How to Achieve Product-Market Fit and Empower Startups by Lindsay Tabas by Kazuki Nakayashiki

How to Achieve Product-Market Fit and Empower Startups by Lindsay Tabas

Kazuki Nakayashiki

Nov 1, 2024 11:07 PM

Summary

Introduction to Lindsay Tabas (00:01 - 00:30): Lindsay Tabas, an innovation catalyst and digital storyteller, is the founder of LearnProductMarketFit.com and host of the Make Sense podcast. With a background in engineering, she has over a decade of experience in Silicon Valley and New York City, helping startups achieve product-market fit.
Inspiration Behind LearnProductMarketFit (01:31 - 05:15): Lindsay started LearnProductMarketFit to address the gaps in existing startup methodologies, highlighting the importance of understanding customer needs over personal ideas. She emphasizes that many startup resources lack practical ways to engage with customers for feedback.
Foundational Concepts (05:47 - 09:22): Lindsay distinguishes product-market fit from an inflection point, explaining that it can be measured at all stages of a startup's journey. The initial focus should be on identifying a major problem (problem value fit) and determining if people are willing to pay for a solution.
Advice on Market Research (09:58 - 12:26): She recommends using platforms like Reddit for market research to identify common problems and the effectiveness of existing solutions. Engaging in qualitative research through interviews can provide deeper insights in addition to forum observations.
Challenges of Visionary Founders (16:57 - 21:40): Lindsay warns against the dangers of the visionary founder myth, pointing out that successful entrepreneurs often face numerous failures before success. She emphasizes the significance of data-driven decisions rather than relying solely on individual visions.
Product-Market Fit Metrics (22:05 - 26:34): Lindsay explains that her framework for product-market fit includes various benchmarks, focusing on user engagement and emotional connection to the problem rather than traditional metrics like retention, especially in early-stage startups.
Traits of Successful Founders (27:44 - 32:06): Successful entrepreneurs exhibit traits like continuous learning, focus, and the willingness to take risks. Lindsay stresses the importance of seeking feedback, having a structured plan, and maintaining focus to avoid burnout and resource exhaustion in startups.

Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Glass Talk. Today, we are excited to have Lindsay Tabas with us. Lindsay is an innovation catalyst and digital storyteller, renowned for her work as the founder of LearnProductMarketFit.com and the host of the Make Sense podcast. With a rich background in engineering and technology from the University of Virginia and UC Berkeley, she spent over a decade in Silicon Valley and New York City,

where she wore every hat from understanding customer needs to guiding engineers in building the right products. As a product market fit expert, Lindsay has helped over 75 pre-seed and seed startups shape their visions into real products. She also mentors founders and evaluates startups on behalf of major VCs and accelerator leaders like Techstars. Today, we will dive into her journey and insights on building successful startups,

achieving product market fit, and also the future of innovation. Thank you for joining Lindsay today. Thank you so much for having me. That was a great introduction. Thank you. Thank you. First of all, you've been running LearnProductMarketFit for over a decade. We want to know what inspired you to start that. Also, was there any specific moment or event that triggered your decision to launch it? Interesting.

I want to keep my journey simple. I've been in tech. I designed my first user interface in 2002. It was human factors, human-computer interaction, everything about how technology enables humanity. That was what brought me to this industry and to my career. I spent the first 10 years working on teams at startups and enterprise software companies, wearing every hat between what the customers say and what the engineers build.

I found that there were a lot of clashes when I insisted that we talk to our customers, that we talk to our users, that we design based on what they want, not based on what we want. There was a lot of friction and a lot of trouble for me to advocate on behalf of the human part of technology as a solution. It was so bad and challenging that it actually made me feel like maybe I was wrong and I was not cut out for the industry.

Indeed, when I left San Francisco at the end of 2009, I had a tail between my legs, thinking I wasn't cut out for this industry. The industry evolved a little more over the coming years. 2005 to 2010, there wasn't a role for user experience designers. If you weren't a software developer, you weren't getting hired at a startup with 200 people or less. You had to be a software developer. It evolved 2010 to 2014.

UX designer became something people were looking for. I came back into the work world excited. But the challenges were still there, the same challenges. So when I set out on my own, I'm passionate about designing technology for people, designing technology to support well-being and humanity. And that's not just lip service. That's not just marketing words. That's how I go about building and designing software and solutions.

