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hi everyone this is top of her mouth oh good and here's my good friend big big drama and I guess we're up to no good we are up to no good I really appreciate you having me on the show I've got my new book mechanized coming out any minute now and I'm very excited to talk about all of the ways in which I think or at least in my experience I have found that people can really take risk out of building and delivering new products to the world one of the best people my favorite people to talk about this he you know not only just a serial entrepreneur who've also helped advise and was an angel for many startups in the New York scene it's also nice like advisor for many Fortune 500 brands on this topic so we've seen it all and one of the best people I personally like to talk about when it comes to how to build a better products you know I really appreciate that but I firmly believe that with the right mindset and the right toolset anybody can take steps to pull risk off the table and increase the odds of their success in building and making something new make sense make sense then and this is like you know this takes us to you know my next question actually which is you know why this is important and I think you're touching on this a little bit here you know mitigated risk is really the game most founders and PCs are in it's like how you mitigate risk and really make sure that you're you know you get to the goal or the objectives or make your product actually succeed and be useful to people so you know why this why why do you think we did this you know you decided to publish this book at this point and why this matters so what's your perspective on it now it's a great question imagine a world in which nine out of ten teams working on this thing right now we're not going to face like a complete lack of success in the market said differently if these are all teams that are working on solving important problems for society maybe selfishly for me I want them to succeed I want to live in a world where more products are successful where more problems get solved I mean isn't that the sort of world any of us would want to live in I think that's why this is important yeah yeah absolutely it will you know I personally again I'm working on many products and helping many teams with different products and it will definitely make my life a lot better so selfishly is something that I really truly care about but again it's a world that we all want to live in more products that sexy and more useful products certainly and I think we live in this we live in such interesting times where more and more is possible both socially and technologically and I guess also I've only recently really had sort of the headspace and the time space to capture the stuff into a book that I guess I felt comfortable would be useful to enough people in the world this is the moment man I think this is the year that I hope more and more people get out there build something interesting for themselves and do it with success and if mechanize can help with that I'm all for it this is really insightful and again if we if we just end up proving the odds of of building useful successful products by a really small margin year I think the world you know it's going to improve many people's lives of this again tiny tiny percentage and increasing the other success is something that again we're all in the business office oh and look let's not forget millions of people millions of teams are trying to build something new right now 10% increase in success rate would be thousands of new products for us absolutely who wouldn't want that no no no and so let's jump right into it you know they tell me well what is the secret so my key insight has been that the single biggest part of nailing down a great start to a project has been in fully and firmly understanding your customer and there's a tool that I call customer assumptions and we're like really trying to document the things that we don't know about our customer and I used to do this by asking teams tell me all the things that they didn't know and predictably that went poorly who can tell you the things that they don't know and so what I've tried to do instead is focus on on what we do know perhaps what we really what we really truly believe and may not be true we said so founders don't know it all that's not true as founders we know nothing so so let's work on the things we know or more accurately the things that we really firmly believe and by capturing and acknowledging them as beliefs rather than as knowledge we open them up for testing and that's the first step there's a tool that I use that I've been calling customer mad lips and if you've ever done Mad Libs as a kid they work in exactly the same way there's a sentence and it has been battered down over the years to be as simple and elegant as possible that's got a couple blanks and if you can fill the blanks in the sentence you can get started on really testing what are the assumptions that you know and the ones that you don't know let's focus on the things we know and more accurately by capturing our knowledge as things that may not be true we open them up to testing and it's really in this testing that we allow ourselves to figure out where it is that we've got the most work to do where we've got the most risk to pull off the table and and really it's how you can capture something potentially fatal and turn it into something that you can really transform the future of a project with so here are the mad libs and so the way you would use this is you just just fill the gaps in my team assumes that customers who have these characteristics like here's how my customer looks and feels have this goal this is the goal that they want to get to we assume that today here's how they meet this goal what are they doing what are they buying are there other solutions whatever have you we assume that the problem with the skull is whatever the problem is that we're trying to fix maybe there's so many better ways it sucks somehow it's too expensive it's too painful whatever the case may be we capture the problem we and we assume that the product the customer is aware maybe they're aware maybe they're not aware is there an education hurdle that we have to get through and whether it is low medium or high severity like how painful of a problem is this really if you can fill in the sentence you're on your way so let's walk through an example this is definitely a company that that you've heard of and I'm sort of coming up with maybe if they were to have used this technique in early days what it might have sounded like so my team assumes that avid readers who live maybe in the Seattle area really want to find and read more books today they accomplish this goal we assume they accomplish this goal by going to their local bookstore and maybe even going to book shows or fairs maybe they even have a network of rare book dealers we believe that the problem with this current solution is local bookstores have limited selection not everyone has access to something like a book dealer and there's got to be a better way we believe that our early adopter is aware of this problem and that it's a pretty high severity problem for them we also believe that if we were to make it really easy to buy books maybe any book on the web in a simple ecommerce way that people would adopt that and that then maybe we could tell them more than just books Microsoft ya know what who else in the Seattle area I guess that is on I like the thing whether it's Microsoft and then we can give so give this a shot with what you're working on and maybe even leave it in the comments of this video you know one of the benefits of working on your projects in a step-by-step way and that's really what mechanized is about is about separating one step from another because it's so often to try and like try to do everything all at once one of the benefits of working on your project my step-by-step way is that you can break the steps apart and you can get them to be really good by themselves and in that way you link them up for a mint and that's really what that's really what this book is about is about trying to take this thing that seems so mystified demystify it deconstruct it break it down into small simple bite-sized bits that anybody can do I like that I like that a lot and you know I think the an example that you just gave is make this more concrete or compelling and and easily digestible were you know people like myself you know what else should we expect not to see in the book you know I personally know what's in the book was up a bridge the book was but what else should we expect you know for those who haven't read the book or haven't seen it what else you get there so mechanize really is about taking through all of these steps and that starts really with really capturing what we think we're working on is our customer really the right customer there's a couple exercises in which the book helps walk through that is the way that we are choosing to solve it have we identified the right problem it's like the problem solution pairing that we are working on in our product or service really good is it really right what are the ways and the tools in which we can use to test that when you're actually making the product are you making it the right way are you sequencing the features that you work on in the right order as of course you know every time you you add a new component or a new feature to a product whether it is a piece of software a piece of hardware service offering there's some risk and some cost associated and really what we want to do is try to work on those in the right order so that each time we learn something new from our customer from our market we're making the product or the service better and that's really what mechanized is about my hope that is what we are able to deliver for readers of the book and for those watching this video that's awesome and I really think make an eyes gave that you know giving it needs personally a new perspective and really like you know looking it's all your perspective on on seeing product market fit though may say and I think there's a ton of content on that out there that you can one of the most concrete and compelling ways to really understand prompt problem solution fit or as some might say you know product market fit so good Thank You Vic for being here and it's been a pleasure chatting with you thank you sir thank you very much thank you thank you all for tuning in today big thank you for being here and hopefully you can continue to get you awesome gifts such as a big fan to talk about you know awesome topics and something that would be useful to us and you as well and go by Nick nice thank you all