How to be a Scrappy Researcher (to Actually Sell Products) with Becky Pierson Davidson

 ”A lot of times we see people wanna say like, “Oh, would you buy this?” Or, “What do you think of this idea?” that’s so common. Like, Hey, I actually did a call with somebody last week who asked me, “Hey, can I pitch you my idea for my business? I’m getting customer feedback.” And so I was really curious about this and I was like, “Yes, let’s chat”, and I did this call. And they asked me, okay, here’s my product idea. And he like really pitched me on the whole thing. And he was like, I had done so many of these calls and I was like, this is like not the right way to do this because you don’t wanna pitch your idea or ask what do you think about this? Or would you buy this? You wanna say, tell me about the last time you solved this problem. Tell me about whatever challenges you have around X topic, because the stories are where the data is.” – Becky Pierson Davidson

Over the last few weeks, you’ve heard from multiple guests about the importance of research. Dappz talked about calculated risks and doing research for the actual calculation.

Nikki Rausch talked about speaking your potential customer’s language and the requirement to do research to learn that language.

Adriana told us to do research while we’re preparing to be a guest on a podcast. But that begs the question, how? How do we make sure we’re doing the right kind of research to yield helpful information or data especially if we’re not a huge company?

Well, we need to do scrappy research, which is why I brought my friend Becky Pierson Davidson onto the show. She’s an educator, speaker, and community driven product strategist who’s focused on helping people like us simplify our customer journey, improve retention, and increase customer lifetime value. And she’s got the receipts working with diverse clients, including personal brands, fortune 500 companies, creative service agencies, and startups. So I thought there was no better way to close out the year and this season than to talk to her about scrappy research.

Look for these top takeaways:

• Research prevents you from building the wrong thing.
• Launches that flop are usually launches that have no research backing them up.
• Don’t just build something for you. It’s not about you. Sure, some people will tell you to dog food your own product, but your business won’t survive if you are the only customer. And you want quantitative and qualitative research.
• Look at all of your analytics, see what content performs well, but also survey your audience and have real conversations with potential customers.
• You only need five to find a theme and a problem to solve.

Plus, in the pro show, Becky and I talk about creating a customer journey map, and for this episode, pro members do get the video so they can see what we’re talking about. If you want to sign up for that, you can join over at [streamlined.fm/join], or if you’re listening in Apple Podcasts, you can subscribe right in the app.

I love talking to Becky. I always love talking to Becky, and I know that this is going to be a hugely helpful conversation for you. So without further ado, let’s get to the intro and then the interview.

Intro: Hey, everybody. And welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps busy solopreneurs and creators grow their business without spending too much time on it. I’m your host, Joe Casabona. And each week, I bring you interviews and case studies on how to build a better business through smarter processes, time management, and effective content creation. It’s like getting free coaching calls from successful solopreneurs. By the end of each episode, you’ll have one to three takeaways you can implement today to stop spending time in your business and more time on your business, or with your friends, your family, reading, or however you choose to spend your free time.

Becky, how are you today?

Becky Davidson: I’m good. Thank you for having me on the show.

Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for coming on. I am so excited to have you on the show because we did, we got together in August with a couple of other people from a community we’re a part of, and we did like some IRL working stuff, which some of it we’re gonna talk about in the pro. I don’t usually promo the pro show this early on, but, wae’re gonna talk about the customer journey map in the pro show. So, if you want that, just go right now to [streamlined.fm/pro]. Or if you’re listening in Apple Podcasts, you could just press that subscribe button and subscribe right in the app ’cause that is going to be a great conversation.

However, Becky is here to talk about scrappy research. And if you’ve been listening to the show for the last few weeks, you’ve probably heard many people say, make sure you do your research, but we really never dug into how to do that research. So, Becky, let’s dive right into it. Why is research important?

Becky Davidson: Well, the number one reason is because you wanna make sure you don’t build the wrong thing, which it happens all the time. I mean, I think every single creator or founder can relate to building the wrong thing at some point. Like you launch something and it flops, or you think you have a great idea, like you’re in the shower and you’re like, oh, I know what I should do next. And you go and launch a sales page or a beta list or wait list, and then you launch it and crickets, right? And so, research helps avoid that problem. Saves you money and time.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And that’s like the dangerous part here, right? Is like if you had to start a business like 20 years ago, you couldn’t just like build a landing page the moment you had an idea, right? You had to jump through enough hoops to maybe make you think about if it’s worth your time.

Becky Davidson: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: But like if legit, like if I got an idea while I was talking to you during your next answer, I could build a landing page like you’re that fast because there’s like so many templates and everything’s kind of connected anyway. And so I think you’re right. Like the speed at which you can launch the landing page is not the important part anymore. The important part is making sure you know that you’re building the right thing.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. And that really comes down to making sure you really understand who you’re serving and, what their challenges are and, what their needs are and crafting. A solution that solves their problems and not just your shower idea, which I see all the time. And I’m guilty of myself.

Even just, you know how it’s like easier to give advice than take your own advice? Like, and so sometimes I do it myself and I’m like, oh man, like. I really didn’t do my research before trying this thing.

And so yeah, it can really save you a lot of time and money and help you prioritize what you should focus on because we all have a million different routes we could go down.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. And I like what you said here, craft a solution to solve their problem, right? Because this is coming from the developer space, like it was really easy for me to build a WordPress, plug it in a weekend and maybe sell it, right? And then I would build the landing page and I would talk about how it’s built with PHP and directly into WooCommerce and like no one who needs that solution cares.

