In the allegory "The Cave", Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
As a team building a company, we are this group of prisoners. Our reality is not the shadows on the wall but that what exists outside of the cave. To become successful, it is crucial we get out of the cave. Not just sales and marketing but most roles, especially product and engineering.
We won’t go in depth on networking with peers outside our company, that’s a pretty obvious way of getting out of the cave. This page focuses on two specific ways to get out of the cave: interacting with customers and advisors.
<aside> ℹ️ “Customers” should be interpreted as current but also potential future customers.
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Given we’re focused on Principles and use the Lenses framework to understand what will make them badass, it follows naturally we should have a deep understanding of what’s blocking (potential) customers from getting their jobs done. No one will benefit from a spray & pray approach.
There are four buckets of “interacting with customers” that each have a different objective. They roughly map to a customer’s journey.
This is us going out into the wild, asking questions and offering our hypothesis to people in the industry (and potentially even outside). A great example of this is the discovery done by Rik around potential go to markets Value Stream: Explore new G2M segment(s) for Awell (aka bubbles 🫧)
The objective of discovery is a) to inform ourselves about the current state of reality and b) to stress test our hypotheses and assumptions.
Very often, what people say is not the same as what they do. A lot of knowledge can be gained by watching a person do things, that would never surface in a conversation.
Either on-site or over a call, shadowing is passively watching a person perform their job (i.e. trying to “get their job done”). This can happen at multiple stages of the customer’s journey. Before they’ve ever heard of Awell or seen a demo, shadowing allows us to understand how the current way of getting their job done blocks them from being successful. After they started using Awell, shadowing becomes a powerful tool to understand how our product is enabling or blocking them from extracting full value, and again getting their jobs done but this time with our software.
The objective of shadowing is to gain the knowledge that cannot be gained from conversations.
After the founders of Stripe, Patrick & John Collison (so not a collision install):
To gain early users, Stripe’s founders employed a power move now immortalized at YC as “the Collison installation.” While some founders might share an email sign-up link after pitching their company to their peers, the Collisons grabbed potential users’ laptops and set them up with Stripe right then and there.
Any chance we get and where it makes business sense, doing the initial work for our incoming customers accelerates getting to a badass customer. Even if we need to fly to their offices, yank the laptops out of their hands and do it for them, this kind of action leaves nothing to chance when it comes to making a customers successful with our product. Obviously there are gradations and multiple media that can be used, i.e. making a postman collection available, building (part of)) a flow for them based on a Miro board, but nothing beats getting into the same room and doing it for them.