And I wanted to enable more founders to do that correctly, right? Most founders are all reading Lean Startup and Traction. And there are not step-by-step instructions in those books of how to really talk to people and listen to what they say. And there aren't step-by-step instructions in those books or in any accelerator. You mentioned, like, I have experience with Techstars, both 2014 and 2022 and 2023.

They don't have any content that is teaching founders how to say, these are all the things I heard. These are the things that are worth paying attention to right now. And here is how we can go about designing features to meet those needs. So I set out to empower founders who wanted to solve real people problems with the skills, tools, and resources to do that. And it just so happens that it's more lean and efficient and faster and cheaper if you listen to your customers rather than, you know,

throw your own ideas at the wall and build stuff hoping something you put out there someone likes. So that's the origin story of Learn Product Market Fit. Really just trying to help more founders orient towards their customers and their users. I see. And then you've helped, you know, over, I think around, you know, 100, you know, preceding seed startups so far, right? And what is, you said, you know, the product, you know, you teach step-by-step product market fit, but what is the starting point?

Can you briefly share, you know, what you teach in the program or course? Yeah. So the first thing is product market fit is not an inflection point. It's often talked about as an inflection point. Like we will achieve product market fit and then we will go on to do other things. Product market fit, this idea that whatever you offer meets customer expectation, can be measured at every single stage of a startup's journey.

Okay? At the earliest of stages, you just have an idea. You have an idea for a solution. You have an idea of what that problem is. And we need to figure out what I call problem value fit, right? What is the major problem you want to solve? And are there people willing to pay money to have that problem solved? Okay? So actually, the first two fits of my framework are founder problems. So why is this problem so exciting to you?

And the second two, people will pay to have you solve it. And those two fits don't require any solutions or software or anything. Because if there is a problem people really want solved and you tell them, I'm thinking about solving this problem, they will talk to you. So that's where you start. I see. Yeah. I think for some developers, you know, as a developer, usually, you know, like, if the founders are developing, they dive into building product and assuming, having an assumption that, oh, maybe people want this one, you know.

But it turns out, you know, later, like three months later, it turns out, oh, this was wrong. And they spend a lot of time. The number one reason startups fail is that they launch to no market need. That means that they built a product, and when they launched it, there were no customers for it, and they had to close because they ran out of money. So they spent all their money building products based on their own ideas without validating the market before they launched.

That's the number one reason startups fail. Go to CB Insights. They will tell you that. And so it's a natural human compulsion. Like, working on a solution is exciting. Sitting with a problem sucks. Like, there's so much anxiety around sitting with a problem. But there's this great quote from Albert Einstein. He said, it's not that I'm much smarter than you. I just spent more time with the problem. Right? So if you sit with a problem that you're trying to solve, you often will find what I call the most valuable problem, the real MVP.

It's this underlying problem that, if solved, will make all the little problems go away. And then you look for the customers that are so interested in solving that problem, feel the pain so much, that they've tried all the other solutions, and they don't like all the other solutions out there. They're potentially trying to figure out a solution for themselves. They're hacking together something that works for them.

That's who you find first. And that's kind of the first market that you need to find to match the problem to know that you're on the right track. Interesting. But how do you think, like, how do you crystallize the problem so it's enough to dive in? Like, you know, how do you make the problem clear so that, you know, we can work on any framework or any techniques? Yeah, sure. So the best place to get started on a problem is probably Reddit.

It's the most popular. Underrated market research tool. If you go to any of these subreddits that are focused on specific problem areas, there's plumbing, there's heating, there's pregnant women, there's so many different types of customer segments you can explore. You can see it on Reddit, you can see it in Facebook groups. You see what people are talking about the most, right? What are the problems people are asking about over and over and over and over again, right? Then you look at what

the solutions people are offering. And in the solutions, you see what's working for people and what's not working for people. If there's no one on Reddit asking questions about this problem, this problem probably isn't that big of a deal, right? So, that's the easiest place to start. But we don't want to just start there and then build a whole company off of that. We really want to understand what these people are doing, thinking and feeling when they experience the

problem, where they turn to first to find a solution. Because where they turn to first to find a solution is where we want to meet them when we eventually have a product to market to them. There's so many things that we want to learn, so we also want to pair that with interviews. So, the general structure that I advocate for and have resources for on LearnProductMarketFit.com is to do both the research of hanging out in these forums and then pair that with interviews

so that you can validate your insights. I think most founders jump to doing surveys, but surveys while feeling easy are actually far more complex and harder to do. And you're much more likely to get false positives and false negatives if you don't do the research, the qualitative research first, which is what I'm talking about in online forums and interviews. Yeah, that totally makes sense.