Becky Davidson: Right. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: The solution that someone needed was, I don’t know, a plugin I built was like, it would change the name of the product in the cart to remind them of the value without having to go back to the landing page or something. You know, it was like neat little plugin. So that’s the solution, right? Prevent churn, right? Or prevent card abandonment is the actual solution to that problem. So, I love that. I guess, how do you temper the excitement, right? Because the excitement is the big thing like, oh, I thought of this great idea. It’s gonna be amazing. I can’t wait to put this out into the world.

Becky Davidson: And that’s a great question. I don’t know that I have the perfect answer, but I have worked with so many founders and entrepreneurs. And they wanna dive right in and run with an idea. And so I use a framework that’s comes from, so I’m from the tech industry too, so going back to building custom software, it was a lot more easy to convince like, Hey, don’t go down this route because it’s going to cost you $300,000 to build this product, right? Like there it’s just a different level. Like you can’t just throw up the landing page like we talked about. It’s almost like it’s so quick to be able to build things now that quality has really taken a no dive and making sure If you put something out that’s of quality is a lot more challenging.

But anyway, coming back to your question, I put them through this kind of like rubric, which is what is the customer value of this idea? What is the business value of this idea and how hard is it going to be for me to follow through on this? What is the level of effort?

Now, the trick, the kicker, is that you double the customer value in the formula. And that’s because that matters more than anything else. So you wanna make sure that the customer value’s really there for you to pursue an idea. But you also need to make sure it’s worth it from a business standpoint too, so that it’s actually worth like your bottom line to pursue this and put the energy and effort and time into it so that it can help you prioritize. So if you come outta the shower and you’re like, I gotta write this idea down, like add it to your tracker that you enter these numbers in. So it’s actually a formula.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Because again, like it’s very easy to be like, well, I think it’s a good idea, right? I mean, like you have comedians who they have their specials, and so you think like all their jokes are hits, right? Like, oh, this is hysterical. Oh, this is great. But what we didn’t see right was them like audience testing in clubs on like random Thursday nights to see if a joke did well or not.

And like, so for the comedian, like the value in doing that club set, right? The value of his or her time is making sure the jokes for the Netflix special are good because you want the Netflix special to be as good as it could be. You want a lot of laughs. That’s the customer value. And so I like that a lot because the level of effort could be low for you or me to throw up a landing page with a, like, right, like you, heck, we can go to like [oneonone.com] and set up a landing page right now, or [buymeacoffee.com] and set up a landing page right now. Payments accepted in 15 minutes, and then you’re like, how come no one’s buying my thing? It’s because you haven’t figured out what the value for the customer is.

Becky Davidson: Yeah, totally. This also can help you with just prioritizing the experiments. So what you described at the Comedy Club, it’s like they’re experimenting lots of different ideas, but even a product experiment, like what you just described with the buy me a coffee thing, that’s an experiment you’re running and you can only run so many experiments at once. So it’s also about prioritizing which ones you focus on.

Joe Casabona: I’m really glad you touched on that ’cause that’s the next thing I was going to ask about, right? Because like, you know, I’m a solopreneur, you’re a solopreneur. Our job is more or less to experiment and see what works, right?

So for example, one experiment I’m running right now is I had a shower idea and instead of building a landing page and a checkout page, I decided to figure out if my mailing list was actually interested in this. And so I sent an email about, I got into an argument with my 6-year-old daughter over the weekend. I basically told that story and then I said, I wanna do this. If you’re interested, email me back and say, interested, right? I’ve got 1300 people on my mailing list. If like 13 people, (Taylor Swift number, right?) If 13 people email me back and say they’re interested, then I’ll be like, all right, maybe this has some legs and it’s worth pursuing. So that’s like the first little experiment I’m running to your point, right? This is kind of my own little customer research. These are the people who are most invested in what I’m doing.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. And what you’re describing is really like idea validation. So you’re kind of actually a few steps deep in the process. Like you’ve already noticed that this is a problem that exists and you’re like, okay, how can I help solve this problem for my audience because they are struggling with storytelling or whatever. Like you’ve already done some work to get those insights out. So if we like go a little bit, stepping back, I think like we start to build a business and we’re building an email list. We’re maybe launching a product, and we’re collecting people, right? We’re collecting people on this list. We’re starting to talk to them, but we’re not necessarily like checking back in with them to see why they, like, they might have joined for a reason in the first place, but what’s going on in their worlds today now?

And so doing continuous, and as you know, I call it scrappy research. Doing continuous scrappy research is really important to be able to just continue to understand the evolution of who you’re serving because everybody’s on some sort of transformation and growth and path. So like if they first joined because they were maybe starting a podcast later down the line, they might actually be struggling with storytelling. So you wanna like basically keep learning what they’re all about over time.

So, for example in my business recently, I did a survey and then I also did a bunch of one-on-ones with people that are on my list. And I noticed that this like journey mapping thing was coming up again and again and again. And I’m like, okay. This is really resonating. It’s the most popular page on my website was this one article I wrote about it. So that to me was an indicator that that’s a problem that people want help with their journey mapping, and I’ve really kind of run with that in my business.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Oh, that’s so great. This is, that story really resonates with me because I feel like I went through a very similar thing when I joined the lab, right? Which is, I guess a little over a year ago now, a year and a half or whatever where I was like, oh, I’ll just like teach people how to make money podcasting, right? Like people would casually ask me about that. And then I realized, through people in the lab and through research that like making like your first $10,000, which was like my promise like was fine. Like some people wanted that, but I noticed that like people who were just starting felt like that was an unbelievable number. And then like the people on the other end were like, $10,000 is not a lot of money. I’m like, oh, great. I’m in this weird middle that nobody caress about or very few people care about.

