.
Amy Hoy: Okay. A thousand monkeys typewriters Shakespeare.
Alex Hillman: Right.
Amy Hoy: Well, I think the key is "garbage in, garbage out." If you have something that's already fundamentally good, then lean startup can help, because you're just refining what's already good. But most people don't have something that's already fundamentally sound to start with.
Alex Hillman: There is no way for them to know whether or not they do.
Amy Hoy: Correct.
Alex Hillman: Lean doesn't teach you that.
Amy Hoy: Throw stuff at the wall until something sticks, which is basically the lean startup approach. With lean, if you actually read the book "Lean Startup," it's really vague.
It doesn't actually tell you, "Do this, do this, do this." It's more of a pastiche, which is fine. People act as if it's a set of instructions, which it's not, which leads to all the confusion and difference in opinion that you find people infighting about all the time in the Lean forums.
The think about Lean Startup is that it's inspired by the Toyota way and lean manufacturing, which is very clear. Some of the best parts of the book are the quotes from the Toyota way.
No one starts an assembly line like, "Well, let's see what comes out the end. If we don't like it, we'll change it."
Which is what Lean Startup does. It's like, "We're going to make something. If it doesn't work, we'll change it." That's not how anyone makes cars and that's not how anyone ever made cars. By the time they get to lean manufacturing, the what is a known quantity. An established function. Then you just improve the manufacturing itself.
I'm not actually sure how the Lean Startup came about. It doesn't logic out to me, if "logic" can be a verb.
Scott Hurff: It is now.
Amy Hoy: Whereas we are like, "What makes something people want to buy?" And then what do people want to buy? Because you cannot make something people want without understanding what people want or being very lucky. Luck is not a business plan.
Alex Hillman: It's not that that's not how it happens. It's unlikely that you can recreate that.
Here's the thing. There's a fundamental difference between the business that's willing to run around with hopefulness, that Cinderella story that we're talking about before, and predictable, repeatable results.
Predictable, repeatable results means you can work with consistency. It means that you can work on a schedule. If you've got limited time. You're trying to do this on the side or you've got health issues or you've got kids and a family. And you don't want to give things up. The lean approach, again, it will swell to fill the amount of time and resources you give it. You can keep doing it into infinity.
Whereas with consistent repeatable results, you can do it with finite amounts of time and know that you'll get there.
It's a beautiful thing, because it actually scales, also. Is you know that when you do it and it works, you can keep doing it. You can do it more and get better at it. You can put more in and get more out. It's an actual process versus this very vague, fuzzy, open to interpretation thing that is lean.
Scott Hurff: What made you build Sales Safari on the pains and not the joys that people mention?
Amy Hoy: Because joy is much more personal and also a lot of cultural groups, and I don't mean like ethnic or country cultures, but industry cultures don't talk about what's awesome. Or, if they do, it's sort of disingenuous, how everything's awesome.
30x500 focuses on providing business value. And business value always comes from something that is a waste to start with or a lack.
So, Freckle Time Tracking, my app, may create pockets of joy, which I think is awesome. But the most important thing that it does is serve a business need while not being terrible. Freckle is actually very pleasant to use, but just saying it's actually fun to use...I mean, you could apply that to anything. It would be meaningless.
This thing, it's time tracking that you'll actually use because it's pleasurable. That time tracking is the key part here, if that makes sense.
There was this scene in this book called _Good Omens_ by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Have you read it?
Scott Hurff: I have not, but it's on my Amazon wish list.
Amy Hoy: It's really good. You should read it now! It's fantastic.
One of the main characters is Demon Crowley. He's sort of gone native in the world. He wants to be human, basically, and live as human. The demon's job is to create evil, right? They have this demon meeting. Demon middle management affair.
And these other demons are like, "I can get a priest to commit blah, blah, blah." And "I tempted a man to kick his dog." Blah, blah, blah. And Crowley's like, "Well, you guys are not thinking big enough. Those are individual acts that lead to strong acts of evil, but what I did was I invented the M-25 motorway. And people drive around it and curse it. Thousands of them every single day."
It's especially funny, because British highways are terrible.
But the idea that looks like the low level accretion of evil, thousands of times a day, I like to try to create the opposite. Think how many horrible hours each day are burned using Microsoft Word.
Or enterprise contracting software. The thing is, if you just say, "I'm going to create joy," you'd be like, "Here's a cup of ice cream!" Doesn't actually tell you where to go. People like kitties. They like kitties. They like ice cream. They like jazz music, but those are harder things to sell unless they're in the need for them.
Whereas if you say, "You struggle with this problem every day. Imagine if it was actually positive interaction instead?" Then you actually get people listening, so that they're in the mood for ice cream, they're not going to buy ice cream. If you can't stimulate demand for it easily, but if you work with something that they're suffering with, then you have a conversation opener.
Scott Hurff: I love that characterization. You have to be in the mood for these things. I've never heard it put like that before. I think that's really powerful.
Amy Hoy: Stimulating demand is difficult. It can be difficult.
Alex Hillman: This all comes back to, just to sort of round out Amy's point, it's very easy and also ineffective to spend a lot of time trying to convince somebody else that they want something versus meeting somebody where they are in the moment where they want it.
Not only are you able to serve them, but they get this feeling of "magic mind reading-ness," which is complicated concatenation of words. The idea being not only are you able to solve their problem, but they get this feeling, in addition to the joy of having their problem solved, think about that elation that you feel when it's like, "Finally, somebody gets me. Gets my problem. And by the way, found a way to solve it."
And even if it's not perfect, even if it's got shortcomings, which by the way, it will. It always does. That doesn't matter, because they feel "felt." They feel like you get them, which instantly instills some trust, which adds to their willingness and likelihood of buying. People buy...that's another factor in the 30x500 process is the difference between selling to clients as a freelancer or even selling yourself to an employer where you've only got to convince one person is you can get to know them and figure out what you need to tell them in order to get them to hire you or give you a raise.
When you're selling products, you're not allowed to be in the room for every sale. So you need new mechanisms for building trust.
And meeting people where they are, helping them genuinely through e-bombs and then through a pitch that says, "I get you. I get your problem. This is your problem, right?" "Yeah, that is my problem. You've described it the way I described it. Are you reading my mind?"
And then you show them how things could be better. They're like, "Yeah, that's actually what I want. That ratchets up the trust. They believe that you get them.
Amy Hoy: Because you do.
Alex Hillman: Because you do.
Of course, this only works if you actually follow through. Amy likes to talk about...we study infomercials and show our students infomercials. The reason that people hate infomercials is because they sell junk.
It doesn't deliver on the promise. If they worked, we wouldn't hate them so much.
So getting the customer's trust, that you actually know what problem they have delivers so much. Then when you do actually fix the problem, that's sort of like a cherry on top of the trust sundae, since today's been full of metaphors. Then you've also got a customer who's not only happy, but wants to talk about you and your product and how much your product is awesome.
Not because your product is awesome as your product helped make them awesome. The product solved their problem.
A customer whose problem is solved is going to talk about the fact that their problem is solved and you get to go along for the ride.
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