And yeah, as you mentioned, Reddit is like most underrated, platform to find a product. Underrated market research tool. Guys, I have an entire guide on how to use Reddit to do research observations. Yeah, and so when you come up with problems, so maybe you can find a solution. So, if you have multiple solutions, how do you think this is the best solution to work on it? Because for one program, there are multiple solutions, right? Yeah. Okay. So, this is like, we're going to get kind of technical.

But you have a ton of solutions to a single problem. At an early stage, a startup is like a Rubik's cube because there's the customer, there's your skill set and your passions. There's the problem, there's whatever resources and money you have, and you're twisting them in different directions to see what lines up, right? So, the best idea for the first solution is to look at how people are solving the problem now and just make it a little bit better.

So, an example that I like to use that's pretty easy is let's talk about people making beer in their garage. In the 90s, it was a very small community. People were DIYing their own homebrew kits, looking at instructions from decades prior to figure out how to build their own kit, right? And they're probably on different chat forums in the 90s trading with other hyper obsessed cult like people on this issue. Then it gets really, really popular in the late 90s and early 2000s.

And there starts to be a group of people that want to join this micro brew homebrew community, but it's too much effort. They can't. It's too much effort for them to figure it out on their own. So, someone says, oh, I'm going to take the best of best of best of all of the DIY homebrew kits and I'm going to package it in a way that makes it easier for the next group of people to join this movement, to join this circle, right? So, if you find these early, what I call early

evangelists, the ones that feel the problem so much, they've tried every solution. They're basically building their own solution because they haven't found anything they like, but they're willing to talk to you because maybe you can do it a little bit better. Your next step is to look at what they're doing and make it a little bit better. That's the easiest place to start on the solutions app. Yes.

Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. Totally sense. Yeah. It's different once the product evolves. Once the product evolves and you have clear customer personas, you're going to have a primary persona and a secondary persona and you're going to look at what their actual needs are and then which features make both people happy, which features only make one user happy, but that's once you really have a product that you can iterate on.

To get to the first product, you just want to look at what people are doing for themselves and how you can make it a little bit better. I see. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And then, at the same time, sometimes I see visionary founders build a market, create a market, right? Meaning, I think, such as Snapchat or BDL or those consumer products. So, I think there are two kinds of types of approaches to product market fit.

One is, as you mentioned, like a market gives you the product idea. Another is like a vision, the founder's vision, create market, like a Snapchat or BDL, especially we see these things in consumer product. What do you think about these two types of visionary founders and also, as you mentioned, like finding product for a problem first, then looking for, you know, like find the solutions, you know, iterate to reach better solutions?

Yeah. So, the visionary founder approach is not something that you can plan. You cannot follow a process. There's no way to re-engineer how this person did the thing they did. They are not the norm, right? It's not the norm. And it's also kind of dangerous because it does fall under the creator entrepreneurial myth. People talk about Steve Jobs like this. People talk about Henry Ford like this.

Neither of them just thought of an idea and built a market, okay? The history books have it. Henry Ford was on the verge of closing after multiple times of the prototypes not working and the runway running out and not being able to get investors to fund him again, multiple times before he had the Model T, right? Steve Jobs, he didn't just like put his finger in the air and invent the iPod and the iPhone. These technologies existed at Xerox PARC. They existed in public and academic research. People were already listening to portable music.

There were MP3s that already existed before the iPod, right? So, it's actually a myth. And I say it's dangerous because our egos that believe that we can be successful entrepreneurs, and we have to have egos, we have to be confident, they also are scared to hear negative feedback and put their stuff out there. So, if we can come up with this really beautiful dream that I can be a visionary and change the way the world is going and make a market, my ego is going to buy into that, right?