Whereas the automation, the how do you run three podcasts with three kids? That question some version of that question kept coming up. And that’s like what I’ve decided to run with is how can I save you like 12 hours a week so that you can tell better stories, so that you can reach out to sponsors, so that you can spend more time actually crafting the content instead of struggling to publish every week.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. That’s so good. And how did you see your business shift when you started to go down that path or make that change?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a really good question.

Becky Davidson: I’m interviewing you now.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. This is really good though, right? Because I basically went from people who were just starting, right? Like the fatal flaw I always, always made in my whole career, ’cause I love teaching, is I would target beginners. But the problem with targeting beginners is you need a huge audience if you wanna make money off of them. And I don’t have a huge audience. So like, that was never a financially sustainable niche for me.

And so I went from like a small group of beginners who like didn’t really wanna pay me what I needed to get paid to keep my business running, to now I’m landing agencies and bigger companies who are like, yeah, our team is spending five, six figures on our podcast and we really need to improve the process. Can you help us? Like, I sure can help you. So, yeah. It’s been a big shift and I feel like we’re coming up on the, as this episode comes out end of 2023, I feel like 2024 is gonna be, I feel a lot clearer and so I feel like 2024 is gonna be a really good year for that side of the business for me.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. I think you just touched on like the other most important part of research, which is like, it gives you clarity. And there’s nothing that feels better than clarity because when, like we talked about earlier, wanting to go a thousand directions, you finally have the idea of like, which directions make sense to head down once you started to get that. And the other thing you said is like, you started getting a lot of questions.

So there’s a lot of different ways to do research, but being really intentional about collecting that data is important. Like if you have let’s say a welcome sequence on your email list, and you ask them, “Hey, what’s a challenge you’re facing right now” Or, something in that first sequence, and you start getting replies, like, record that and see what the trends are.

And every time you kind of revisit the research in your business, you wanna look at what were those replies? What are the things that people are asking you all the time? And so, you’re really looking at pattern recognition. So it’s questions being asked, but it’s also asking great questions. Because you can’t just ask somebody what they want.

And that’s why earlier when you talked about your product idea that you emailed your list, you’re like, would you be interested? That’s helpful because you’re validating something. And if people click, they’re interested. Okay. Then the positioning is probably done well, like your value prop was strong, but you wanna understand the problem a little bit earlier in that process. And so it’s important to kind of recognize those differences.

Joe Casabona: Right, right. That’s a great point because even as I was writing that email, I started writing it from the perspective of like how to be a good podcast guest, and then I kind of recognized that. Well, my mailing list is mostly, well podcasters are aspirational podcasters, right?

And like, yes, be a podcast guest. If you are a podcaster, that’s how you grow your show. But I kind of had to change the positioning to be like, this is why you need to tell good stories as a podcast host, right? Or this is why you need to understand storytelling as a podcast host. It’s a little bit different as a guest. So the positioning is really important there, like you said.

Becky Davidson: Yep. And when you ask questions, here’s a fun tip. So a lot of times we see people wanna say like, oh, would you buy this? Or what do you think of this idea that’s so common? Like, Hey, I actually did a call with somebody last week who asked me, “Hey, can I pitch you my idea for my business? I’m getting customer feedback.” And so I was really curious about this and I was like, “Yes, let’s chat.”

And I did this call and they asked me, okay, here’s my product idea. And he like really pitched me on the whole thing and, he was like, I had done so many of these calls and I was like, this is like not the right way to do this because you don’t wanna pitch your idea or ask what do you think about this? Or would you buy this? You wanna say, tell me about the last time you solved this problem. Tell me about whatever challenges you have around X topic, because the stories are where the data is. An example I teach my students is when, if you ask me, how many times do you go to the gym a week? I’m gonna tell you, “Oh, 4-5 times.)

I go to the gym. Now, you’re not really getting that much information from that. You’re just finding out a number, but you’re also getting lies, and it’s not that I’m intentionally lying to you, it’s that humans are highly aspirational. Like we wanna say like, yes, I will buy this. Like, yes, I would definitely do this program.

Oh yes, I go to the gym five times a week. Like I have all of these big dreams and this is exactly what I do. But if you said, tell me about your workouts last week, you’re gonna get this way more information about how I exercise. You’re gonna find out I only did it twice, right?

Joe Casabona: Well, I wasn’t feeling very good and something came up at the time I usually go to the gym, right? Like, yeah. Love that. I had a very similar experience recently where someone kind of reached out and they’re like, I’d love to ask you a few questions around podcasting. And I’m like, oh yeah. Great, great. So we get on the call and they’re telling me about how they want to do like a, well, I guess if they’re listening, it’s gonna be really obvious I’m talking about that, but that’s fine. Like a Facebook ads for podcasters to grow your show. And I’m like, here’s all of the problems with that. Like, first of all, podcasters who aren’t growing their show don’t have money. And so they don’t, they’re not gonna spend it on Facebook ads. And then I got a lot of, well, but this, well, but that, and I’m like, you’re not looking for idea validation. You, in your head think you have a great idea. And so like my feedback, it’s almost like in college, anytime anybody asks me what computer should I buy, I would always tell them to buy the $600 Dell. Because all you’re gonna do is write papers and surf the internet. And they’re like, but I want a Mac. And I’m like, but you don’t need the Mac. They’re like, but I want it. And I’m like, well then we shouldn’t have this conversation. Yeah, you ask me what I think you should buy. You should have said, tell me I should buy the Mac. Okay. Like that’s a different question.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. People often look for validation bias in their research. So one of the things I noticed working with, like one of my larger clients recently, they have a research practice like, they’re like, oh yes, we’re always doing research, we’re always testing our ideas. But it’s very much like validation bias where, this is what I’m thinking about doing. You wanna join, right? Like that’s not research.

Joe Casabona: You’re leading the witness, right?

