From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not talent. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Feiffer, the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. Here is one of the biggest challenges that a founder faces at the very beginning of their journey. Maybe it's going to sound familiar to you.
You're at the stage of what's often called as, I have a solution looking for a problem. And I came up with something great. Now, to a cool easy. All right, I'll tell you about the voices you just heard in a second, but let's just unpack the thought there. A solution in search of a problem. How could you get there? Quite easily. It's a very common problem. The thing is that entrepreneurs often set out with a great solution in mind. They have developed some
solv and maybe it solves their own problem or maybe it builds off of their own expertise. But whatever it is, they've built something great. But then when they take it to market, they realize that they're not exactly sure who it's for. Who's going to pay for this? Who has enough of a problem that this is a solution that they have been searching for? This question will send you in circles. It will cause many pivots and
rethinking of marketing strategies and business models. But when you get it right, when you have a great solution, you figure out exactly who has the problem. Now, you are very literally in business. Today on problem solvers, I'm going to play for you something really unique, which is that I found a founder who is in the middle of this problem right now. And I found an expert, someone with incredibly deep entrepreneurial experience, who knows exactly how to navigate this problem.
And then I brought them together. I brought them together for a conversation about this where one could help the other and everybody could listen in and learn something for themselves. All right. So let me give you some quick context on who these people are and how they came together. The voice you heard. I have a solution looking for a problem. That is Brent Turetsky. He is a passionate digital leader with decades of experience, building consumer and SaaS products.
Currently, he is the senior vice president of product at Peloton Interactive, the leading connected fitness company. Prior to Peloton, Brent held executive product management roles in innovative consumer companies, such as Parsley Health, Invision, Exo Group and Udacity, and was a board member at Shasta Ventures, also the founder of the New York product conference. So in short, a guy who knows a lot about building very successful digital products.
And here's who he's going to be talking to today. Hi. My name is Bertna Trafri Kisotir and I'm the founder of Bölfe. Bjergena is in Iceland and has been studying creative thinking for her PhD thesis and turned those insights into this company called Bulbyt, which is a brainstorming tool.
But a brainstorming tool for who that is the starting point for our conversation because Bjergena reached out to me and said that she has been trying to figure out what her go-to-market strategy is and a big part of trying to figure that out is trying to figure out exactly who this tool, this very useful tool called Bulbyt is for. And she's been experimenting with a bunch of different ways to answer this question.
But I thought, you know, what she's going through is so common that it would be incredible to pair her with someone like Brent, to hear the right way to think through this specific problem so that we all could learn from it. I brought them together in this community that I have built on my newsletter. So I have a newsletter that's called One Thing Better. You might have heard me mention it each week one way to be more successful and satisfied at work and build a career or company that you love.
You can find it by going to OneThingBetter.Email. That's a web address. One thing better.Email. And like I said, so there's a community that's built on top of that. People can upgrade to the community and then join a whole bunch of stuff including these regular calls where we bring the community together. To talk through specific business problems. And this call was a hot seat call, which means that Peter was in the hot seat.
She was going to share the problem that she has about trying to figure out who her customer is. And then I brought in Brent, who was just kind enough to spend half an hour of his time helping out. I was just so gracious of him to be willing to do this. And it was such a good conversation that I wanted everybody to hear it, which is why I am also producing it as this podcast.
So what you're going to hear is it's going to be Birna and Brent. And also on my part probably mispronunciations of Birna's name. So I probably just did it again. So I apologize. But so valuable to hear from an expert like Brent on what it takes to get through this in search of a problem phase of your business. And that is what's coming up after his break. On this show, we talk a lot about entrepreneurs who tackled business problems and came out the other end more successful.
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Are we are back? So, I'm going to just dive into it. The first voice that you're going to hear is Birona, who is going to give some background on herself and her business, Bulby. And then I'm going to bring Brent into the conversation Brent. Of course, like I said just before the break is the senior vice president of product at Peloton Interactive and has held just so many executive product management roles and just really knows the stuff as you'll hear. Okay, let's kick it off with Birona.
I'm a creditor. Creative thinking expert. I've been studying it for my PSD thesis and just super passionate about creativity. And what I learned is that the best way to come up with a good idea is to come up with many ideas. And I've been facilitating workshops and teaching about creativity for over a decade now. And I realized that people often learn about the exercises they can use to enhance their creativity, but then they don't follow through when using them.
