Building in public
Simple validation that only cost me a Diet Coke.
About 6 weeks ago, I had a very insightful conversation with my barber. Usually the barbershop is full of other folks, which makes chatting about anything of substance difficult, but that day it was just him and me on a random Tuesday.
Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have long been an interest area of mine. My entire family is full of people with hobbies that they’ve managed to turn into a side business and even full-time gigs. If anything, I’ve been a bit of an outlier, so far…
The quiet setting enabled me to ask him some questions about how he runs his business that might have been awkward to do at other times.
After a few probing questions about his day-to-day, my barber looked at me funnily and said: “You’re not looking to open a barbershop are you? If you are, I’m happy to help as long as it’s not too close to here.”
It was then that I explained to him, that I am doing some user research on MSMEs for a potential project, and that rather than trying to compete with him, it might be worse, I just might try to sell him something 😆.
I left that day with a lot more than a haircut. I hadn’t been planning to interview him, so as we wrapped up, I asked him if I could pay him for a 90 minute session in a few weeks, so that I could include a more structured 45 minute Q&A, which he happily agreed to.
Two weeks later, after my haircut, we went to a nearby cafe. As he answered my questions, I furiously scribbled down learnings and other details, and tackled uncomfortable but critical questions like willingness to pay.
At the end of the session, I went to pay him for this additional time and he flat-out refused my cash. The most I could get him to accept was me paying for the Diet Coke he consumed during our chat.
Doing user research is not a new thing to me, I’ve done a lot of it during my career as a PM, but in typical “do as I say, not as I do” fashion, it’s been less of a focus when hacking on my own stuff. In the past, my side projects were not really focused on external impact, but self-validation.
I relished having an idea and figuring out how to build it on my own, most likely learning some new tech along the way that I could add to my skill list. That itself used to be enough.
I’ve almost certainly let a few decent ideas die this way, as “self-validation” is also another way of saying that I built in private. Most of my side projects never even got something as quick and simple as a social media post. It’s been almost 14 years since I built my first iOS app, for iOS 4 (not a typo)!
Over the past 16 months, I’ve slowly been pushing myself to do more things publicly, e.g. this very newsletter you’re reading. However, that random conversation with my barber was a blip in my typical perfectionist approach to going public.
The lack of pre-planning made me quite uncomfortable when I first started asking him questions on the fly, but the extremely casual approach to our conversation likely meant that I received more authentic responses than if I had started with a more formal interview.
My chat with my barber ended with “If you build this, I’ll sign up right away” and all that validation point cost me was a little courage to put my still half-baked idea out there. Oh, and that 1 Diet Coke.
HOW is 2011 FOURTEEN years ago?!