Becky Davidson: Yeah. You’re leading the witness. Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. And so, the way to avoid doing that is to keep your questions really open. So what? Starting them with what? Starting them with how, and then like I mentioned, my favorite one is, tell me about the last time you X, or what is the most frustrating part of Y? Like whatever the problem is, what is the most frustrating part about trying to Run a podcast while having, while being a parent? Like is it the sound? Is it the sound? Is it the noise? Is it finding the time? Like you might have lots of ideas about what it is, but it could be something completely different.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I think that’s where I struggle the most when I have those conversations is, I then give examples what’s your biggest struggle being a parent and a podcaster? Is it like the noise? Is it your kid’s capricious schedule? And they’re like, yeah. All of those things. And I’m like. Dang. Like I just gave them answers.

Becky Davidson: Like I messed up. It’s really hard. And that’s why like there’s a whole art to it like you have to be really careful about your conversations. And for people like us that love to talk a lot, you also have to shush, like you have to just put out the what question, the how, question, the quick thing, and you wanna get that deeper level of why and understanding so you can follow up with why or tell me more about that. But don’t say like, don’t lead the witness and don’t give them lots of examples. If they’re really stuck and you’re pulling teeth in the conversation, that’s one thing, but most of the time you wanna have that issue.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I guess if you’re pulling teeth, right, is that indicative that maybe they don’t have the problem you think they have, or it’s not so big of a pain point maybe, that it bothers them?

Becky Davidson: Yeah, that could be it. The other thing could be that you didn’t make them comfortable enough in the beginning.

Joe Casabona: Mm. Yeah.

Becky Davidson: It’s kind of like when we got on this podcast, we talked for 15 minutes, right? And by the time we start recording, it’s not so like, Ooh, we’re recording, right? It’s like making the person feel really comfortable. So, I always tell them even if I’m like showing them something.

So another thing we could talk about is like testing ideas. If I’m showing them something or if we’re talking about a specific topic, I’ll say like, this isn’t my idea. I’m just a researcher. I didn’t design this even if I did, right? Like, you don’t want them to feel bad because people feel really bad giving feedback about stuff. So you wanna be careful to make them feel like they can be really honest, that they’re safe, that they’re not being tested. So a lot of that comes in with just like empathy and making people feel comfortable and not jumping right into business, like talking about the weather or whatever is a good way to kick it off.

Joe Casabona: I wanna get into that, but first, let’s take a quick break for our sponsors

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Joe Casabona: All right, and we’re back. So let’s talk about why can’t I just build something that works for me, right? I am a customer. I could use my own thing. I had the idea. After all, it was a pain point for me. So why can’t I just do that? And then dog food my own product.

Becky Davidson: It’s not about you, Joe.

Joe Casabona: Alright. Hard truth. Let’s dive into that though.

Becky Davidson: Mic drop. I’m done. Yeah. I see this all the time, especially like LinkedIn posts that are like, founders should start by building a product that solves their problem. And like, look, that’s where a lot of ideas come from, and that’s okay, but you don’t want to then solve the problem and craft a solution that is completely around your own personal experience because you’re only one data point. You have to collect more data than that.

So when doing research, you wanna balance of qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data are these quality conversations, the one-to-ones I’ve been talking about. So having asking those what questions, asking them to tell you stories, you only need like five to start to see trends.

So, people think, Ooh, it’s gonna take me forever to do that work. I don’t have time to do that. But, it actually can happen really fast. You can get results with even as little as three interviews where you start to see themes. Now, this is kind of within a given segment.

So for your example you gave earlier, maybe your newbie podcasters, you only need to talk to like five. And then for your people that are more advanced in their podcasting career than another, five of those. So it’s kind of based on the segment, but still or stage of where they’re at in their transformation journey. But still, you only need five. And then your quantitative data, you can collect more from more people. So your full list, you could do a survey, you can look at your data analytics of your course products or your email and that kind of thing. So, yeah. It’s not about you. You need more data than one data point.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, because I mean, right? The honest truth is if you’re building your thing and you’re the only customer, no one’s gonna buy, right. This is not like, I guess this is like the big difference between like maybe being a coach and being someone who sells a product, right? Because like Aaron Judge has his own batting coach, right? Or, Lamar Jackson, right. He has a coach to help him when he’s in the pocket and his line is collapsing or whatever.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. Now you’re speaking my language.

Joe Casabona: Right. But that’s gonna be different for everybody, right? Tom Brady was apparently like untouchable when he was a football player. So like he would handle being in the pocket that wasn’t collapsing very differently. So like there, maybe you have like these one-on-one bespoke solutions, but when you are building something that you wanna sell to more than just one person, you need more than one person to validate the pain point.

Becky Davidson: So true. Have you ever tried to use somebody’s Notion template and been like, my brain doesn’t work this way.

Joe Casabona: Yes, this is what has prevented me from buying other Notion templates ’cause I’m like, I don’t know if this is gonna work for me.

Becky Davidson: Yes. It’s like the most hilarious thing in the world to me because every time I get one of these templates, I’m like, this doesn’t work for my brain. And I’ve thought about hiring somebody to help me build a dashboard for my business and I’m like, I just don’t think this is gonna be a good use of my money. I think I have to spend my time figuring out how I want it organized ’cause it has to work for me. And so anyway, my point is everybody’s different and you have to test these things.

Now, if you made a Notion template and you gave it to 10 people that are who you think is like your ideal customer, and you said, Hey, test this and give me feedback, and then you make it better, then it’s probably a good template. But most template creators don’t do that.

Joe Casabona: Right. They build the thing that works for them and they’re like, I’m gonna put this out there, right?