So I thought, okay, I'm going to create a tool that's going to help them come up with many ideas because we are more trained to converge where we are more picking out with ideas to go forward with. The tool that we created is to help people come up with many ideas. And our first hypothesis was that those people that are constantly creating content, they for sure need ideas.
So we thought that the first customer segment would be content creators, but then chat to D.P. came to market and we thought, okay, no, this is probably not our group anymore. There's going to be marketers, people like at agencies and marketing people. And then we started to go into that direction and we realized that people that identify themselves as creative, they don't want to help with creativity.
And it has also been researched and we figured out, okay, this is not our group. So then later on, we started speaking with CEOs here, nice stand and speaking with a lot of people and they showed a lot of interest in bulbium. And we were like, okay, this is exciting. And they talked about pilot projects and things like that. But then nothing happened.
And then we read the book, the mom test, and it changed my life. And I realized that people, they just want to be polite and they tell you that your idea is good. And it's interesting and things like that. But we were not solving a real problem in their life. So we started to do the mom test and I've been interviewing a lot of people and grabbing the opportunity where I can speak to people and learn about how they are solving problems, how they are solving challenges, how they are innovating.
And we've identified four potential groups that we could help with the with this tool that helps people think in more different ways. And the groups that we are currently looking at, it's it's product development teams that work online. So it's a remote company that we are focusing on. And they need to brainstorm together. And then another group is that we think that what we have heard is that leaders, they often want their employees to think outside the box.
And this can be a tool to help them with that. So we can help them solve that problem. And then the third group is facilitators and coaches. And then they want to stand out and have valuable solutions with their clients. And then the final group we have are executives and leaders. So these are four groups we are currently thinking about and that have been the results from our mom test interviews.
I think that the moment you're identifying here, the moment that you're in right now, Berna is is a really relatable one, which is you built something great and you're not sure who needs it. And that's the thing that you're now listing off is all these great pieces on who needs it. And Brent, this is something I hear quite a lot from a lot of entrepreneurs. It is the founding story of so many journeys that I end up writing about in entrepreneur magazine. But what.
But before Bernardo goes any further in this journey, what are you hearing and what do you think entrepreneurs should be and burner should be thinking about in this particular moment. First off, I bear now thank you so much for sharing the story of bulb is so far and it's wonderful to meet the rest of you in this room.
My wife's known to printer. I've been an entrepreneur at mobile phases in this top and it's and also exciting. Seeing you all get together is a wonderful way to support each other through this journey. Now back to your question Jason, you're at the stage of what's often called this I have a solution looking for a problem. I came up with something great. Now, cool, who needs it? And this is this challenge where you have a theory, Berna, you have a theory of where you could use this.
But you got to figure out where how to translate the theory to reality. Now, it's an exciting moment. It's a tough moment. It's often a surprising moment when I think about building at any kind of enterprise from a product perspective, there tends to be three different phases that you could use and can use a model called the gem model that I learned from my boss a long time ago, and give it all.
And it's a bunch of products speaking and gem model sense for GM growth, engagement and monetization anytime as a when you're refining a product, you can say, how can I go get more customers, how can I better engage the customers I have, how can I make more money from the customers I have. And you got to be intentional about what you're doing right now, you're very much at this engagement phase, which is how can actually get people to use the product that I have.
And that is that's in general, the first stage to be at. If you want product market fit that you want to grow, you need to know what you're selling to food and that it solves a real problem. I always start with the user and the use case and how to engage that user. And that's an exciting phase. It's where you are. And it's also unpredictable.
You've now come up with a solution, something that solves a problem that that you've seen in your experience at the salivating brainstorming and gosh, why kind of the people just see it as brilliantly as you see it and know that they should just use it. Because it will solve their problems the way that you've been solving for them.
This is such an art stage and it's really this sort of down in very roll up your sleeves, part where you are the salesperson, you have to bring it to these different user segments and take it from theory to reality. And you're going to be surprised to use it as I think about these segments, remote products, development teams that need to brainstorm.
They've been hammered with Sess stuff for the last three years. Lots of features have been built. We've seen products like Miro, B&U, Class of product that my old company in vision had a park in this area. There's a number of these that are they're trying to support online brainstorming and there there's new exciting tools and plugins going there is brainstorming a feature for an existing tool set or should it be a standalone platform.
It would probably be better as a selling it to Miro and having them as a cool feature versus having people actually buy a whole new platform on board older users to it. I don't know. I'm thinking having leaders who wanted to get their folks to think out of the box, then you need to go to L&D champions inside of corporations and talk about what are their problems and trying to find pilot studies for them to use to say, okay, use my product for free, see if the soul for problem for you.
