#224 – Deploying Empathy to Build Better Businesses with Michele Hansen of Geocod.io
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What's up, everybody? This is courtland n from india hk's to com. And you're listening to the indie hackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.

And on this show, I sit down with these ni hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. All right, i'm here with macho hanson. I'm macho.

You are many things. You are the founder of geocodable, the coasts of the excEllent podcast software social. You are the author of a brand new book called deploy empathy, which we're going to talk about a lot today. welcome.

Welcome to show. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

So why don't we started talking about geocodes o because this is like the most ny hackeris h thing that you do, although every one of these other things is a very hacker thing to do. What is geocodes o and how did you come to started?

So geocodes o is a software service company that my husk eyes started together in twenty fourteen. So the genesis of IT is that we had a little mobile APP calls, what's open nearby that at at the time you you couldn't just like type into google, like which grocery stores are open right now. You had to like, remember that like, there was a safeway near you.

And then I go to the safeway website and I go to the store located and like typing your zip code and find the one near you, and then find their hours that was like five, six deep. And so we built this abb inside that. You just pull that up.

And IT was a map, and IT showed you which grocery stores and convenience stories and coffee shops were currently open. So you didn't have to do all of that. And the whole idea of that is, if you needed, you milk, get midnight or a coffee at three A M.

You didn't have the brain power to do all that searching. You could just pull up the APP. And so the central point of this APP was this map.

So for geo coding, which is the process of turning addresses into latitude, launch tude so a computer can understand them. So you can, for example, show a map on a mobile APP. Basically, we got from google, and they would give you twenty five hundred look up for free per day, but you couldn't cash them or store them.

And then if you needed any more than that, you needed to pay like tens of thousands of dollars as a year for an enterprise contract that gave you like a hundred thousand a day. And we were like, well, like we had this up going and we had some add revenue like couple hundred box of months. And I was like, I felt IT was working.

And we are adding more and more stores, getting some good press ve out IT. But we have like three thousand stories at one point, really like hold on. So we we're five hundred over this limit and there's just nothing like we just can't get the data like how we're going to keep this going.

So we initially built a super rudimentary dio quota just for our own purposes, for this APP, just to keep you alive. And as we talk to other friends about IT, you know who developers, they were kind of like, oh, like, I have the same problem. And eventually somebody was like, have you guys ever thought of just like slapping up paywall in front of this? And then like maybe other people could pay your server costs so that you don't have to, like, pay to host this? I'm like he had.

Like that would be amazing. Like other people paid the server costs. And so we launched geocodes o in january of of twenty fourteen. We had two tiny little digital ocean droplets for ten bux a month each. So our expenses were basically twenty dollars to keep IT going.

And to our great surprise, you know, we put IT up on hacker news and in parade and is somehow I ended up on the front page the whole day, tons of sign ups. Of course, we've never come anywhere close to that traffic that we got on the first day. And most of IT didn't the stick around, but we got some customers out of IT.

We ended up making about thirty one dollars our first month. So about, you know, eleven dollars when you take out the server cost. We are so surprised that anyone wanted to pay us that we actually had not written the code to tell people to to tell stripe to build people.

Wow ah yeah we did because we did. We did pays you go for one of our plans. That was the only one we launched with initially, but that to us was a smashing success because we had more than paid our server costs. That was the goal and that was such a crazy experience, you know, getting so much feedback from people on hacker news. And that was really where I started to be interested in, like the role of customers in building a business.

There's so many lessons in that, that story, particularly this this idea that as you're building your first super side project, your business, you're building tools to help you out. And the fact that these tools that help you out could be useful to other people know geo coding service that you created for yourself is something that others might need is such a cool insight.

And I consistently see this pattern of founders who end up pivoting to a business that at first, we're just to help her for the previous business. It's almost as the best way to come up with business ideas is to start something, literally anything. And then when you find yourself needing problems, solve their valuable, go to that as a business instead.

yeah. And what I love about that approach is you are already passionate about the problem. And worst case scenario, you have solved the problem for yourself. You have made yourself more efficient, you have an accomplishment you can feel good about, and maybe nobody is paying you, but you have solved your own problem.

I think the other thing that I take from a story which you didn't quite dive in two but you handled that, was that you are a husband, wife team working on the side project and also working on geo code o what do you think is a lesson that you're taken from? I guess seven plus are working together for other people who are working together with their partners.