I'm going to buy into that. And instead of talking to any strangers, instead of doing any research or any validation at all, I'm going to sink 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, 150,000 into a prototype and put this out there. And then the number one reason started. is that there is no market need. So that is why it is dangerous. You cannot re-engineer it. You cannot recreate it. It's all based on luck. And this industry thrives on telling that story over and

over and over again. But take a step back. Now I'm going on a little diatribe because it's something that makes me angry. Virtual reality. Metaverse. It's all we talked about in 2022, right? Not talking about it anymore. Why? Because virtual reality still hasn't found a major application for mass adoption, right? 2004, I did a project on virtual reality. I coded in virtual reality modeling language, right? So there are these stories that our industry tells that

portrays some person as a visionary for the metaverse that they're going to create some market. But this technology has been around for over 20 years and it still hasn't found mass adoption. You could say the same about blockchain and crypto. They still haven't found mass adoption. But we keep telling this story that we can be visionaries that change the world. It's dangerous. That's it's dangerous. That's how I feel about it.

I see. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying it. And yeah, yeah, really convincing. And by the way, I'm curious how do you define product market fit in that case, you know, you iterate ideas and so on, you know, some people say retention matters or some people say like a Sean Ellis test says, you know, let's say if you ask, you know, 100 people and 40% of people say, you know, I would really regret if I lost access to your product or

something like that. In your program, what do you, how do you, what's your definition of product market fit and how do you teach it to people? So I go back again to product market fit is not an inflection point and it's not something that we can wait to measure until the product is built and until there are customers using it. So retention models, net promoter score. These are all things for products that already have

customers. Okay, we don't have that at the early stages. And most companies who talk about product market fit and are aiming for product market fit don't have that ability, right? They just don't have the number of users to measure those scores. So my product market framework, the innovation framework has benchmarks for where you are in every stage. Founder problem, problem value, value prototype, prototype pilot,

pilot growth. Okay. So at each stage and sophistication of your product, there is a different measure for what product market fit means. Okay. So if problem value is, hey, I have found these early evangelists that are so keen on me solving this problem that they're willing to brainstorm with me. They're willing to spend time with me. They're not asking to get paid for a user interview because they are in, they want to solve this problem.

So that's your first kind of benchmark, problem value. And then value prototype is your ability to provide value through whatever that first solution is. It might not be sticky, but you run it through user testing and usability testing. You're able to talk about your value propositions and people opt-in for your launch list or your newsletter because you're able to connect with them emotionally about the problems they want solved and the aspirations that they have

for themselves. And you guys have a product out on the market. You know that understanding the emotions and aspirations and talking about problems. The marketing stuff that is so easy for engineers to dismiss is probably the thing that will make or break your product's success. Right? So why not do it early before you sink tens of thousands of dollars into software development? Can you launch? This is why a survey is important, doing it later.

Can you launch a survey? A survey is just like a landing page, right? You guys have a landing page. You want to get early opt-ins. You want to go to investors. You want to say we have 2,000 people on our waitlist. What is a landing page? It's a page full of value propositions, convincing people to give you information. Right? What is a survey? There are value propositions about a problem that needs to get solved and you are collecting information for them.

So if you can run a survey and hit, and I define this in the Labs program, Labs is the name of the program that's up at LearnProductMarketFit.com. I define metrics of how many people you want to fit that early evangelist description versus how many people you want to take that survey so that you can have decent insights. But if you can't convince more than 20 of your early evangelists, that tiny little group, to take

your survey, then you're still a little far off in conceptualizing what the problem and solution is. Okay, so I'm not going to go through the entire framework. I do have a Product Market Fit ebook where I lay out the benchmarks for each of these innovation benchmarks, each of the kind of how I define Product Market Fit at each of those stages. I'm happy to share that link. People can download the ebook. Everything is there.

I want to share it. I do. I want to share it with everyone. So go there to learn more about those different benchmarks. Thank you. By the way, I downloaded your ebooks about, you know, Learn Product Market Fit and that's really helpful. And I think I will put the link in the description. Yeah. So you did like it? Yeah, I really like it. Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Great. So awesome. Yeah, and I think you've seen many startups so far in your

program and also outside program. And what is a trait or personality or, you know, common things you find in like a people. I think, you know, some startups do well, some startups, you know, not doing well or something like that. And what have you found like in successful team or founders? What's the traits, you know, they Yeah, open-minded, you know, Yeah, I'm just curious about their traits. There's no like perfect makeup, right?