Becky Davidson: Yeah, exactly.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. This is really funny actually because as we record this, I am moving my whole operation from Airtable to Notion. And I took the free Notion template that people can opt into and I was like, oh, I’ll just use this. This is based on my Airtable base anyway. And then I made a bunch of changes to it, like my own thing that I was giving away for free. I’m like, oh, that’s not really how I use this anymore.

So it’s really funny ’cause like it’s a thing that like past me built that future me or current me, like can’t even use today without modifying it. So it’s so funny that you mentioned that.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. I don’t know where that idea came from just now, but yeah, it’s like something that’s just really mulling around in my head because I’m like, oh, I wish I could just get some templates for this stuff, but I just know it won’t work. So…

Joe Casabona: Right.

Becky Davidson: Or I haven’t found the right person yet.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Well it’s hard though, right? ’cause like I’m working on a book, right? My next book on podcasting and I was like, oh yeah, so I’ll do this in Notion. I’ll just find like a book writing template in Notion, and like the first few I found were fiction, right? So it’s like character board and places board. And I’m like, I don’t need any of that. I need like case studies, right? And like big ideas and actionable advice or whatever. And then I found one, and it was just like chapters. And I’m like, no, I’m just gonna probably just work in Ulysses, to be honest ’cause that’s where I write. And so that’s probably the best place for me to do it. So, it’s, I think you’re right.

And then I don’t wanna lose this thought, ’cause you made a really good point, right? Multiple data points, finding results within like three to five people. But it really depends on their journey, right? So you mentioned like people who are just starting a podcast, that’s gonna be, I’m gonna have to talk to different people than starting versus going to the next steps, right? Because when you’re starting a podcast, literally wrote this in my newsletter this morning, there’s a pretty clear blueprint that you can follow to launch a podcast, right? It’s like you need to do these steps and whoever needs help with that, just needs help with those steps versus growth that’s gonna be very niche based and very audience based. And it could be that you’ve positioned your show wrong, Or that your content needs tweaks. And so like solving that problem, there’s no blueprint to solve that problem. There’s things we can try.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. I think another thing that comes in here is sometimes research all the time. Research can really help you with figuring out the personalization strategy that you need to have, because within every group of customers, you’re going to have different variations. And if you could like answer a few questions and then get the template that’s best suited for you, now that could work, right? Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Becky Davidson: Because there’s just like little differences that can make or break whether or not it’s a great product or not for that person. And I’ve worked on a lot of custom software, like dashboards, like insurance products, ad platform, like lots of categories. And the one number one thing that comes out of research sprints is people want personalization. They want everything to feel like it was made for them which means you have to do some of that work to be able to create that experience.

Joe Casabona: I mean, and so we both kind of come from the technology field, right. And I know you’ve worked with WordPress. I’ve worked extensively with WordPress. One of the things that would always drive me crazy about freelancers who would do work for clients when they got a new client is they would say, they would always say, I never work with GoDaddy. So like the first thing we’re gonna do is move you off of GoDaddy, or I hate Bluehost. The first thing I’m gonna do is move you off Bluehost. And I’m like, Hey friends, maybe the client is happy with GoDaddy. They understand it. And if you hate GoDaddy, you shouldn’t thrust acost upon them to move to the thing that you like. You should just not take them on as a client. I know that’s really hard to hear. If you don’t wanna work with the tools that they like using, then you should not be working with them.

I told my client who’s on GoDaddy, I’m like, look, just so you know, it takes me like 25% longer because you’re on like a low GoDaddy plan and it takes a long time. So it’s gonna cost you more. And if you ever wanna move, I will help you move. But if you’re happy, well stay here. It’s your website.

I feel like it’s the same thing with like, kind of like you said, personalization, right? Like I’m trying to help people improve their processes. And I need to be very careful to not be like, well, I know you use Trello, but I prefer Notion, right? And so we’re gonna move, this is like a perfect recipe for you to never use the thing I help you set up.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. Yeah. It’s such a challenge being in service business work. Like I was at the custom software agency, I was at, for five years, and different clients would be on totally different systems. Like we’d have people on Microsoft, people on Google. And then our business was on Google. And so Microsoft was a real pain to like try to get into. If you don’t have like there, you know, anyway, right. My point is it just takes so much time. That’s a problem that needs solved. There’s somebody out there listening. It’s like if you are a service space business owner and all your clients use different tools, that is such a time sink for the service the people doing services. But you’re right. You can’t just move everybody to the systems that you wanna be on.

Joe Casabona: Right? Right. I mean, like if you can, great, right. You’re solving a different problem. Or like you have such a big audience and a big client base that you can very easily turn away those people, right, who don’t fit your exact criteria exactly. But again, like for me, if someone’s like, Hey, I need help improving my processes, by the way, I use Buzzsprout and Descript, or I use GarageBand, or whatever, I’m not, I can’t be like, well, change your whole life for me.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. I draw boundaries with that stuff. Like for my clients that are on ConvertKit, I’ll help them set up their lead magnets and automations. If they’re on anything else, I’m like here’s my people.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Becky Davidson: Because frankly, I don’t wanna learn how to do the other tools. It’s just not my zone of genius. Like I only can help with ConvertKit ’cause that’s what I use in my business, you know? So I know it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, and that makes perfect sense, right? Like I have tried a lot of tools, so you know, if someone wants to use Notion or Airtable or Trello, I’m familiar with all of those things, but if someone comes to me and they’re like, oh yeah, we use Asana, I’m gonna straight up be like, I don’t know Asana very well. Here are some ideas. You’re gonna have to try those yourself, right? Or like pay me an hourly rate to learn it. Like, I guess I could do that, but like, again, like am I spending time in my zone of genius at that point, probably not.