Working with my spouse, for me is my dream job. In a way, it's a reason why I never planned to get a job again if I can help IT. Because we work so well together that that is that IT just works.

We both bring unique things to the table. We respect each other professionally and as people so much. And so IT works for us. IT doesn't work for all couples. And I think whenever the topic of founder couples comes up, there's always at least one person who has a horse story about working for a founder couple that should not have worked together. So it's so funny like, I think people self select into IT because I member, I think I think I was at microchip.

This happened where, you know, I just like chatting with with people and what I and people who don't work with their spouse who knew that we worked together, uh, would be like, how do you guys work together? Like we would kill each other and in the people that do work with their spouse, they would be like, isn't IT just the most amazing thing? I am so happy for you and I was just this huge decodeme like there are two reactions to hearing that we work together well.

sounds like people have slided themselves into the right buckets because the people who are not working together, the people who know that they would kill each other, did you and your husband, did you have to do a lot of work, or any work to, like, make IT work? Or was that just sort of naturally natural? From the very beginning.

we met at work, working at a pretty small company. I and we actually worked together as coworkers for six months without any sort of romantic Spark or intentions or anything.

Never not worked together.

Yeah, yeah. We have since we have known each other, we have worked .

together before. go. yeah.

So it's Normal to us, like in in a way, when matteus finally went full time in twenty eighteen, I went full time in twenty seventeen. IT was like returning to Normal.

very cool. Well, obviously, the two of you are doing a great job. I don't know how many employees your code you has, but I do know that you're doing north of a million dollars and and your revenue, you're crushing IT.

And you've had the time on the side of that to england, some others side projects. So I feel like I need to have you on the show like three times. I want to talk about pocket after social.

We have time to do that now. Want to talk about the whole story of geocodes o because there's a lot of interesting insights there. But in this episode, want to talk about your book that you recently just published is called deploy empathy.

I read IT. It's great. What's what inspired you to write a book that why write a book if you've got a company, if to making millions of dollars, if you've got a podcast, if you got a family, you've got all something for you. Why do the arduous tough tasks of sitting down and being at a book that I think well over three hundred hundred and thirty pages?

So there's two directions for that answer. One of them is the where the need came from. And then the other one that that's a bit simpler, and I think makes IT all make more sense, is that I have A D, H D.

And so doing many things at the same time is like completely Normal to me. I actually need to have multiple products going because that makes me excited about things. And you know, I I get born and I want to move on to something else.

And so having multiple projects going is just superNormal for me, but where the book came from. So for years now, I guess, i've sort of been sort of on and enough having calls with people who are trying to get started with customer research. So it's sort of my favorite topic.

You know, my functional expertise is in product management, and my middle niche within there is customer research. And at one point, you know, I was one of the leaders of the washington, D. C. Jobs to be done, meet up, you know, gave some other various talks.

I gave a talk microcom about interviewing customers because some some people kind of knew that that this was my area because most of the writing on customer research, with the exception of the, is not written for the hackers. It's not written for developers, is not written for people who are getting started on their own without funding. It's written for U X.

people. It's written for product people. But I really wasn't til last fall when I was mentally a sprint group through founder and they were asking me questions about customer research more frequently.

I was meeting with them every week, and I didn't have one good place to send them with us. Something needed that I sort of started. We like, maybe I should like to.

yeah. So is interesting because you you're sort of experiencing this problem that people have, people clearly find IT valuable. To get this advice actually have a problem talking to customers, learning what to build, learning how to build IT. And then the solution to that problem is shady. It's like you said, it's this piece meal you collection of break problem. There are bunch of different books and blog posts and sections to ignore, pay attention to and I think that's like again, another perfect formulation for like uh huh business idea that dated problem that people actually have existing solutions are really crappy for this particular .

group of people yeah and you know what we are talking about geocodes o and solving your own problem in many ways, the book came out of solving my own problem. And I had this thought one day that I was like, maybe should read a book. And like, everything I have read from writers makes writing a book sounds awful and like really lonely.

And like they had to go lock themselves in a room for six months and not the other people, and have these strict rules for themselves on how many hours they write IT a day. And I was like, I mean, this is myth february ary we're in the middle of strict lockdown. I did not need any more loneliness in my life um so was like I should not write a book and I like but you know that I could write a newsletter like people are doing this like newsletter thing now.