Facilities who want to add value. This seems like it could that they have real problems that they want to add value. They're charging money for it if you can help them make more money that could be viable, get in front of five of them, give them the tool. And then and then this last group of leaders who believe that diverse groups should collaborate.
But one of the critical things that the state is getting in front of users, you build something you've got to get people to use it, you have to make sure they use it. If they're going to point you to someone and that person doesn't share the same feeling, they're never going to use you, you have to find the person who's, you know, break down and door to use your product as a problem for them. It's either going to save the time or get them better results to help them make more money.
Yeah, good point. What do you make of that? I burn ahead shared with me and thanks, friend, for all that burn ahead shared with me by email when volunteering for for this hot seat that you've been working to keep expenses low and get the word out. So that includes writing articles. I'm just reading from your email that you sent me offering insights on podcasts, making a conferences writing posts on LinkedIn.
So cold outreach and email marketing. So that definitely gets the word out, but, but do you feel like that's accomplishing the thing that Brent is saying here now, which is getting directly to users. Yeah, yeah, so we were wondering that we have all those four different groups that we believe could be the potential user.
And we were thinking about getting the word out and this is our hypothesis, but when we get traction, we could see like where does it lead us like who is reacting to our material who is interested in learning more about how to brainstorm the best way based on many decades of research and who is interested in learning.
Yeah, who is interested in really getting new and better ideas and becoming better version of themselves. And yeah, so we and also I was thinking about the adoption curve because of course we are start up when we like the vision we have in our mind is really different from what the products we have today, but who is who could be an early adopter. Like where's it we focus and we believe like coaches and trainers facilitators could be the early adopters more likely than for example, leaders.
And so we're thinking about, yeah, reaching to them and I was just curious also like it's to me is so big like where to start and what should be my next steps when we have this and yeah, and also like I knew that you should not create a product before you know who's problem you're solving.
But like in the beginning we thought we were solving a problem for some phone and we got all the data behind it, but then the world changes so fast. So what to do when you already have created a product but your hypothesis was wrong with who's the customer. And it's so difficult at this early stage, which is why to the extent that you can get in front of people in real life, those facilitators who you think are going to use it and both need it, but will also be the ones personally using it.
And how can you get people to actually use the product and give you that feedback, or can you watch them using the product. Someone needs it more than other people who's got the biggest pain point, is there any software out there that people love that you saw much better, maybe that can give you a signal about who needs this.
One thing is for sure is that you're going to need to be both a salesperson and the user researcher until you have that confidence that I know this user in this box really needs me. And if I give it to them, I solve their problem again, which is either making more money saving time coming up with a better widget that they need to do until you have that confidence about who really needs this it's going to be hard to go bigger than that.
And what would you recommend for me that if you were in my position, what would you do to figure out who needs it, who needs it and like how can reach them. As the sort of chief salesperson, I reach out to my network, it's a hand, does anyone need to help solving this problem that I think I can help you with or a problem like that.
A blast that goes generally, no people are important to listen to as well as if you reach out to your network and try to go to places where people know you know your expertise. For example, you've said that you've been facilitating workshops for a decade in this area, do you have any people that you've worked with in academia where you're getting your PhD or clients that you've worked with who might be interested in piloting the same product.
And as anyone that netted a conference who has a job like you have in doing and facilitating those brainstorms where you could say, hey, I know that you do this for a living, you and I have talked about facilitating creative processes. I have something that I think could make your life easier with you viewing the triad.
By using your personal connections, one is you can understand them better, they can understand you better and they'll give you the benefit of the doubt to try something new and then also give you real feedback in terms of the mom test. They won't just be nice. Yeah, maybe I'll use it and then ignore it that they will you'll say, please give me the hard feedback. I'm willing to basically, but my time, my company's time into building something beautiful for you to make you let easier.
But to do that, you have to be real with me about what's working on. Yeah, good points. So I'm actually going ahead of myself. So I should not start with content to figure out who's reacting to my content. So that's not the best experiment, but to reach out to my network and ask people in my network to introduce me to someone that I could learn from and they could do pilots.
I think that'll be the fastest way for you to get in person experiences with potential customers of getting them to use it, letting you observe them use it to see what's working and what's not working. And to trust you to solve these problems. Yeah. Good point. So I can figure I can find someone from each group and see how they react and what is a. Or or or try three in each group where you have a strong intuition that you could give them value. Yeah. Yeah, good.
