Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You want to be the best so you can charge the most. Well, how do you be the best? Because you're the one that knows the customer better than anyone else.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Yo, Mike, check. What's up everybody? You're listening to the Street Pricing Podcast, the only show where proven SaaS leaders share their mindset and mistakes in pricing so we can all stop guessing and start growing. Enjoy, subscribe, and tell a friend. Now let's break it down with your host and sought after slayer of bad pricing, Marcos Rivera.
[00:00:30] Speaker C: What's up and welcome to the Street Pricing Podcast. I'm Marcos Rivera, author, founder and CEO of Pricing IO. And today I have a guest who I'm super excited about because he's just as passionate about value and growth as I am. Today I have Eric Weiss. He's the CEO of Chaos to Clarity. Eric, welcome to the show, man.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Happy to be here. Great to see you, Marcos.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: Great to see you too, man. I've known you for a minute and I am so happy to see the trajectory and all the stuff you put out on LinkedIn and all the great content and messages that you give to entrepreneurs out there. And I'm excited to have you on because we're gonna talk a lot about how to walk through that journey, that entrepreneurship journey, how to help folks capture the growth, capture the value that they're producing. But first, before we get into that, why don't you give us a little bit about you and what you do.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I am a sort of a jack of all trades. I've been in the software industry for over 20 years now. Getting a little long in the tooth, but I came up as an engineer. I was a CTO of a couple of startup. You know, I've been in big tech and small tech and everything in between. My passion has really always been about sort of developing entrepreneurial ecosystems and communities. So I'm on the board of a few different nonprofits in San Diego that, you know, we do San Diego Startup Week, we do San Diego Design Week, and a couple other things. And I've just always sort of been plugged into the startup ecosystem, trying to help founders be successful, build great companies, build great products, and so on. And so it was seven, eight years ago that I decided to kind of go out on my own and start doing a bunch of coaching and consulting with dozens of different startups, but really focusing around product, market fit and kind of that early growth to scale inflection point. And so I work with startups in every industry you can imagine. AI, healthcare, fintech, crypto, you name it. But it's always about, you know, helping them really empathize with and understand who their customers are, the problems that they're trying to solve, the gaps in the market, the opportunities, and then to really craft and design an excellent solution that obviously crushes the competition, but just provides a ton of value. And then when they become a victim of their own success and start growing like crazy, you know, how do they really build a team and develop their leadership around it, raise a bunch of money and head to the moon?
[00:02:53] Speaker C: That's right. So easy, right? So easily done.
No, but that's important. That clarity that you bring is a prerequisite to good pricing, I think. And there's, I think, a very natural intersection there we're going to get into. And so are you ready to get street with me?
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:03:10] Speaker C: All right, man, let's do this. Let me lay out a quick roadmap for everybody listening here. So this show is based on the book street pricing. So what we're going to do is, is break it into a few different sections. First we're gonna get into rewind, which is we're gonna talk about a story. Eric's gonna bring up something that was maybe a struggle or a success, and a big lesson behind that I think our, our audience can take away from. And then we also get into play, which is now present day. What are some of the biggest tips and tricks that are working, creating unlocks for different folks out there trying to grow? And then last, we have fast forward, which is, let's look into the future. What's happening? There's a lot of things changing around us and, and where do we think some of the key things are going into the future world? How does that sound to you, Eric?
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Sounds like a tall order, but let's dive in.