Like maybe I could just like start writing stuff as a newsletter as I need IT like the stuff that I need to be able to send the people and then the archive of that newsletter like the next time somebody asks me, hey, how do I do this? I can just send them this newsletter archive. And then I don't need to have this conversion over and over again, right? So was solving my own problem.

yeah. I think the the topic of the book itself talking to customers is a chAllenging topic to get people to care about you because I was with a lot of indy hackers.

If I think about the problems that at the top of their mind, it's it's things like, how do I come up with an idea, know? How do I even know what to build, right? Like how do I find the time in my day to even finish like building this product and get IT out the door? It's so hard just to like in shit and something that's releasable.

And then like how do I find customers? Nobody y's paying for this. I don't have any money. And how to continue making this business work. These are like kind of the biggest pressing problems. And I think when people here, oh, you need to go to customer research and talk to customer ism, check out this book to plan with and check out this book the mom teacher, like I don't have time for that. I could barely, barely have time to do all the other things i'm trying to do. So how do you address that notion? How do you, I guess, content with the fact that, like a lot of founders, don't see customer research as something that's worth putting the time into doing?

Yeah you know that something i'm very aware of that understanding customers is perceived as a vitamin rather than a pain killer. But what has been really unexpectedly dly delightful about this process is learning that it's more like a gummy like once people know how to do IT, they actually get really excited about IT.

And I have had people tell me who have been running their own businesses for years and barely spoke to their customers, never mind interview them that like now they're excited about IT after doing IT after reading my stuff, which is really, really exciting. And you know, I sometimes find that the people who are the most against IT are the people who tried IT. But they went into IT without enough guidance, and they went into an interview and they asked someone, you, is this a good idea? Would you buy? IT watched I build next and they did that.

And then the person didn't buy at their like, well, that was a waste time, like under doing that again. And I I posted on into hack ers a couple months ago when I was writing like like have you found talking to customers to be useful? Because I wanted understand what people's perceptions of IT were, what their experiences were, you know what those hesitations were.

And someone actually like comment up on IT that they were meeting their potential customers in coffee shops near them. Robert besa, i'm sorry, i'm probably pushing your name, blast name Robert. He's an india cki in romania. And he like coming to this whole thing about how he was meeting people for coffee and like getting you understanding their process, all the stuff.

And I was like, I need to talk to you because you are exactly in this group of developers who people often think or you know not gonna out and talk to the customers and don't want you. And you're getting all this out of IT and you're doing IT and you're like living IT. And this is so incredibly exciting, IT told me IT really was possible to get people excited about this.

I had so many sole nourishing phone calls with people about their customer research during the process of of writing the book in that one that would really stands out. And IT just came from common thread on hackers because I think people believe that stereotype, that developers are bad at talking to people. And it's just not true.

And the research shows that it's not true. Like research actually shows that you engineers actually Better at pulling insight out of a usability session than experts were. And that's a study from one thousand and ninety three. Like this has been known for a very, very long time. And yet people believe that and allow IT to, you know, hold back their projects and then they wonder, why isn't anyone buying IT? You know, they couldn't talk to people and have their idea and found that thing that really did make IT work.

There's always the stereotypes that I think society tends to propagate. That's really they're really easy to buy into. And once you just sort accept them is true, you up becoming the confirmation bias where you're looking for evidence that these things are true, you're ignoring evidence against IT engineers, sea talking to people.

Well, if you think that you're really going to see the truth of that all over the place, but if you actually look at the data, you're saying it's actually not true. That's the case. And I think even worse, if you believe that you might fall into the trap of like saying i'm not going to be good to talk to people and it's the ways of time for me to talk to people.

But I think given how many people are good in engineering nowadays, how many people can code an APP, how many people can build, you know, the sort of fundamental parts of a business that way? I think one of the best differentiators is to get good at talking to people. IT is to like developed these soft skills and rebooked like yours and figure out how to actually talk to customers.

I think that helps you about something to sell somebody and why they should read the spooky, why they should talk to customers. Quite Frankly, the number one problem andy hackers have is building something that nobody wants. You spend six months, nine months, five months of your life coating the state that you're super excited about.

