Bill, thanks so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure, Erdin.
I really enjoyed the first class we did.
The feedback I've gotten has been
nothing short of sensational.
It's one of the most rewarding things I think I've ever done.
Yeah, I feel the same, and that's
why we're back here today.
I want to talk to you about understanding
how your prospective customer will use your product.
In the first course, we talked about who
is your customer, which is critically important.
But now we're going to look at what can you
do for your customer.
Do you have a framework for developing an understanding
for how your customer will use your product?
Yeah, I think it's very important
to attack this in a structured way.
What we first start in our class,
is we talked about a use case.
That's what a lot of people talk about.
What we prefer to talk about is a full life cycle use case.
Now, what is a use case?
So first of all, a use case is I get this product,
and then I install it, and I use it.
And it's good for me.
That's a use case.
You stress the importance of the full life cycle use
case, what is the difference between a full life cycle use
case and just a use case?
And it's a very important difference.
The full life cycle use case says,
how do I know that I have a problem if I'm the end user.
And I know that things exist.
And am I activated to go look at solutions,
and then go out and acquire the solution.
So the use case is really about the use of it.
The full life cycle use case includes
the pre-acquisition part, as well as
the post-acquisition part.
After I use it, how do I pay for it,
how do I go about considering to buy more of them,
and how do I tell other people how great this product was?
The full life cycle use case, in your discipline entrepreneurship
methodology is step six.
And it follows step five, which is finding the persona
for your beachhead market.
Why is the full life cycle use case
a logical continuation of your persona profile?
The first thing we want to know is, for whom?
People say we want to test hypothesis.
I don't want you to test a hypothesis
beyond who is your customer.
And then why can we help them.
So first we have to know for whom
and then we're going to talk about what can we do for them?
So now the life cycle use case is
good to be introduced for the first time.
We're not going to get it right the first time.
But we're going to introduce it now and start thinking about,
we know who the customer is, what problem can we
solve for them, and how are we going to go about solving it.
And then we're going to iterate on that over time.
Bill, what I appreciated about the way you teach
is that you stress that you didn't know most of the things
when you started.
Now how do you yourself realize the importance of the full life
cycle use case?
Yeah.
You're not born knowing this stuff.
But in my first company, Cambridge Decision Dynamics,
we had two great PhD's.
Our product was superior to anything else
that was out there.
I mean, it wasn't even close.
Yet, we weren't getting great success.
And our problem wasn't that once the customer got it and used it
that they didn't like it.
But the problem was, people didn't know about it.
And they didn't even know they had
this problem or that something like what
we had was available for them.
So we had to think about, how can we
go through that, how would they go through that process?
And how can we start to understand that?
And then start to address that in a cost effective way.
Because remember, we're not IBM, we're not Procter & Gamble.
We can't just run a multimillion dollar campaign.
So really understanding the details
of the pre-acquisition part of the full life cycle use case
was incredibly important to have our sales go up
from basically zero to a million dollars.
And once the customer uses your product,
that influences whether the customer
buys the product again.
And a lot of businesses depend on repeat purchases.
The best customer that you can get
is the existing customer you already have.
And this is sometimes what entrepreneurs forget.
They get one customer and they focus
on getting the next customer.
The customer you already have is someone
that you can grow and become a sales force for you.
They're going to be a better sales force than anyone
you can hire.
So when you think about the full life cycle use case,
right from the beginning, we want
to get them to understand that think about not just how they
pay, but how can you continue to make them successful,
and then have them buy more product,
and then tell other people about your product.
That's the entire.
That's the pre-acquisition, use, and then
post-acquisition full life cycle use case.
How your potential customer acquires your product,
can that influence what the product is?
Absolutely.
When you think about this pre-acquisition stage,
you have to understand what's going to activate your persona.
Let me give you an example.
A company I was working closely with,
they did water purification technology.
The science of it was to try to get
the particles to be smaller and smaller.
And this is what they were focused on.
But when you step back and said, for the beachhead market
of data centers, which is what they chose,
the persona was a facilities manager.
Did the facilities manager care about technology?
Did he know about Technology?
No.
Well, then they thought maybe he cares
about the greenness of their data center.
No, that's not what he cared about
The thing that kept him awake at night was reliability.
So understanding that reliability
was what he cared about and that would activate
this pre-acquisition process for them
to go out and find out about the technology
and get them interested in it, so they would move
towards acquiring it, and then using it,
You design your product differently.
You're less obsessed with the technology
and you're more obsessed with the benefit
of increasing reliability, improving that.
And that change made all the difference to the team.