[00:03:52] Speaker C: That's a lot to cover, but we're gonna cover it, man. Let's go ahead and start things off with a story of your choice. Take it away.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: You know, I do have to be just a little bit confidential in terms of getting too deep into it. There's one quick story that comes to mind, but it fits into kind of a larger framework that I use with all the companies that I work with. It's basically a story around human centered design and, and product discovery. So this was a company that did a, basically an email marketing platform, kind of a, you know, a modern day mailchimp. And you know, they had built out this platform. They had kind of reached a, you know, a certain level of growth. They were, they were hitting their Series A, you know, making a few million bucks a year, but had really kind of stalled out. And, you know, their growth was primarily focusing on E commerce. And they really just couldn't clearly enough define how they were better than or differentiated from, again, mailchimp and Mix Panel and all the other email marketing platforms out there. And so, you know, I. They brought me in and I just kind of do what I do, which is I pretend like I'm one of their customers, and I just go through the process or the journey of discovering them and, you know, the whole buyer's journey, right? Like, what is this thing? How do I find it? Did I find it through a blog post? Did I find it on social media? Like, how do I even discover this thing? And what is it that makes me decide, oh, this is something that I'm going to go after versus, you know, something I may already be using. So how does this company present itself from, like, a branding perspective? How does it talk to me and make me feel like I'm the one that they're talking to? Right, that. That I'm their ideal customer? How do they describe the problem that they're helping me solve? And do they do it in a way that uses language that I'm familiar with? Right. Are they speaking technobabble to me or are they speaking my language? And then, okay, so cool, let me check it out. Let me test it. Then we get into the product stuff around onboarding and user experience, and is there friction? Is it frustrating? Or does it really just kind of effortlessly take me to where I want to go, which is, you know, the value and solving my problem and doing it better, faster or cheaper and, you know, taking less time and energy. And so I went through all that, and basically they did very poorly on a lot of different dimensions. And so we. What we started to do was we said, all right, let's do some case studies here. We interviewed maybe a dozen different customers, kind of their. Their, you know, their best customers that they've had, and, you know, discovered that not everybody was having the same experience. Because when you have a platform where it's kind of like, choose your own adventure and you give them a lot of flexibility and a lot of tooling, different customers are going to figure out how to be successful in different ways. And so this was kind of the first big unlock was anytime you're building a platform, you don't really have control over the journey. You're not just, like, sending them down this path on rails. You're giving them a toolkit, a toolbox and saying, you're the craftsman, you figure it out. And so that was kind of the first thing we found is when we talked to customers that were churning that were doing really poorly, it was largely because they weren't using the toolkit in the same way that the very successful customers were. So we said, all right, well, let's model what the best customers are doing, and let's make that into, like, an easy mode so that any new customer coming on board can kind of just click a button and say, I don't know what I'm doing. Show me. And they can basically implement the templates and kind of the same settings and everything that the big dogs are doing. And so immediately what happened was new customers that were coming on board, they launched their email campaigns faster. They got, like, higher response rates, higher open rates, and ultimately their churn rate went down, retention went up. Obviously, they were complaining to customer success a lot less. I mean, just like, kind of, like amazing results with a relatively simple change in the user experience. Right. And then we said, okay, how do we put this on steroids? So we created a whole, like, class. We actually paid those customers that were doing really, really well to teach little modules, little master classes on email marketing, copy and design, and, you know, everything down to, like, scheduling and audience segmentation, all these things. And we basically offered that for free as a part of the platform for onboarding. So anybody who signs up to the platform would not only get kind of all the templates, but then they can, like, take these classes that would teach them how to be like the masters, long story short, or to kind of fast forward a little bit. Grew like gangbusters, Raised a Series B not too much after that, and just really established themselves as a major player in a very crowded space. So that was an example of where we focused on how do we create value by making people's lives easier and by learning from, you know, our best customers and teaching to, you know, to the ones that are just kind of starting out. I kind of have a whole framework around this, but it's basically called, like, discovery led growth. It's all about feedback loops and customer interviews and all this kind of stuff. But it's really about getting super close to your customers and figure out what problem are they trying to solve, how are they trying to solve it today? And being the expert or being the master, bringing those best practices into your platform. Because, you know, if you're the one who's literally building the tool that is supposed to be solving this problem, you should be the Foremost domain expert on how to be successful with it. So I guess maybe a bit of a lesson there is, you should be educating and teaching your customers just as much as you are providing the tools for it.