Will say throughout my research, I have a number of my coaching clients have said, can I just like give you my files and then like be done with it like you? And I’m like, oh yeah, like probably. So this is the next like big service I’m validating, right? Is can someone just gimme files and edit instructions? And then I put them into my process and how much are people willing to pay for that? Because that’s a little different from the services I currently offer and I want it to make sense.

Becky Davidson: I think that’s really smart. As somebody who’s tried to do a lot of productized services that are more like strategy or here’s how to do it, or here’s the directions and that. They’re like, great, what do you have for like done for you? And I’m like, ah, okay.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yes.

Becky Davidson: But you gotta figure that out, I dunno.

Joe Casabona: Yes. Oh, we’re gonna talk about this in the pro show too, because this is something I thought about a lot. Like, I don’t know if you know Brian Casel. You know who he is? He had a website called Productize where he talked a lot about productize services.

Becky Davidson: Oh yeah, yeah.

Joe Casabona: He launched ZipMessage, which is now called Clarityflow, and he came on the show. And after that I was like, I need to productize a service. And I just realized that like nothing that I did or could help people with was really productizable.

Becky Davidson: Well, now your audits right?

Joe Casabona: Now my audits. Yeah, for sure. But like then I was thinking like, oh yeah, productized podcast editing. Brian found the same thing that like, that’s really hard to productize because everything is, it’s not like you don’t get like a brief and write a blog post. You get like files that are a crap shoot and then you need to figure out how to best work with them. So that’s really interesting. I wanna talk to you more about that.

Okay. So just to sum up here, where we are? We’ve talked about why research is important, right? And how to do some good research. We touched on that earlier. We talked about why we can’t just build what works for us, and it’s because it’s not about us. We are a customer of one, and we need to find presumably more than one customer.

So, I know we’ve touched on this already, but assuming you’ve convinced everybody listening that good research needs to happen, and again, if you’ve been listening for the last few weeks, you’re already convinced of that. How do I do good research? Like conversations with people sound scary to me and like a lot of work, but how do I do it right?

Becky Davidson: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a misconception that it’s a lot of work. I mean, sure it might be five hours, but I don’t know. It was five hours. A lot of work.

Joe Casabona: Is five hours a lot of work if it’s gonna save you 20 hours, right?

Becky Davidson: Exactly. Yeah. If it’s going to save you thousands of dollars, potentially. I mean, I watched founders build custom software projects that cost them hundreds of thousands and they refuse to pay for research. And the whole time we’re like, wait, validate these ideas, and then it launches to crickets like I’ve witnessed that multiple times. Yeah. So be that guy.

Joe Casabona: Course creators, same thing, right? Like course creators will like go in into like a hole and spend three to six months developing a course and then launch and wonder why nobody bought it. You know? Maybe it’s ’cause people know you as a developer and not somebody who just can launch a WordPress blog. 2016 Joe, that was like my first course, how to launch a blog. One person bought it because I was like a developer. Like what does Joe know about launching? What does Joe know about monetizing blogs?

Becky Davidson: Yeah. The best way to do a course would be to do like a wait list and then do interviews and surveys with your people that are on the wait list, and then develop the sales page. Sell it, pre-sell it, and then if you got sales, run it live.

Joe Casabona: Yes.

Becky Davidson: Then learn from that experience and then develop the recorded version.

Joe Casabona: Y’all, you just got the blueprint. Yeah, the blueprint for launching a course.

Becky Davidson: There you go.

Joe Casabona: if you are writing scripts or recording videos right now, right now, being today, stop and do what Becky just told you to do because it’s going to save you heartache and disappointment. Take it from me who’s gone through what you’re doing now so many times. Validate, create the sales page, run it live, then do the recordings. I love that. That was a side quest, but it was a really important one ’cause everybody wants to make a course and they all think they need to do it the same way. I need the course to sell first.

Becky Davidson: We do. Okay. So how to do great research really comes down to collecting different types of data and making sure they are of quality.

So coming back to what we talked about earlier, you want qualitative data and quantitative data. So that means looking at your analytics. So for me personally, I use Miro. Take whatever whiteboarding tool you like and just start screenshotting stuff and dumping it in there. So I take, I go to my website analytics, I go to my email platform analytics, like what were my best performing? And this is very high level research if you wanna do like discovery across everything.

So, what were my best performing newsletters? What pages are most visited on my website? What products are selling right now? What is getting no sales? Looking into email sequences and funnels, like where do people drop off? If you already have a course, Is there a certain module everybody stops watching after? Like dig into the data you have and the real numbers you have. So that’s number one.

Number two is send a survey to your whole audience. Now surveys, here’s a few tips on surveys. You want them to be as short as possible. If it’s more than 10 minutes, you have a significant drop off. Less than five minutes is going to be the best results you get.

So most tools will tell you, this takes three minutes to respond to. If you’re getting above five minutes, look at what you can reduce. But the most important thing about a survey is that you have a goal for what you’re trying to learn. That every single question you ask, you know exactly how you’re going to use that data.

So I actually wrote a survey this morning that’s going to people that purchase my program that’s running in January. And in the, or one of the survey questions is about revenue, like where are you at revenue-wise in your business? And I sat there for, I don’t know, probably five minutes and I was like, do I need this question? What am I going to do with this data? Is this important? How is this going to help my people, my community members that are joining this program? By me knowing this information and I could come up with answers, so I was like, okay, great. I’ll keep it, but for some other questions I cut them. So I think just be really Intentional about the questions you ask.

And whatever you do, don’t start with an open question where you’re like, tell me why you joined this course, or like, whatever, or like, tell me what your greatest challenge is right now. That’s qualitative in nature and surveys are for quantitative data, which means like, an example is in one of the questions I wrote was, what kind of products and services do you offer in your business? And it was like, check boxes, select as many as apply. That’s a quantitative question. It’s closed. I just wanna see like, what are the most popular products out of the people that are gonna be in the program? What kind of things do they have, right? So making sure that your questions are quantitative in your survey.

