What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from Andy Hackers.com, and you're listening to the

IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses,

and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are today?

How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. Now, one thing I want to do on the podcast a little bit more often going forward, including in this episode is to bring on subject matter experts. People who are really good at a particular

thing so they can share

their knowledge with all of us. Today, that expert is Rob Fitzpatrick. Rob is a serial entrepreneur

and a Y Combinator alumnus. He's also a software engineer and a sales expert. And he is perhaps

most famously known for being

the author of a book called The Mom Test, which is kind of the definitive guide for how to

talk to your customers effectively as a founder. Rob and I were already mid-conversations,

so I'm just going to jump in where we left off. But if you find this episode useful and

you like to see me interview more experts, feel free to ping me on Twitter. I'm at CS Allen and send me some suggestions. Without further ado, Rob Fitzpatrick. Okay, why should founders care about talking to their customers? Why is it even something they should be spending time on? So before I answer that, which I will, I just want to say that there's two parts of this. There's two challenges you got to deal with. There's the kind of the willingness or the emotional challenge. Like, yes, I'm going to do this. I'm going to engage in this scary way with strangers or almost strangers. Or I'm going to expose my idea. And then the other part of it is like the actual hands on skill of running these conversations properly and asking good questions. You know, you need to be willing to get

out there, but that's not enough because if you go out there like I did, I tried so hard, you know, I was miserable. I wanted to be coding, but I was like, I have to do this for my team, for my investors, for myself. It's like two years, full time. All I did was talk to customers, and I was so miserable. And then we went out of business anyway, and I was pissed off, right? because I'm like, man, like, if I get to suffer this much, I wanted to at least work.

And what I eventually learned, you know, leading into my next company is like, you got to do it right. You know, these conversations can easily go off track and just trying to talk to, like not all feedback is good feedback. That's an important thing to realize. We'll talk about how to do it properly, I'm sure. As for why it's going to benefit you and why it's worth overcoming these

learning programs, is good feedback. That's an important thing to realize. We'll talk about how to do it properly, I'm sure. As for why it's going to benefit you and why it's worth overcoming these learning

curves, emotional and skill, it's that it ends up acting like a programming superpower. For example,

early in my first company's history, we kept building features based on market research or building

features based on strategy or intuition. And we might spend like four or six months building something. We'd launch it. People don't like it quite as much as we had hoped. That's a very expensive way to explore an idea space, right? Especially if you've got a team. I mean, even by yourself. And if you're working nights and weekends, like development is slow, right? So if you lose four months of development, that's such a setback. And it really clicked for me when I was

having a conversation with someone and I'm like, wow, that just saved me four months.

You know, this 30 minute conversation just saved me four months of development time. That's incredible.

And so that's when I started to get excited about it. Another piece that made me excited emotionally was when I realized that customers actually enjoy having these conversations if you do them respectfully. When I first started, I was in very much a sleazy salesman mode where it's like, I'm taking your time and you're getting nothing in return. Screw you. And that made me feel guilty because that wasn't the way I wanted to interact with strangers, you know, or my customers. And over time, I realized actually it's valuable for them as well. If it's the worst part of their day, they love talking about it. And over time, you build up this expertise and you can offer real value back to them in return just from your perspective on the problem, how other people are dealing with it. Another way it clicks, which is valuable, is you know, you've all launched like a landing page, right? And you're like, okay, do people want this? How am I going to market this? How am I going to get people to see this? Like, you try the product hunt. You try all this stuff. And it doesn't quite work, but you don't know why it didn't work. Like, is it the way you described the product, the copy, the value proposition, is that the way you built the website, is that the user experience of the app, it's very hard to debug that if you don't have any contact with the people. You can tell if it worked because you're rich, but when it hasn't worked, you don't know why it hasn't worked. Whereas if you're talking to people, you can figure all those things out before the launch. You know exactly what the tagline should be because the customers have told you. You're like, hey, why do you care so much about this? Why does this even matter to you? And they just tell you. And you go, okay, take that, put that exactly on my landing page. That's my value proposition. That's my advertising copy. That's my marketing

tagline. There's so much stuff you can figure out and it gives you a lot more confidence to

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