And at the end of IT, like nobody pays before, IT doesn't grow and you're dejected and you quit and that sucks. And like a lot of that can be avoided if you've really good to talk in the customers, which IT doesn't take that much effort to get good at. I think in your book, you know, like I would expect a book like this to be called like learning how to talk to customers or customer conversations or something like that, but it's called deploy empathy.

The sort of main theme running through the book are these tactics and techniques to help you become more empathetic and demonstrate empathy in these conversations. And how would you define MPA thy and and why is that important to have empathy when talking to customers? Why is that the title the so important? That is the primary concept of your book.

This is such a good question because I think people mix up the definition of empathy and and compassion um and sympathy very often so the definition of empathy that I used in the book, which is a quote of brazil Brown, is empathy is understanding that somebody else's thoughts and emotions and actions make sense from their perspective and it's seeking to understand their perspective, appreciating IT as valid from their perspective and that IT makes sense from their perspective even if IT is different from your own perspective and and it's important to talk about the definition of empathy because there is also sympathy which is you know sort of feeling bad for someone and in compassion and and I think sometimes and this is sometimes people give me a little bit of push back here because they define empathy is feeling what the other person is feeling and I don't use that definition berney Brown doesn't use that definition either and I think actually attempting to feel, I truly feel what the other person is feeling is distracting because then you are focusing on your own feeling. And the whole point is to focus on the other person and understand what they are feeling and almost spend your own judgments and prevent ceive notions and your own feelings about what they are saying, and just completely submerged into the other person. I like to think of this as becoming a sponge, or as it's phrase in the book and with the cover, picturing yourself as the rubber duck that is just there to listen to whatever IT is they have to say.

And this is way, way easier sad had done. That is not how easy to just sit down, especially if somebody he's like describing like industry you know a lot about or are are describing using your own product that you spent like years building. It's hard to just sit there silently and just eat their point of view.

Like you're doing IT wrong like you should like this and this way it's just like hard not to interrupt t but like if you do that, you sort of taking yourself out of, I guess, effective interview remote and you're of making IT about you. And and in fact, in your book, you have what you call the most important section of your book. It's section that before.

Basically, it's all about how to talk so that others will talk to you. And it's intriguing as, like, great, in the beginning of that section, you say this is going to be a list of tactics and tips. And you need to promise me, reader, that you will not be manipulative.

You will not use what people say against them. You will not use these these tactics to do harm on the others, because they can make somebody open up to you much more than people Normally would. And I think Normally if I see something like this in a book like that's the kind of like on the cover on the very first page, like.

And add to people intrigued. But in years, it's like an actual promise that you want to extract because like the tactics that follow like actually could be pretty manipulated, like they're very powerful techniques. There are things that there is due to have very good conversations with people and they're effective. And so if you're willing like, I want to go through this list of techniques because I think they're very fascinating and there's something important .

to be said about every single one of them yeah and and you know on that IT is very important to me that people use these tactics in what they learn from people ethically. And someone ask me recently about the fear that people might you manipulated and am I just giving fuel to people who are manipulative? And that is a question I have thought about quite a bit over the past few months.

Someone pointed out to me that people who are minibike and who seek to do harm to others, they do not need instructions on how to do that. They instinctively know how to do all of this and so much more, and use IT in ways as as weapons against people. It's people like us who are a bit more naive, maybe a bit more on the socially awkward d side who actually need instructions on, like validate what someone is saying and leave a pause for them to to fill the people who are charming and manipulative don't need to be told how to be charming and manipulative, because they have probably known how to be that way.

So maybe before we jump into this list, what's the broad sort of the broad strokes of why this this is even important? Because the books kind of divided until like these these tactics for empathetic conversations and then also these very useful scripts for, like, hey, do you have this problem? Are you at this stage in your journey? Here's a script, how to talk to a customer about topic x or topic y. Why do you need like these soft, empathetic conversational skills before you can just .

jump into the scripts? Because how you ask the questions and how you treat the other person matter so much for the kind of output that you are going to get in the kind of results you're going to get. You know that the book has all of these scripts.

And in some ways, I often think about what I what my questions I have to ask someone as the first half of an interview and and what you're doing is priming someone to think about the topic. You're building report with them. You're showing them that you care, which you for for many in hackers, you know, especially if you're building something B2B, you're asking some about an everyday business process that nobody in their life has ever Carried about.