[00:09:18] Speaker C: That's powerful. Discovery led growth is what you call it. I think it makes tons of sense. There's, I think a little bit of a mis. Misrepresentation about discovery, right. I think there's a. It's very cyclical in the sense that you discover, you grow and expand. Folks forget to go back and rediscover, right? Because there's new, you know, paths they can take and things like that. And I love the discovery led. It is sort of in my mind again, the way I think with this, my crazy frameworky, you know, type of mindset, right. Is you were, you were definitely, you know, mapping out that journey. You created that right model and then you created a mastery around that with masterclass, right? And that to me is a really, I think, good discipline that is easy to overlook because there are companies and entrepreneurs. Tell me if I'm wrong. Companies and entrepreneurs out there that actually will think that they control that journey or will tell them, here's what you should do without actually sitting in, maybe walking through their shoes, watching, mapping and seeing what are the actual, the right paths to, to carve up. And that's a. One area that I wanted to get into with you is in that discovery journey as. As you're sort of stepping through, like what is the ideal path? What are some of the areas that you think folks tend to, you know, fall short or maybe run into some obstacles? Cause that's always. That's not easy. I'm thinking of like complex software, Eric, that might be, you know, has a lot of bells and whistles.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: An analogy I like to use a lot is when we talk about product market fit, it's the like trying to put a square peg in a round hole, but there are no squares and there's no circles.
A problem is a very detailed, complex, nuanced shape right in the way I draw. Just like a big old squiggle, right? With all kinds of random sharp edges and twists and turns. Because we have people, they're humans that are trying to solve problems. And problems are complex and people are complex and solutions are complex. And then we talk about product market fit. So we go on the marketing side. Channels are complex, communication is complex, language is complex. So there's all these complexities that all have to resonate, that have to click and just sing like straight to the customer. That is Hey, I get you. I'm millions of people out there. Millions of ads. Hold on, stop scrolling. I'm talking to you. Right? And so for somebody who's going through their emails and going through their social media and whatever, all of a sudden it's like, whoa, wait a minute, they're talking to me. And wait a minute, they're talking to me about something that I'm thinking about all the time. They're inside my head. And the way that they're talking about it is the language that I use to describe it all the time, down to the expletives. And then when they start talking about all the things that I've tried to do and why it hasn't worked, I'm like, oh, I get it. That's why that didn't work. I, I, I totally understand. Okay, now I'm engaged. Now I'm, I'm leaning in. And so then when I start to actually use the product, it has to fit in my world, right? It has to fit in my environment. Another interesting quick story. So I used to work for a health and fitness company. We were a music platform for gyms and for athletes and all this kind of stuff, right? And we had this mobile app and we were heavily used by runners, like marathon runners, right. And so, you know, we built this user interface and it looks beautiful and it's great and it's all sexy looking. We had a great designer on staff and we'd push it out and then, you know, we'd get all these complaints and people would just say like, I can't. App isn't working. So I said, all right, well, let's actually go test it out. So we actually go to a run and the first thing we notice is you're outside. So I'm Devel, we're, we're designing this solution in our offices with our like perfect lighting. And you never actually take the thing out in the sun and realize like, oh, the contrast isn't that great. And then like, you know, people have those armbands and then, you know, you stick the phone in the armband when you're running and that has like a little plastic kind of semi opaque thing. And so now I'm looking at my, I'm looking at my arm and I'm trying to push a button through a plastic, like a piece of a plastic wrap in the side. And so obviously it was just like, wait a minute, the phone screen interface isn't optimal for this kind of environment. So then we started to think about, well, how could we Create other interfaces, you know. And so then we were plugging, we decided plugging into like Apple Watch, plugging into, you know, making sure the headphone, if you had headphone controls that those, all of those things were. Because nobody is going to stop and pull their phone out of their arm strap to fiddle a button and put it back in again. Another one is connectivity. So when you're at a marathon, right, there's 10,000 people around you all hitting the same cell tower and you might be running through an urban center with buildings and you know your signal is going to be garbage and if your music is cutting out or the signal's cutting out in the middle of your run, you're going to be an upset customer. So we started investing in all of these things like buffering and like low latency and lightweight, you know, streaming protocols, all this kind of stuff that we never would have thought of if we didn't actually get into the shoes of our customers. So again, so discovery led growth is like kind of like anthropology where you gotta go out into the field and really sit down with your customers and not only understand again, what problem they're trying to solve and how much they want to pay for this and that solution, but like what's the world look like around us when we're trying to use this thing and then design a solution that fits within that complex situation. So I say like that squiggly solution that we want to create, it can't be something that you go off and carve and then cram into it. It has to grow organically in that space so that it like fills out all those little nooks and crannies and that's what human centered design and discovery led growth is all about.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: That's terrific for a lot of reasons. One is you're getting them out of the spreadsheet and into the shoes, which I think is super important, right? There's all nuances and things that happen when you're in that, that role playing environment, like the, the screen on the arm and, and all those kind of real life things that you don't appreciate when you're just kind of sketching something out on paper or in a PowerPoint presentation or whatever it is, right? So that is a, a, maybe a bit of a lost art. And so people like, like us, who've been in the product world before, right, who've had to develop products, got some training, but a lot of entrepreneurs don't have that, that product discovery muscle built in. Usually they just have a great idea and then that great idea is what's propelling them forward, right? So in, in this discovery led motion, right? It's going to take time and discipline to do it and get it right. And maybe it might be frustrating that you may not get everything the first time. You probably have to do this a few. And so in there, in this discovery led, have you seen it take anyone the wrong direction because they didn't do it all the way or they thought, oops, actually nevermind, I did it once. I got all the answers, let's go ahead and run with this thing. I'm an entrepreneur, I have no time to sit down and do this multiple times. Have you ever seen anybody kind of take the wrong conclusions from it?
