Customer convos are the carpenter's hammer // Pick the right tool for the job // Validation Quads v0.9

October 20, 2022 · writing

Customer convos are a profoundly helpful tool, but they aren’t your *only* tool, and they don’t work well in every situation. It’s like the carpenter’s hammer: you couldn’t imagine a carpenter showing up to a worksite without a hammer, and the hammer will probably get used an awful lot, but not always, and not in equal measure on every project.

Many of the questions I receive from founders are cases of them trying to use a hammer when what they really need is a saw, and then wondering why it isn’t working so well.

In general, customer convos are more helpful when you’re dealing with high *market* risk (i.e., do people want it and will it fit into their lives?) and less helpful when dealing with pure *product or execution* risk (i.e., can i build it and bring it to scale?).

Customer convos are more time-efficient when you’re sales-led (since you’re already setting up 1-on-1 convos), and carry a higher time cost when you’re marketing-led (since 1-on-1s are an extra activity that you wouldn’t be doing otherwise.)

When customers have a strong understanding of a well-defined problem, conversations can double as both learning *and* validation. But if their “problem” is kind of murky, undefined, or in the future, then you’re only going to get learning (not validation), and you’ll need to use something else to validate, like a simple-lovable-complete v1 product.

Speaking of which, here’s an attempt at a 2x2 of picking the “right tool” for different validation contexts, which I’m calling Validation Quads (v0.9):

I present this here with zero explanation, because I’m still writing up a full thing about that, but it’s been taking a while (like a month+), so I may as well get this out there in the meantime.

One thing of note is that this only applies to validation (i.e., confirming that you’re building the right thing) and *not* to the earlier-stage discovery (i.e., understanding what your customers are already doing and why they’re doing it that way).

This isn’t a new idea or anything, just maybe a more structured presentation. E.g., five years ago, I used to just describe it as:

Maybe the quads are more helpful? Maybe not!

Anyway, point is: learn how to wield the hammer properly, but don’t feel obliged to use it in every situation, because sometimes there’s a better tool for the job at hand.

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