Joe Casabona: I wanna pause on this for a minute because that’s really important, right? This is a lesson I learned with like email engagement too, was the first email I would send is like, tell me your biggest problem in podcasting. That’s such an open-ended question that like someone reading my email is not ready to answer at that point, right? Tell me your biggest anything or your best anything, right? Like that’s like people are gonna be like, oh, what is my biggest, right? Well, I guess it’s like making money, but is that my biggest?. And then they’re not gonna answer you, right? But questions like, I’ve actually, I’ve had great success with questions.

I tack onto my webinar registration ’cause those are like, I know what they are joining for and so I usually say, where are you in your podcast journey? I’m just starting, I’ve started, I’ve Podfaded. And then like what’s one struggle or what’s a recent problem or something like that. And like I get a lot, about 50% of people answer those questions, but I warm them up, right. What’s your name? What’s your email address? Easy. Where are you in your podcast journey? Easy. And now like, all right, tell me a little bit, like, what’s one question you wanna ask me during the webinar, right? Because that’s like, oh yeah, that’s, Joe’s gonna answer my question live.

Becky Davidson: Yeah, that’s really good. Also, people like to talk about themselves. So if you ask in the beginning like, what are you building? Or, I think that’s what mine is. People are excited to respond and tell you, like ask them about something that gets them jazzed to talk about.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s really smart. So I love what we’ve heard here so far, right? First of all, user analytics like, that. I’m just gonna put that on repeat or like put that on my whiteboard ’cause like I never, I never look or I don’t look nearly as often as I should, right? Like I recently discovered that one of my 20 minute solo episodes is according to Apple Podcasts, like the most consumed episode, like as far as like minutes listened and I’m like, wow, I should probably do something about that, right? That feels like an important data point.

So look at your analytics, whatever you have so far, and then surveys short as possible. Less than five minutes, right? ’cause you don’t wanna ask for commitment now. Now you’re like, oh, I’m gonna take time outta your day and give them some easy wins, like make the first couple questions simple. Multiple choice. Something they can click. And if you can make it fun in any way, like add fun in and save your open-ended like you can have one. Maybe open-ended question, meaning people would type a paragraph, do it at the very end and make it optional. That’s when people give up.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, I like that. I mean, it’s the same, that’s like the same advice that I would give somebody who’s teaching in a classroom and making a test, right? Like the worst tests have the hardest questions first. You’re just, it’s like demoralizing right at the beginning, right? You wanna start them with something really easy so that they build their confidence. Then ask them the harder open-ended questions, right? What are the ramifications of France entering the American Revolution, right? Who was the first president? Should be the first question on that test, right? So I love that, but there is opportunity for those deeper questions, right? Because you talked about quantitative versus qualitative, and then so I guess how do we get some of those deeper answers that we’re looking for.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. So that’s all gonna be in conversations. You can’t get, like the reason is because in a survey it’s hard to follow up with why and really get like meaningful answers. And so the qualitative comes in with your conversations. I have a couple tips on that. So, like I mentioned you, you’ll see trends at three to five.

So this is where people get really nervous about the time commitment and the effort. But you just say like, Hey, I’d love to chat with you and talk more about this topic. You could offer an incentive if you want to, if you’re willing to like sign up for time here and you give them a Calendly link.

Now, when you meet, like we talked about earlier, you wanna make them feel really comfortable because you don’t wanna feel like you’re being tested or interviewed, like this is them helping you, and you want them to feel like you’re helping me make this product better. You’re helping me improve this experience for you like turn it back on, why it’s valuable for them.

Most importantly, you want to record the session because you wanna make sure you’re not adding your inherent bias to your notes. Because afterwards we’ll be like, this was my main takeaway and my insight, but what you wanna do is actually look for themes across the transcripts. People, I dunno why I can’t say that word Transcripts.

Joe Casabona: It’s like how? Oh my gosh. Benedict Cumberbatch can’t say Penguins. Have you ever seen that?

Becky Davidson: I don’t think I could say that person’s name.

Joe Casabona: Benedict Cumberbatch. Yeah. Ben, Benedict. Dr. Strange. Smog.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. Dr. Strange. Okay. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Brandywine Cumberbund. But that’s really smart because like I do record conversations, but I also take my own notes. But you’re right, I have my own biases, right? If they say like, it’s really hard to be a parent and run a podcast, I wanna be like, yes. This is what I believe too, but like I never, no one thinks that right in the moment they’re just like, oh yes, I have been validated. I’m gonna run with this.

Becky Davidson: Yeah.You have to be careful not to use bad research practices to make business decisions, which is why I’m so interested in teaching this topic. Like, and by no means have like a PhD in research, but I have worked with PhD researchers and learned this stuff from them. And so, you have to be really careful about validation bias and adding bias to your notes. So transcripts are really great. And then literally highlighting and like copy pasting out the themes and notes and insights in their words, and then looking at that. So yeah. Transcripts.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, and like, I mean, as we record this, right, this is like the talk of the town and actually we on last week’s episode with Brian McAnulty, like we touch on this, but ChatGPT or OpenAI just rolled out like the ability to create custom GPT feels like research is a really good, you know, you feed it a bunch of transcripts and then you’re like, what are the trends here? Or like, what are the themes that keep coming up, right? Because AI only knows exactly what you’ve told it. And it looks for pattern recognition.

Becky Davidson: I should [Inaudible 49:04.9] about that.

Joe Casabona: I know, right? And like you, from what I understand, I haven’t tried this, but from what I understand, you don’t need to be a developer to build these things. You like feed it a bunch of information, and then you have your own GPT, your own assistant or whatever. So, really interesting.

