Communication, Empathy, and Flexibility

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Michele Hansen  0:00 
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So you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?

Colleen Schnettler  0:59 
Yes, I sure do.

Michele Hansen  1:01 
I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.

Colleen Schnettler  1:07 
Okay.

Psychology of Money

Michele Hansen  1:09 
So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.

Colleen Schnettler  1:15 
Okay.

Michele Hansen  1:16 
Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you.

"In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."

Colleen Schnettler  2:08 
Hmm, interesting.

Michele Hansen  2:10 
And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me.

Colleen Schnettler  3:09 
Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book?

Michele Hansen  3:13 
Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing.

Colleen Schnettler  3:16 
No.

Michele Hansen  3:16 
He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right?

Colleen Schnettler  3:42 
Yeah.

Michele Hansen  3:42 
Running a good business. Right.

And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult.

Colleen Schnettler  4:02 
Yeah.

Michele Hansen  4:03 
And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly nines and 10s. But then it also has a question that asks as a follow up, and that survey and the question have a really high response rate. And we were previously asking, 'what can we do to improve?' And I changed this question. First of all, we were you know, we're getting a lot of like, boosts out of it. Like people were saying, like, no, you're awesome, and like, that makes us feel great. And like as -- you know, it feels nice. But also, we were kind of like asking people to do our work for us by telling us what we should improve. And so I changed it instead to 'What did you use before you used Geocodio?' And this is just reminding me about how we, you know, you know, competitors, at first blush, they seem like other companies, but in so many scenarios, and I think this applies to your business a lot too, competitors are people figuring something out for themselves or like some, like manual process where they're patching things together. And it is so fascinating to see the variety of responses I get from people. And how many of them say 'nothing' like that they used no tool and that they were like, hunting and pecking, or they had something internal, or they were like stringing together different solutions. I mean, our approach to competitors is so much more like relaxed than this, I think for, like, the traditional kind of business approach is like, you know, you should know everything that your competitors are doing and like, you know, know exactly when they have new features and like, be copying their features and everything. And I'm like, Nah, dude, like, I'm going to talk to my customers, because my competitors are all the time that they spend doing it themselves.

Colleen Schnettler  5:59 
It's this, it kind of the same thing with my business where a lot of people in the beginning, they were just weren't really doing it, or they weren't, you know, they were just, they were just putting, like piecemealing kind of half a half usable open source solutions with with, with other things. So So to your point, like your competitors, really not the other people offering the same service, but what the user was doing before.

Michele Hansen  6:26 
Yeah, I mean, there's so much space in software to have products that do things that are similar to somebody else's product, because so many people are just doing things themselves.

Colleen Schnettler  6:40 
So one of the things from that quote, you read from the book that I thought was interesting was flexibility. And what do you think that means in a business context? Does that mean pivot? Does that mean, let go of your idea that you're super passionate about because it's not working?

Michele Hansen  6:55&...