There's no perfect makeup. I think that there are certain things that help someone be successful as an entrepreneur and founder. One, leaders are learners. So just continuous learning and improvement. Like if you just start every day admitting that you don't know that much and other people can tell you a lot more than you know, then that's going to help you continue to look for opportunities to be a better, to build your skills and and not

just your actual little skills, but your management skills. I took workshops like that and I have people that have worked for me for five, six years, never having been a manager full-time because I opted in to wanting to learn how to do it. Well, so leaders are learners. I like to go to something my dad always said to me, which was in order to be outstanding, you have to be willing to stand out. So entrepreneurship for sure the fastest path to self-knowledge

is being an entrepreneur because you have to continually do things that scare you and standing out can be very scary. I find that a lot of founders have challenges with my framework about going to talk to users and putting surveys out there before they have a product because they want to hide behind their product. Right? They want they want they're too scared to put themselves out there and and to do the marketing again, like marketing scares

the crap out of most founders. So that's why I challenge them to do it first because if they don't have they don't have the guts to do it, you know now they're not going to they're really not going to have the guts to do it later and I've seen that and I think the other thing and I have a video on YouTube that where I talk about this, but the number one challenge for founders is focus. Actually, I have a little plate and it says, Focus on Focus.

I made it for my clients a couple years ago for the holidays. And it's one of the New Year's resolutions that really changed things for me, like in 2016, Focus on Focus. We hear so much feedback and insights from people, and we don't know which ones to pay attention to. And then some of that feedback makes us feel very, very insecure. And then we think that maybe we're wrong and we need to change our entire plan.

And then we start to take on too many projects and don't have enough time to finish anything. And we exasperate and exhaust all of our resources. And then the startup fails for something like the pivot, a pivot gone bad, or they ran out of cash or something like that. So I think the ability for someone to create a plan and as rigorously as possible, stick to that plan is really helpful. And to get there, you probably also need to have advisors. And they don't have to be informal, but informal advisors that you can talk to and review your plans with

that will help you get past any confusion that's leading you to focus or leading you to not have any focus and be working on way too many things. I worked for a startup once who raised like $30 million Series C round and then started closing down within six months because the CEO just had seven priorities that he wouldn't make one more important than the other. And you can't do that. You need to find your focus and you need to prioritize. Yeah, focus and prioritization.

That's what we've been thinking. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I want that freight or something. So you give it four days to funders in your cohort, so focus on focusing. It's like, can I buy it? Can I get it? You want one of these? Why not? I love that suggestion. I'm putting more and more stuff on learnproductmarketfit.com. Actually, what I'm doing right now is breaking up a lot of the guides and resources from labs.

So labs, the program on Learn Product Market Fit in its original or latest form, it's a six-month program with 21 chapters, guides, templates, et cetera. For a whole other conversation, that program didn't scale to growth. It kind of hit a point where it wasn't as a business worth me running and scaling more. But what I'm doing is breaking up all of the content into smaller bundles and putting them on the website.

So you can download just the resources around using Reddit for research or just the resources around creating a really good survey to validate your problem and get feedback on your solutions or just on onboarding new users, you know, the transition from when someone learns about your product to creating a user account. So I have resources for each of those things. I'm going to be putting them on the website. So maybe I can put these on the website too. Thank you.

I wish it was a little cleaner so I could really show it to you guys, but you can see focus on focus. Yeah. Yeah. I see. I can read it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. So, yeah. By the way, you know a lot about product market fit. So you experience like so many things in product. So I looked into your profile page and so say like you have experience in being an entrepreneur or founder, but so with like much information and knowledge,

so you've gotten so far about product management, so you don't have any like opportunity to start a startup again. Are you asking me if I'm going to start my own startup? Yeah. Why don't you start your startup again? I love that. I love that question. It's actually one of the things I learned about myself being an entrepreneur and self-employed for the last 11 years.