So you're getting them comfortable talking about IT and comfortable talking to you. And then in the second half, you use all of that report and they open up to you about how they really think about that, what they're really doing. And so the tactics are so important because the questions are really only a small part of building that report and asking the questions in a harsh tone of voice or interrupting someone or talking over them or not making them feel comfortable you're not going to get very good results back.

You know, I could ask you, what LED you to sign up on the hackers today and you want to be like like I like, I don't know. Like, I just I wanted to comment on something yeah but if I ask you so what LED you to sign up? And in the hackers today, you've got me like, oh, well.

you you you're trying to be.

as I sort of often put IT as harmless as possible.

yes. So the scrips is one of the what you do and the tactics, sort of how you do them get less of of twelve tactics. And you just use the very first one, which is use a gentle tone of voice.

Just I mean, your example demonstrates obviously like why react differently to the first question that I would to the second, but what are your thoughts using a gentle tone voice and a customer interview? Like how does this help with customers at ease? I guess, how does this help you learn more as a person interviewing them?

You need to speak in a gentle tone of voice in order to put them at ease and to make them feel safe and to show them that whatever they say is is acceptable. And you can do that through your your tone of voice. And you, I mentioned in in the book that a lot of the tactics come from tactics that therapy sues and negotiators as well.

And speaking in a calm, gentle tone, voice helps the other person calm down. Therapies do this intentionally to bring calm to maybe someone who is aged. So do negotiators.

Yeah and it's cool that has that effect on yourself as well. If you just try talking in a gentle tone, voice like you end up coming down yourself. And I guess if you are like new the customer interviews and something you have had done a lot of a founder, you might be a little empt up, a little nervous, a little shaky. And so if you can calm yourself down and calm them down, I think that sounds great. And if it's good enough for like someone who's like a hostage crisis negotiator than I think he's very good enough for founders.

Yeah and you know for those first couple of interviews, if you notice that you're shaky and you're excited and you're talking over them and you're not following these tactics, it's okay. But what's important about that is that you noticed you were doing that and that gives you the opportunity to improve on at the next time.

IT takes time to understand how to use these tactics and use all of them in an interview, but starting to notice where you are not using them is so powerful and that in and of itself is a sign of growth. And IT doesn't mean you're doing this process wrong. IT doesn't an you're learning IT wrong. If you find yourself accidently not speaking in a gentle ton of voice is okay. You can do at the next time.

So the second tactic is, I think my favorite IT seems like a few degree, but that seems to me like one of the most powerful tacks on the list. And it's just the word validate, validate what people are saying. But what does that mean?

So we talked about the definition of empathy and how I know in some ways that means simply acknowledging that what the other person thinks and does make sense from their perspective. And you can make that known by when they say something to you simply replying with, yeah that makes sense and that is a profoundly powerful phrase because IT gives them permission to keep sharing is a super intuitive .

because it's it's like, okay, well, why would you to tell somebody what they said makes sense? Of course they think that makes sense, like they just said, IT, you know what possible help can to be for you to sort of tell them something that they already know?

It's all about building that environment of safety and calm and where you're putting them in control and and you're also elevating them in many ways to the position of teacher. And see, you know you were saying earlier about interviewing people about an industry or a problem that you're very familiar with saying, you know, i'd like to understand how this works from your perspective and then you're elevating to them to that teacher position is one of the most powerful ways to influence someone. As found by the marketing researcher, a Robert celli, he found that when he, he, for researchers, for his own book, influence.

one of my favorite books go.

by the way, I love that book. So he did a podcast with, I want to say, IT was economics radio a couple of months ago and he was saying how he ebel ded himself into all of these companies with really spamming marketing basically. So the time I was encyclopedia salesmen and like he's car dealerships, like all those sort ts of things, and he would be a training their programs.

And then he wanted to use that for his research, for his book. And when he asked, people told he ordered himself and said he was actually a professor, and he wanted use this in this book. And he asked them if if he could use that, if he gave them a copy of the book, only about half of them said yes.