Well, I lost a thought here, so I’m gonna try to bring it back. Record the conversation so you don’t have your own bias. Look for themes in the transcripts.

This is why I listen to, we’re not gonna talk about politics, we’re gonna talk about like politics writ large, right? Not like specific points here, but like, I listen to a lot of podcasts where like they hate polls. Like they just think like polls can be like so inaccurate. And like the questions that certain media outlets ask, like any media outlets on either side will ask and they’re like, this is bad data, right? Because they’re asking like, I don’t know, why is Joe Biden terrible? Or like, how do you think the election was stolen? Like, those are both terrible questions, right?

Becky Davidson: Yeah. Leading questions.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Being mindful of everything Becky just told us here is like stuff that can really help you kind of enrich all areas of your life, I guess is where I’m going here like if you’re aware of your own bias, it’ll be a lot easier to kind of separate yourself and look at things more objectively.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. I think this research work really helps us with empathy and making sure, and there’s a lot of careful strategy that needs to go into survey distribution, to your point. Because, but in our sphere for solopreneurs like survey your whole audience, your whole list, like that’s okay. But when I’m working with like really large brands that have a cultural impact, like we need to make sure that we’re not just sampling people that look like us, you know. And just being really careful about, and that’s hard to get right and takes a lot of resources. Now that doesn’t fall as much under my like scrappy research umbrella, which is more like understanding who’s in your particular subscribers and audience and making sure you’re talking to all of them.

But one thing you can do too is like if you ran the survey first, you can get, actually this is my preferred method to get interviews. So run the survey first and ask a few, you can ask a few like demographic type questions and then in the survey results, you pull out the report and at the end you say, Hey, are you willing to have a one-on-one with me? Most people check the box. Yes. It’s surprising.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. ’cause we’re aspirational and we wanna please people, right. Like to your points earlier, right?

Becky Davidson: Yeah. Right. Exactly. So then you filter your survey results for the people that said yes, and then the demographic list and make sure you get a good sample of people that represent different types of people and who you wanna talk to. So that’s a good way to do it. And then you reach out to that group and start there. And then you can expand out if you don’t get enough. But you only need five, so you probably can get there.

Joe Casabona: You only need five. You only need five. if you take away nothing else, which seems impossible ’cause this has been a great conversation. Remember that you only need five. We’re not going for statistical significance here, right? We’re going for checking the temperature of the people who have already opted in to what you have to say and do.

Becky Davidson: Well, it’s funny actually, like with interviewing, when you get people on the call that have a similar like persona type, you will see the same thing like, I’ve done five, I’ve done 25, and by interview six, you’re freaking bored. Because you’re like every conversation is the same, and it just happens over and over and over because the themes are off there. It actually is statistically significant, and this is based on Nielsen Norman Group. I didn’t make this up, but that’s like the user research. I don’t know, [Inaudible 52:45.0] or whatever.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. Yeah. They’re the people who, I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten like a $5 bill in the mail with like a survey for like your TV watching habits. Am I just old so like I just like old myself.

Becky Davidson: No, I know what you’re talking about. We got one recently.

Joe Casabona: So I’m sure it’s like less common now ’cause like everybody streams, so it’s like really easy. It’s a lot easier to get that data now. Yeah. But that’s really interesting. So I know we’re like coming up on time here, but I have to ask now, what if you have six, seven conversations? And like there’s no themes. It’s just like all over the map.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. Well, if that happens, keep going. You’re probably talking to a really diverse group and you need to identify who the different personas and segments are. So you might start to see, let’s say you do 10 interviews and you’ve got themes among three and four over here, and three and four over here. You just have two different persona segments, and I did a really big research initiative like this with BossBabe members when I was, had a product at BossBabe, and we had 20, I think I did 25 interviews. There were three clear persona groups, so…

Joe Casabona: Nice. And so, but like, that’s okay, right? These are people in your audience. You just need to tailor your offer a little bit to them.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. So coming out of the research, you have to identify. let’s say you notice there’s three different groups, you have to identify which one is the primary one you’re focusing on for whatever products you’re gonna create. So like 65% of ours were one of those personas. So that one’s the primary.

Joe Casabona: Okay, cool. That’s good. So what we’re learning here, right? Do good research and then focus on one atleast to start, I guess, right?

Becky Davidson: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Love that. Well, Becky, this has been an awesome conversation. I could keep going, but I want to be cognizant of your time and everybody’s time. So thank you so much.

If people wanna learn more about what you are doing ’cause I know you have a cohort or a program launching next month, where can people learn about you? Do all the things.

Becky Davidson: Yeah. So I have a program launching next month if you wanna do all this research with me and what might help, I give you feedback on your survey questions, your interview guides, give you tips on how to do the outreach, then we analyze all the data together and actually map your customer journey and come up with product ideas.

So Six week program. It’s gonna be great. It starts January 18th. It’s called Journey Makers Live. So that’s on my website. [beckypierson.com/journeymaker]. Live for the particular page. And I’m on Instagram at @buildwbecky. I just changed my handle, @buildwbecky. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: @buildbecky.. Awesome. I will link all of that, everything that we talked about in the show notes over at [streamlined.fm/345].

If you want to hear a longer ad-free version of our conversation, you can become a member at that same link. But definitely check out Becky’s program because I got like the matinee version of it right early on over the summer, and it helped me shape what I’m offering today. So I can’t say enough nice things about it.

Becky, thanks so much for spending time with us today. I really appreciate it.

Becky Davidson: This was so much fun. Thanks for having me.

Joe Casabona: My pleasure. And thanks to our sponsors. Thank you for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.