So I just said earlier that being an entrepreneur requires facing your fears and learning a lot about what you like and what you don't like. I learned that I am not the type of person to run a product team. So I played every role, product manager, user researcher, you know, UX designer. I've done some front-end engineering, business analysis work. I've done all of the roles on the product team and I always was very stressed. Like once I was done the designs going through the sprint planning meetings and being there for software developers to support

them, going through these iterations and seeing some of my designs like morph and change and not really for the better and realize that like I don't have the temperament for that. I don't have the patience for that. So on a tactical level, like my skill set, I'm an activator. I get people from zero to one. I'm probably the best person to think out, like do the research and think out the whole idea and put the plans together, but I'm not going to give it to someone

else to run with, right? So one, it's temperament and skill set. The other thing is that my passion, the problem I want to solve and my problem founder, founder problem fit is enabling and empowering other people to do better in connecting with the human part of the problem that they're solving. Everyone, not just engineers and technical people, everyone avoids the subjective people part of a problem. Everyone wants to be like I have a problem.

Here's the technology to solve it, but we've been doing that for well over 20 years and we can see a lot of places where that is not working, particularly people at their jobs, right? If you think about enterprise software at work, your CFO adds one more solution, your CTO adds one more solution, and it's like this isn't the thing that's going to solve the problem. That's because we're not looking at the people side, right? The people side, people are subjective. We can't predict them.

We can't make assumptions that they're all going to act the same way all the time. They're going to figure out the 1% edge case scenario that ruins the entire solution and engineer design, right? But that's the key to success. That's the key to lasting change. That's the key to figuring out whether virtual reality has been worth the past 20 years of investment or not is understanding the people part.

And in 2006, when I lived in San Francisco and I was still in graduate school, I went to a panel with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn. There's one other guy. He might have been from MySpace, and this is a neg at MySpace, but I don't remember who it was. But I asked Mark Zuckerberg, hey, when are you going to hire social scientists because you're changing the way that we communicate and connect with each other? Okay? And he dodged my question.

And Facebook didn't go on to hire any social scientists until 2010. And by that point, the DNA of that company was set. And how many problems has that company had with people, with the people part, with the human part over the past 15 years, 20 years, right? It's brought a lot of cool things, right? But it's also gone off the rails in a lot of other places too. So my passion is helping other people figure out the human subjective part of problem solving so that we can design the human experience into the future.

So that's why I'm not starting another app. Awesome. Yeah. Beautiful. Yes. And by the way, I'm curious about startup, the joint program. After the program, you said it's a six-month program and then you teach them things step-by-step. Then after six months, what's the usual path to the startups? Will they raise money? Assume they find a product market or reach into product market and what's their path? And yeah, do you keep in touch with them?

Oh, yeah. I do keep in touch with them. I think once I start cheering for someone, I don't stop cheering for them. It's very unique and specific to each one of them. I have some stats on my LinkedIn profile about the ones that went on to raise money, but not everyone building a tech startup wants to raise money, right? And my program has a lot of components that you need to think through in order to survive due diligence with

an investor, but it is not specifically geared to exiting the program and raising money. My whole philosophy is that if you have customers, raising money is easy, but if you don't have customers, raising money is hard. So, I teach you how to have customers, right? So, of the founders that have gone on to raise, one of them actually just exited a few months ago. Unfortunately, some of them closed.

Some of them have, I think, the total raised, I really don't keep track. Honestly, six and a half, seven and a half million or so more. And a lot of my founders, I think the most proud thing is the first version of that program was in 2017. And all of my founders' businesses from 2017 are still alive. So, that's really the proudest stat because I put a lot of weight on my own personal flexibility and freedom. I don't want to work for anyone else. I don't want to have to get approval to go to a dentist appointment.

And I want to work on things that I want to work on. So, if I can enable people not just to connect with their customers, but to build the skill sets that keep them in business for a long time for themselves, that makes me feel amazing. So, it really depends on who the founder is that has come out of the program. They might raise, they might hire software developers, they might continue to iterate on their prototypes, build something sustainable.

Some of them learn that they don't need to build technology to make the business that they wanted to make. That's really, yeah. So, awesome. And so, this is a little bit different topic, but we want to know about your, how do you get knowledge and experience? So, you mentioned you went through so many careers and huts over time, but how do you keep the information or experience? Do you use any note-taking app or you keep a diary so that you can remember information?

And yeah, I'm curious about your knowledge management system or any productivity tools you use to keep your knowledge and experience. Yeah, there's so many ways I could go with this question. I do use Evernote, so I never really upgraded to Notion or anything like that. So, I do use Evernote and I've been using it for 12 years. So, that's one area where I keep notes when it comes to, I use both Dropbox and Google Drive.