Yeah, really good. And when I'm done with that stuff, what's the next step since I have you. I ideally you start to sharpen the picture of God. I can solve this problem for this user that delivers them this amount of value. And if you get closer on what that is, you can better clearly communicate the value proposition you have. You could also understand how to acquire this customer. So are they are they students? Do they pay directly? Do they work in companies where they can pay directly?
You get product-led growth where you sell it to one person and they'll bite other people. In general, it's helpful to start small as you're say as you're both selling. And listening and eventually as you get a stronger perspective on these types of things, you can start letting the product sell itself. But you're not there yet. That's okay. This is the old products start like this.
Yeah, yeah, wonderful. Yeah, and when you mentioned product-led growth, we're thinking like if we can solve problems for facilitators and coaches, they could they would share it with many people. And those people might realize they could use it for all the other things is possible to use it for.
Yeah, products growth opportunity. When they're in their natural areas for person to person sharing and then storing those documents, either you're a process workflow or you're a document store or an in product store, there's a natural ways of playing in other people where they either want to share with others or they want to create accounts to maintain things.
But sometimes I see companies trying to be greedy where because they want to try to drive so much growth that way, they they overstate their value. And they try to be too precious of owning the customer relationship that creates friction in the product. Sometimes people don't want to create another account in order to access a file or so this is why you the first phase is very much where are you delivering value. And then leaning into is that naturally a shareable service or not.
Yeah, that's why thank you. I've been watching the comments and thanks everybody for sharing. I would just want to throw out something that Richelle had written. Richelle had run a workshop in this community a month or so ago. Hey, Richelle, good to see you. So Richelle had asked, have you found anyone who has paid for a solution to this problem and the solution was inadequate?
I thought was a really interesting way of identifying potential customers because they've already signaled that they're interested in a solution to this kind of problem and they could tell you what was wrong with what already exists in the marketplace. Brent, I see you nodding your head. Is that is is that a good filtering mechanism that people should be thinking about?
That it can be really helpful as you're thinking about what kind of value you add if you're either helping people make money solve solve a problem or save time. If you exist in a category where there's other product and you know that compared to other products, you can either deliver the same value cheaper deliver the same value faster or come up with better results.
I hope you I then recognize these are potential customers. These are potential value propositions. These are potential folks to go after. Absolutely. That's a great way of targeting people. My my guess is though is that we're that easy. You would have started there. You probably would have gone to Google and said collaborative brainstorming software. Who's doing well? What are people using today? Gosh, I should just go after selling to those people.
So since you didn't mention that I'm guessing it's not that easy. Exactly. Yeah. There are not so like the problem. I will add like the solution. I want to bring to market is to help people think in different ways. And there are not many projects there. It's more like you mentioned me. It's about gathering ideas.
But what we were going to do is to help people overcome biases because we have so many biases that reduce our creativity and there's so much going on that that is not supporting us seeing new and valuable ideas. And especially now with this past pace society. People start to think more in the same direction. And I want to help people think in different directions and there are not many products there.
So there's so much in the beginning. We were looking at reports that said like world economic would create a thinking as the skill that will grow the most and importance in coming years. And also like it's in the top of so many top list and it's a valuable thing. And there's so many courses of creative thinking and. And it's a large industry to teach like design thinking and all those things. But so there are really few solutions that help you with this different thing. Where you're thinking.
Building on what Roshal was saying. Are there audiences of people paying for tools in a related space? I don't know like a mirror user conference or message boards about mirror or other collaborative collaboration software. Where you're hearing people talking about pain points. Imagine someone says what stinks about your own. Or what do you love or hate about your own you look at those rated comments and and then five people say gosh I wish it did some kind of feature help me overcome bias.
You could reach out to those people on the message board and say tell me more is this how much of a pain point is this is for you and what situation to that happen. Take that feedback and then try to adjust how you talk about. And then go back to potential customers and with this new lens to see if they're that makes them more interested in it.
I don't know what any direction you want, but I'll just throw one out which is I really love the gem model that you had shared and I have a longer version of it in an email that you would send which I can share with everybody. But maybe as you think about growth engagement and monetization what that looks like early and then how you eventually want to get to it. Maybe if you want to share where entrepreneurs tend to get tend to stumble in executing that model or where you think.