But when he said is like, well, you know, i'm a professor of marketing, but I wanted to come learn from you because you are an expert and how to influence people. One hundred percent of them said yes. And so these tactics are validating what they're saying. And basically elephant ding them to the position of teacher, even if you are the founder of the company, even if you have decades of experience in something, IT makes them feel complimented. IT makes them feel like they have something to say that makes them feel like what they're saying is important, which if you are building a company and this person is representative of the customers that you might have for that company or you or is IT customer of your company, IT is incredibly valuable to make them feel valuable themselves yeah .

and international about validation. You talk about something I think that is is fascinating, which is not only do you use validation and when you don't necessarily agree with what the other person is saying even know sounds absurd to you, you're not agreeing with them. In fact, you're you're going out of your way not to give any opinions at all.

You're not saying like that's good or that's bad. You know like that I don't like that you're attempting to become almost in a human like this object in the room with them that isn't even capable of having opinions are judgments. It's all of these validating phrasie years are like like I can see what you do at that way machine or I can see what you're saying or IT sounds like that frustrating or IT makes sense that you think that none of these are opinions, none of these are judgements.

but they are also profound, the validating .

at the same time, right? Why is IT important to not have opinions? Why is that important to not give judgments?

So on the flip side of talking about putting them in the position of teacher, it's also very important that they don't start trying to impress you because then they will start holding things back and they will start trying to craft a narrative around why they do things and make themselves look at.

And if you were to say, yeah, I love that idea when they share a feature request with you, they're gonna feel like, oh, actually thinks my idea is is good. Like, what does he think of my other ideas? Like, if I say something else, I want her to think that's good like you're reminding them of their own insecurities.

But instead, if they request a feature and you say, can you tell me more about how you might use that? You're just diving deeper into what they think, how they see things and you're leaving those opinions and the quality of what they're saying completely to the site. It's it's irrelevant. You're just looking to understand their perspective, looking through their mental closet and you know, asking permission to open up all of the draws.

I love that it's like the idea that if you are someone who's capable of giving opinions and making judgments, as you said, like you trigger something in them to be like, oh, this is a person that I need to impress. And that's the last thing that you want in a custom m interview. You don't want somebody saying things that aren't necessarily true. You want somebody giving you the most accurate possible sort of, I guess, revelation of their experience.

And it's a really hard one for people to learn because socially, we are often conditioned to be agreeable to build report with people, but in this case is actually detrimental.

right? And it's hard to go on a customer interviews and like not sort of already know what you want them to say. If you were a new founders, you have been working on your baby for you know a while and you go talk to a customer about IT, like it's probably got a scary to know that they might say bad things about IT they might not need or you're building they might not have ever thought something like that before. And so it's easy sort gradually, suddenly coax them into saying good things. I don't think this is true for anything like even if like, I don't know, I see you're going to fight with your partner and you want to go talk to a theriere, right? It's easy to like give your erp is very biased version of what you what the situation is because you want them to agree with you or if you're energy customers is easy to talk up your product and you know suddenly, without saying, IT excepted, to put them into a situation or a mood where they feel like they need to say good things about your product and then you can sort of trick yourself into walking away from their conversation thinking, ah yeah people like what i'm doing. I should keep doing what i'm doing when it's really you sort manipulated them into saying good things.

I think there's a very natural instinct to want to hear positive things about what you're building and doing, especially when you need motivation and you're going on your own. That's that's very Normal.

A customer interview can surface a lot of things about how you're helping someone rarely will IT come in the form of I love you, this product is amazing like it's not gonna come to you like a testimonial, but I will come to you in hearing, wow, like this thing they're doing like IT took them like so much time before and now I just took them fifteen minutes to get IT set up and they don't even think about IT and they are super grateful to me for that like, wow, like it's really different. But we have to check our own instincts to be praised and feel good about ourselves. And you know, what you are saying earlier about this is in just about customer interviews.

It's about all of these complicated human emotions and how do we handle them. It's important to have empathy for your customer and it's also important to have empathy for yourself. And if you find yourself in an interview looking for praise and looking for validation rather than evaluating an idea, but trying to validate IT understanding that your desire to feel good about what you're doing is completely Normal and its natural, and it's okay. Have empathy for yourself as well.

Even other point in this list you called mirror and summarize their words. What does that mean in the context of a customer research interview?

So that's to rephrase what they have just said. Again, you know, without any opinions, and there are two different ways of mirrors and summarising. And basically what this does is IT IT prompt someone to keep talking, but is not actually a question.