In 2016, I told you I'm a big proponent of continuous learning and improvement. I took a one-day seminar on managing multiple projects and priorities, and with that came some tips on organizing systems, and I did spend the time to kind of set that up. So, I have pretty rigorous organizing systems on both Google Drive, Dropbox, and my desktop to easily find information that I need, and knowledge. I use Evernote primarily, one of the ways I use it is for email templates.

So, if you are doing enough networking, as I'm sure you reached out to me, there's kind of a template that you want to use over and over and over again. I use those. I have archives of all different types of email templates that I want to use, so I don't have to ever recreate the wheel. And then, I know you had a kind of similar question around ideas, but where I keep ideas is a separate conversation. If you want to have, there's knowledge and there's ideas.

Knowledge, I just explained where I put all of that. How about ideas? How about ideas? So, one of my core strengths is ideation. My friends have called me a power generator of ideas. I am always thinking of ideas. I think of more ideas than I can keep up with. I cannot write them all down, and the challenge is if I write some of them down, I start to look at them as items on my to-do list and not items that are just ideas to consider.

So, what I like to say is that if it's really a good idea, it will come up over and over and over again, and I'll translate this to any entrepreneurs, any founders, any product managers. If you hear a user say something and you're like, oh, that's a good idea, one, you should wait until at least three other people say that idea before taking any action. So, it's one person's opinion. Two people say it's a coincidence. Three people say it's a theme.

Yeah, so if that idea is really that great, it will come up over and over and over again. Recently, I launched a series of reaction videos to Silicon Valley HBO. I've had that idea since like a decade ago. You know, I've had that idea for a long time and never knew where it fit in, but it kept coming up over and over again, and then in this summer, someone brought something up and gave me some advice, and I was like, oh, now it's time for that idea.

All that being said, is that I do have, like, I have a folder on my desktop called ideas that some things are in. Sometimes I realize I'm working on a project and it's not important, so I drag it into the ideas folder, and sometimes, you know, in companion to my active to-do list, I have a section that just says ideas. I rarely look at it. I really rarely look at it because I generate so many ideas all the time.

I can't keep up, and it becomes quite overwhelming to look at all my ideas. Yeah, that's an interesting way to organize ideas, and yeah, and also knowledge, and then how about, you know, like AI tools, you know, do you use any AI tools to for, let's say, brainstorming, ideation, or as you mentioned, like a template, you know, because nowadays, you know, people, many people using touch video. Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. So, like I said, I'm a big proponent of templates.

I had a past intern ask me to write him a recommendation for graduate school. I just go to chatGPT and ask for a template of what a recommendation letter looks like. I would never let chatGPT write something for me, but it gives me a starting point. It's the same as how I learn new things and how I figure out how to do new things. I usually go to the internet. I might go to chatGPT now, but sometimes I also want to browse, but I look for people that have spelled out how they've gone about things,

so that I can create a process that I can follow for myself, and so I will go to chatGPT and be like, what are great, what are all the components of a great creative brief, you know, and it will spit that out for me. I use chatGPT and Google Gemini differently. I find Google Gemini gives a lot better feedback on writing, so if I'm looking for suggestions on how to improve a LinkedIn post or article or improve an email or bio, Gemini will reproduce and make it better,

but it will also give you bullet points on what it did and why it did that, so that you can improve as a writer, and I like that over chatGPT. I think sometimes chatGPT takes a lot more liberty. With rewriting what I've said and then the tone of voice is very different than my intentions. I also use Grammarly, but I haven't really gotten into AI image generation. I've found that every time I've gone to different tools to try to create stuff,

it's a lot harder. The prompting is a lot harder than you would think it have to be to make it happen, or at least for what I'm looking for. And then I think AI is embedded in so many places, we can't get away from it, so I'm probably using it in a lot of other places that I have no idea that it's even AI at that point. I'm just curious how AI will change product management, product flows, or finding or reaching to product-market fit.

Do you have any ideas on this? Well, I just recently heard a good idea in terms of brainstorming problems and understanding problems that you can prompt your chat GPT to play a role as your target customer and then have a conversation with it. I think that's really interesting because there are so many processes and frameworks within a startup's journey, not just defining the original problem and figuring out what the solution is, but in marketing, in voice of customer, in all types of activities you need

to start with, what is your customer's problem? And every activity doesn't require five months of research or even more than a day of research, right? And so I like the idea of maybe being able to use AI tool to talk to your customer and to create hypotheses about your customer that you go out and prove. I have concerns because, as I said, plenty of people will cut corners when it comes to talking to actual people.