[00:16:00] Speaker A: 100%. You kind of highlighted the two extremes, right? One is somebody who may talk to a couple people and then say, great, they validated my assumptions, let's just go and build it. And then on the other extreme, you have people who get into that kind of like research or analysis paralysis where they think, oh well, we got to keep talking to people, keep talking to people. So this whole thing only works if there is a like reasonable timeframe to actually building and testing something. So like, this isn't just about doing interviews or doing research. It's about building and testing prototypes as well. And so thankfully we've got so many awesome prototyping tools available now that it doesn't take much for us to build, whether it's just a design clickable prototype or something even functional to validate our assumptions and to test out what we're thinking. So you know, I'm a like agile development guy and we tend to work in roughly two week sprints. So I've been able to get clients to a place where within two weeks they can go from I'm curious about something or I have a question to okay, let's spin up some, some interviews or some field testing. Let's get some, get some results, get some insights. Let's test some kind of a prototype and get some sort of data to tell us whether or not we're on the right track. Maybe not if we're right or wrong, but at least where's the signal within a couple weeks. So, and that just makes the whole thing digestible too, because if it's like, no, we don't do research because it takes three months for us to get any answers, you're right. Yeah, you shouldn't do that, you know, but at the same time you shouldn't just completely ignore what your customers aren't telling you and just barrel ahead with whatever ideas in your mind because then you're just building a solution for one for yourself.
[00:17:41] Speaker C: Right? Which is one of the early things we learned. Right? Which is your opinion, while interesting, doesn't really matter. Right. It matters what the customers want and all those key things. And I could see, like, bias creeping in for an entrepreneur who's just quick to pull the trigger and says, oh, great, you validated my idea. Let's go on. And so that balance, a couple weeks, not six months, not nine months. You don't need to aim for perfection here. Right? You're going to keep learning a couple of weeks. I think it's the right balance here. Man. I love the discovery LED approach. I think a lot of folks can really benefit and it doesn't take a huge heavy lift to get going on this. Right. So for the folks listening right now, how would you recommend they get started with this discovery led? What do you think they should do first?