So for example, so before we started recording, you started talking to me about how you're buying furniture for your apartment, and you, you, but you just bought a chair. So I could ask you, how did you decided by that chair? Or I could say, oh, so you just bought that chair.

right? Even after I just told you that I about .

the and then and then you'd probably like, yes. So then, my friend, like their content, you know like it's a way to prompt elaboration but is less threatened than a question. Going back to the whole thing theme of being as harmless as possible.

Yeah super interesting because I think sometimes in conversation it's it's easier to feel like especially for like you almost successively polite that you need to shut up and that like, okay, I said the thing, I answered the question, that's all i'm going to say. And if you sort of repeat back to me what I said, like you give me permission to just go on a library and telling much more about whatever IT is I was talking about.

any other way to do this is to summarize what they said wrong. So for example, let's say that you told me that you bought an end table last week and you bought a chair today. And if I was trying to illicit elaboration, what I could do was prompted to correct me and then elaborate on top of that.

So I could say also, you bought a chair last week, and then you bought in a table today. Same tone of voice, same way. But then you would say no was actually the chair that I bought today because last week, I got the end table because I was at the store and they were having a sale and like and then you start going into IT because you're correcting me and giving me more detail so I understand right.

right? The super smart and all these things are in validation, mirrors and summarizing. We have another one on here which is asking for clarification even when you don't need IT seem to be like methods of just getting the person do not only feel safe, but to get them to just keep talking and giving you more and more details why do you need so many details? What is the matter that they keep talking and sharing more, more about their experience with you?

Because it's important you understand the problem from their perspective. We always have a sense of a problem from our own perspective. But if we want to build something that solves a problem for somebody else, and this is also intuitive for them and solves a problem in the way that they would understand and that they can interact with IT and they're able to implement IT, we need to fully understand their perspective, even when you think something is obvious and just.

And I see this time and time again with kody aware, i'm like, okay, i'm pretty sure I know why they need this, but let me just ask anyway and then I ask and then I like, oh, that was not all, but I was thinking, i'm so glad I ask that. I mean, so the more you do that and you ask people things that that feel to you like dumb questions, like, again, I feel that were socially conditioned to not ask dumb questions and we're so afraid of that. We're so afraid of the shame that comes with someone saying, well, that was a dumb question, but you need to ask those questions to clarify even when you think you understand because it's often such a valuable doorway till learning new things and new avenues of the problem that you didn't even realize was there. And I think this is like, this is the big shift that people go through when they're learning, had to interview from in the very beginning of feeling scared, they're gna, say they are wrong thing and threaten that their idea may be incomplete or wrong, to then realizing that they will discover things and then going into them and being excited for finding out when they're wrong and excited to discover some new angle and perspective on this that they didn't know before. And I experience this myself when I learned how to interview and its it's so amazing to watch people go through that transformation who I have helped start interviewing as well in the disco from of scared and a nervous to being like, oh my god so I can't wait to tell you what I learned.

Very cool. You you got a couple of items in this list that are things not to do. They say, don't explain anything.

yeah. Say, don't gate the person anyway. what? What does that mean? Do not explain things.

So this often comes up when you're interviewing someone and let's say you are doing a screen chair interview with them. Maybe they are testing a prototype, er, they are testing a landing pay you have and and they say, oh, why is this button over here or this doesn't work even though it's working as you had built IT.

There is a very natural tendency, especially as the person who built up thing to say, oh, well, what I meant there was actually that you should do this. And like this is how it's intended. And like this is what I was thinking when I was doing IT, and you started explaining IT. And then you like, and actually, if you just click on this thing and then you go over there, then you'll be able to get to IT. You can do IT because you're the whole point is to understand how they experience IT.

And if you start talking about what you intended or what you think how that should work, then you're turning the interview on yourself and you're not understanding, okay, why is IT that they expected that button to be somewhere else? And why is IT that they missed that menu item? Like how can I understand where they expected those things to be? Like is IT possible that the process you're solving, you're solving IT in a different order than they expected? Or like there's something going on there and so you can start explaining yourself, which again, is this very natural inclination to defend yourself when you feel like someone is is saying that you build something that bad, right? Like that is supernatural to feel that way, but you have to check that feeling and say, okay, how can I understand why they think that way? What did they expect to happen? And then with also not negating them, again, you're building this environment of making them feel safe, making them feel like the teacher. We're moving your own opinions from this. And if you tell them that something they think is wrong, they're gonna shut down right away.