And I am afraid that doing that, they'll think that they're doing research, but founders and innovators are already really bad at talking to customers and listening to other opinions. So to advise them to go use chat GPT as a way to avoid talking to real people, I feel like it is not in our best interest, not in the future's best interest. I have thoughts on AI in general. I call myself a pragmatic futurist because just because a technology exists doesn't mean that it's

going to have mass adoption, doesn't mean it's going to have mass impact. Again, still figuring out what to do with blockchain, still figuring out what to do with autonomous vehicles. They're not quite safe just yet. Still figuring out what to do with virtual reality. This industry loves to project all the crazy cool things that could happen. The reality is that human behavior and adoption is the real defining element of whether technology has an impact or

not. And specifically with AI, I think one of the biggest challenges in having an impact is the fact that in most places in our worlds, think healthcare, financial systems, government systems, the data is terrible. The data is really, really, really bad. So AI might help with small problems and small solutions, but there's not enough electricity and power grids in the world to help a Fortune 500 company figure out what that 1970s Cobalt system is doing that is

supporting their entire business. And so I think when it comes to solving really big problems, I don't know that AI is going to have the massive impact that visionaries are predicting. Very interesting. Yeah. Is that controversial? I don't know. I like this idea. I like it. Yeah. So this is kind of like a second last question, but thank you for sharing all the insights and experiences, but do you have some advice to startup founders in pre-seed seed round?

You already shared some advice, but do you have anything? I have hundreds of videos on my YouTube channel. You can search playlists by marketing, customer research, product management, design, fundraising, anything you want to know about for startup founders on the tactical, practical side. You want to learn anything, I will point you in the right direction on YouTube. I think what I said about leaders are learners, and if you want to be outstanding, you have to be willing to stand

out. It's huge having advisors so that you get out of your own head. And the other thing that I mentioned I think is really important, a lot of founders think that fundraising will solve their problems, but it often creates more problems than they had originally. If you chase your customers and get customers, fundraising will be easier. But if you think that you can't do any of that until you fundraise, you are going to create more problems for yourself.

And there's plenty of stories out there for you to go learn about the problems that are created by fundraising when you are not ready, or you don't have a business that's worth fundraising. All of it. I'm glad I got you laughing. Yeah, 100%. And I found a really interesting tweet by Michael Siebel recently, and he posted, oh, our company has a problem, no product market fit. So the only solution for us is to raise more money. Just in case we see some startups. And yeah, you mentioned the same thing.

Yeah, yeah. Venture capital works for certain types of businesses, but I don't think CB Insights will ever put on the top 20 reasons startups fail this reason, but prioritize fundraising when they absolutely shouldn't have. That's how you run out of money. Yes. I think we should watch this video again and again, more than 100 times. I love that. Hey. Yeah, with a play of saying focus on focusing. Yeah, for sure.

Focus on focusing. Yeah, thank you for that. So, okay, this is the last question. Since Grassroots is a platform where people can share what they're reading and learning with others as their digital legacy, and we want to ask you what legacy or impact do you want to leave behind for the future generations? Yeah. So there are two things. One is going to be the fundamental orientation towards people and designing the human experience into the future.

So the more awareness and problem solving, and I want to say elevate the way we innovate. The way we solve problems in corporate America and in startups is still failing us. So if I can help more people, particularly non-technical professionals, understand the landscape and empower them to thrive in a new, in our technical world, that's a big thing. The other thing, which is secondary, is just like, I'd love to redefine what an engineer looks like. My commitment, my passion isn't women in STEM.

But I don't think that more women will go into STEM until there are more women like me that are willing to be visible, you know, create content and put their opinions out there. So that's kind of like the secondary legacy is, you know, taking up that avatar persona and pop culture of like what a woman engineer can be like and it doesn't have to be nerdy or geeky or awkward.

Hopefully, she can be a good conversationalist and make people laugh and still share really important information. Yeah, I see. Really beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you so much for all the insights and knowledge, you know, sharing with us. Yeah, of course. This is great. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

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How to Achieve Product-Market Fit and Empower Startups by Lindsay Tabas

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