And then you might be needing to put their most effort and attention. Sure. At the beginning it's figuring out who's a user that you're solving real problem for. And so that's very much about about getting those die hard users. And that's about what we talk about is engagement built something that people will use.
And then people think about growth to get started before they're clear and the problem of user they're solving the four. And that it ends up being both the challenging use of energy and money as a startup. Money is your oxygen that you have to live. So spend less money by figuring out engagement and just making sure that the product is right before you spend money on sales and marketing just build a product that people love.
And then you can get a lot of confidence around that engagement loop. Then it can be time to drive growth, which is getting in front of more people to validate that there's a. How big the market is. And then what it's going to take to continue to expand the universe of your product. Oftentimes in a South product you start with a single user moving into teams of users moving into departments across company.
And then you start with the initial segment which might be students, I go from students to professionals to nonprofits to big corporations. As you drive growth, it helps you understand which platforms of segments to go after and how large those are. And then typically the third bucket of monetization is figuring out what's the best way to drive margin. Once you're knowing how you're selling, you have to adjust your growth market model to sell more cheaply or more effectively.
What's the best way to price your product to support your product like growth or to improve your margin or to enable the right R&D investments to continue improving your product. Sometimes people think about that not at all or when it's too late and then suddenly it's very expensive to keep scaling a product because your cost of acquisition is very high. So if we said the first problem is that people don't think about engagement enough.
Once you move from engagement to growth, another problem is they don't think about scalable monetization enough. And then suddenly you spent all your money trying to grow without actually knowing that it's going to be a sustainable model. I just always keep these three things in mind because you can't do them all simultaneously.
You as the founder are the big brain, the parent of this product, your brain has to focus on the most important problems for the company and it tends to go into this into across the stages. That is awesome. Thank you so much for joining. This is so valuable and really interesting and it's just it's a real joy that someone with your level of experience is willing to jump in and just share so thank you so much.
And that was the call or that was the first half of the call Brent took off and then a lot of community members stuck around there about 45 folks and offered their own advice to be able to know which was also really awesome. So thanks to be able to and to Brent for sharing sharing their experiences both incredibly useful to hear and Brent's gem model is so interesting and useful and he had emailed me about it before this call.
And so I have the way that he wrote it and I want to read it to you because although it was really useful to hear him talk about it also just hearing it broken down in this written form is really useful because the way that he writes about gems or gem again is growth engagement and monetization way that he writes about it is that early on it actually gets a little flipped.
It's not gem gem it's e GM and that's because early on the first step is really engagement you want to get a product into users hands and iterate engagement to make it more valuable. Then you go to growth then it's G which is to you grow once there's enough value and engagement and for SAS that's initially going to start with word of mouth and communities.
And that can get you far enough to provide a business viability and show that there's product market fit and then you get to the M the monetization you figure out pricing that makes sense for your market and against your competitors and then you start selling to individuals and small teams.
But then eventually once your company grows now you're at the real gem model worth G E M instead of E GM so G growth you want to use product led growth as much as you can so you make the product easy to use and to share and to communicate the value and you do that before you need to invest in sales and marketing and community engagement then E which of course is engagement.
So you're not only delivering value for individuals but now you're really thinking about teams you're thinking about ways to unlock stickier value to build confidence in future promises and to communicate your roadmap with your team customers and then and monetization.
And you eventually need to sell to managers and department leaders and go through procurement processes and eventually you need security compliance and you need to have that all delivered by sales people and account management and of course the price now goes up to sell and just reading from Z.
Pricing goes up as costs to sell and deliver increase which makes sense so in short at the very beginning it's the E GM model and then it goes to the G E M model but anyway if you don't have growth engagement and monetization or you don't understand how to build towards those things and you don't have anything and I hope that through this conversation you don't is on her way to building bull be and you are on your way to building whatever it is you are building or growing or improving.
So I hope you enjoyed dropping in on this community call again if you want to learn more about the newsletter or the community you can just find it at one thing better dot email that's a web address one thing better dot email.
And that's our episode I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved you can find me at my website Jason Fyfer dot com J S O N F E I F E R dot com also I have some more useful stuff for you I write a newsletter about how to future prove yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic I would love for you to sign up it is at Jason Fyfer dot bulletin dot com also check out my other podcast.
It's called build for tomorrow in each episode I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think problem solvers is a production of entrepreneur media and comes out every Monday morning so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode thanks to Deepa Shaw for production my name is Jason Fyfer see you next week.