Yeah that makes perfect sense. And it's so inaccurate to be kind of coaching a person and explaining them through the process of using your product or how they go out their day because you're not there when they're doing this stuff. Know somebody to go to your website.

They they not going to have you over their shelter, use IT. And so totally right. It's completely I think I just gives you the wrong idea if you're injected yourself too much into the interview.

And there is a place for on boarding calls, there's a place for customer support. The interview was not at.

So these are all tactics for basically how to conduct yourself when having an interview, how to be empathetic.

There's also the question of like what are you even trying to learn the interview? Know why are you talking to customers? What are you hope to get out of this? Because even if you get them talking, even if you validating and you're not interrupting and you're not explaining things and you're more mirrors their words, what is that that you're even listed for? And how do you take that information back and like, make Better decisions as a founder, and I realized this is like a tremendous question. This is basically what your whole book is about. But what are the sort of broad shows that we cannot leave listeners with so that they they have an edge in the customer interviews going forward and they can like find your book and find out the rest of the story after that.

so you can use these tactics to steer the conversation in a direction that is useful for you, that helps you understand, you know, what might be valuable to someone, or what might a usable product look like to them. In the case of doing a screen chair interview, you are not just letting them talk about anything forever, right? If I you know to the questions I was saying to earlier about buying furniture, if I had actually been wanting to interview you about sound dampening panel and why you bought the panel that you did, IT would be pretty irrelevant to ask you about chairs until you keep talking about chairs, even though I personally love chairs.

And so all of these tactics help you guide the conversation, tour that direction that you needed to go in so you can understand, what do I need to build? What do I need to do to get more customers to come? Why do people stick around? Like, what should my marketing say about what the best customer is for my product? How do I stop, turn? How do I see if people can use the thing that I build? Like, those are the core problems that the book helps you solve, and all of those tactics help you pull out information that is relevant to those problems that you are having. And so you're not just letting them talk about any old thing. You're getting them to talk about the topics that are relevant to you in a way that makes them feel like they are steering the conversation, which in turn makes them feel open with you, which allows you to understand their process from their perspective and what might cause them to switch products or what might make them stay with the product or why they cancel something very cool.

Well, with some shows an excEllent book. I think there is plenty of reason to to read IT. I think the calling up books like this is there's always going to be set subset of people who aren't sure they should talk to customers and they're not sold on that and they going to do things the wrong way.

And there's always going to be some subset of people who are completely sold that they should be doing this and they just need like the offender guide to do IT well. And I think your book is the defensive guy doing a well and these tactics about empathetic conversations are applied pretty much any conversations even outside of talking to customer. So I hope people read the the book.

Um we didn't get as much time to go into your code, your story of geo coding as much as I would love to you maybe in a future of facit. But you've done a lot. I mean, you're been a founder.

You've written a book. You've to view thousands and thousands of customers yourself. What would your parting advice be for andy? Hackers who are just getting started. What's one thing you'd want them to take away from your learnings in your journey that might help them on theirs?

Don't be afraid to be wrong, I would say. And and follow what you are passion ate about. I think people are afraid of being wrong.

They're afraid that maybe they build the wrong product or they're solving pum, something that people don't care about or that other that that this isn't going to sort of make their dream come true about you being financially dependent or what not. You don't have to stay at all on one thing in the beginning, and it's okay to be wrong. It's OK to change directions.

It's OK to pivot. It's oao mic changes. It's okay for other people to introduce ideas to you, but keep following that thing that you're passionate about, whatever IT is, and be open to what other people are saying, but let yourself be wrong. It's okay.

Don't be afraid to be wrong. But so, hanson, thanks so much for coming on the inDiana's podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Where can people go to find your book to point empathy? And where they can they go to find other things are working on online as well.

So deploy empathy that the print version is available from amazon. Uh, you can find other versions available from the book's website. Deploy empathy dot com.

You can also sign up for the deploy empathy newsletter there. Um you can also you can still see all of the rough drafts I wrote the book in public as a newspaper. You can see them all there.

You can also find me on twitter at M G W. hanson. And of course I have my my own, a weekly podcast that I cohoes with college deler called software social.

right? Thanks gonna show.