Knowing how to talk about happiness will make you a better entrepreneurby Derek Lidow Understanding how to reliably make potential customers happy is super challenging but is the key to being a successful entrepreneur. Happy customers come back, they want more, pay more, and they tell their friends. Unfortunately, finding out what could make someone happy at any point in time is challenging and tricky. Understanding why this is tricky will make you better at finding out, which will then make you more successful. First and foremost, people don’t always know what makes them happy, let alone, “what COULD make them happy.” A significant fraction of the population is in a bad mood at any point in time, and when in a bad mood people generally have a difficult time thinking about, or talking about, being happy. You need to engage people at times and in places where they are not under stress and in a way that does not create stress to have a chance of getting deep insights on what could bring additional happiness to some group of people. Most people consider their emotions and feelings to be private, and to be shared with only the closest and most trusted friends. This is generally true for introverts and also applies to many extraverts. In general, people do not want to trust strangers with personal information. To discuss a subject like happiness, you must appear trustworthy and you need to have a reason that is compelling to the person you ask. Even when somebody is in a good mood, they can have a difficult time thinking about and describing a new activity or situation that would make them happier. It is difficult for most people to think about themself in a future context they have never encountered with enough confidence for them to say for sure that a situation would make them happy or happier. It is easier to make something up than to deeply contemplate such a question. And even when they do have ideas of things they want that could make them happy, people often find it too complicated and hard to explain to a stranger. In Sprint 3 “How to test your ideas” we describe how to find and approach potential customers in a way that finds them unstressed and that creates trust. Unfortunately, there are many ways entrepreneurs use to approach potential customers that do not work and you do not want to do: Sending surveys via text or email yields very misleading results. Surveys ask closed ended questions. They do not let the respondent answer in a way to express how they feel or what they really think. Relying on surveys you will miss the most important insights about how and why a person feels happy in certain specific situations AND not other situations. Starting a conversation with, “Can I just ask you a few questions; it will only take a moment?” is problematic. First, few people will say “yes.” Second, this approach creates no trust and makes people want to cut short whatever conversation ensues. Third, this means you will again only receive superficial and often insincere results. Some entrepreneurs hire pretty people to do their market research, such as when a new sunscreen is tested at the beach or a company shows a new product at a convention. This form of getting feedback requires a fully developed prototype and only works if you can visually detect how happy a person seems when they try it. Even then, initial reactions are often misleading. Nothing beats developing a trusting relationship with the community of potential customers for ensuring your efforts at developing a new product or service will pay off. With gratitude, Derek and Ben P.S. If you like what we’re doing, please consider recommending this newsletter to another person you think would benefit from us. It really helps us build out our free content platform.
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