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Just go talk to customers. It doesn't have to be a part of the process just yet. It can sit, like, alongside of it. And then insights will start feeding into your existing product development or design process. So just go talk to customers. That's the. By whatever means necessary. It's like the thing that doesn't scale. I don't care how small or how big you are, if you're not talking to customers, you're out of touch. And your product is gonna be out of touch. Your marketing is gonna be out of touch, and you're gonna beat out by companies that are in touch.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Team, I wanna take a quick pause here to ask you for a huge favor that'll mean a lot to me. Please review and share the show. Share it with your team, your friends, your peers. Not only will it help them stop the guesswork in pricing, but it'll also help you and increase the chances that you'll take action and change for yourself. All right, much love. Now back to the show.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: SaaS especially. But, you know, tech in general is becoming, and already is to a certain degree, commoditized. Anyone can build software using ChatGPT or whatever in a day and throw it out there. So what is going to not only attract. Well, what's going to cut through the noise and attract customers is when the marketing and the messaging really shines through. Right. And again, the only way to do that is to connect with customers and speak their language and really understand them and empathize. And then the solution has to be the one that is that that has sort of the craftsman touch or that is really designed for them and really solves the problem in the most elegant and efficient way. That's not something that you can just sort of slap together. That takes time and it takes iteration and discovery.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: 100% man and high five to that. Talk to your customers. Yeah, it sounds a bit of a cliche, right? We all say that, right? Talk to your customers. I say it, you say it, but it's still critically important. And you'd be surprised. Well, actually, you probably won't be surprised on how many entrepreneurs or businesses or folks don't do it. Right? Or maybe they think they do it, but they're not quite.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: Or they do it once in a while. They do it in a spurt. They say, like, okay, we're doing a new thing. Let's go talk to 10 customers. And then you go spend the next three to six months building. What I'm talking about is you should be talking on average, to have a real customer conversation every single day. It doesn't have to be you. It can be your product lead, it can be a designer, it can be somebody who is integrated into that development process should be having a serious customer interaction five days a week. And that, you know, takes. There's some systems you gotta set up in order to kind of automate that and make it sort of effortless, but it's not that hard. So you've got your email drip campaigns that's dripping out throughout their. Their journey. They just signed up maybe a week later. Maybe they just bought something, maybe they just renewed. Maybe they, you know, showed some indication that they might be churning. Send them some kind of an email that says, hey, we'd love to talk to you. We want to connect you directly with the founder, with our head of product or somebody who wants to really understand, you know, what you're doing when you launch a new feature or new solution. Hey, we want to get your feedback. How is this thing working? So there's all these ways that you can, like, try to get people to get a little bit of their time and automate it so that basically it just falls on your calendar. And you can do like round robin with calendly and all that. So, like, you know, whole team can kind of swarm on it, but just that there's like customer interviews or customer conversations, you know, sprinkling into everybody's calendar throughout the week. And then whatever, wherever you're at can be what you talk about. So, like, people are coming to talk to you. It's like, okay, well, right now we're really trying.
[00:21:44] Speaker C: We're.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: We're really racking our brains about this thing over here, or we're doing some usability testing over here. You can take those conversations wherever you want, but it's just having that, like, funnel of customer interactions that are falling in that you can just now leverage to say, okay, what's our research project for the week?
[00:22:00] Speaker C: I love it. I love it a lot. Because there is working it in and making it a natural part or natural extension of what you do. Let me ask you this, though. Do you have a favorite question, a powerful question that tends to get them talking and get them revealing. Is there something. Some ninja trick there?
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Let's bring it back to pricing a little bit. So we all know, like, the magic wand question, right? If you had a magic wand, like, what would you do to make this problem go away? Or what feature would you like to have? I love that question. And I, like, that's the question for me, that kind of ties into pricing. Because the way I kind of get to it is to say, like, hey, we're talking about some problem here, some solution. And the magic wand is this solution is just gone. In fact, there is no solution. Like, I don't have to deal with any technology. I don't have to download an app. I don't have to put in my credit card. I literally snap my fingers and this thing is just gone. Then I ask, well, how much would you pay for that? Like, I'm holding the. A bag of pixie dust from holding the wand, and I'll sell it to you for whatever price you think it's worth to literally make this problem just magically disappear. And that creates the anchor point, the upper end of what pricing would be for a perfect solution. And then from there, we get into, like, okay, how close to that is the actual solution? And that gets into, like, well, how much effort is it to use it, to get on board, whatever. And then we can kind of say, like, well, are we, like, 50% of the way there? Are we 25% of the way there? And you can literally just do the math to say, all right, well, if they would pay a thousand dollars for the magic wand, and what we're giving them gets them, like, you know, half the way there, then we could charge 500 for it. Now, you know, we always think we're actually closer to it than we really are, but you can actually measure at that point, like, how much time does it really take compared to zero? How many steps does it take? How frustrating is it? How many Decisions do they have to make. And so that's where like, as a product person, you know, we map out the entire workflow with like the boxes and lines and the diamonds and all those diagrams to say like, okay, the Magic Wand is like, there's one box and it's like snap fingers done, you know, and that takes 0.01 seconds. And then there's the actual solution, which takes them 15 minutes. And it take. They have to make three decisions and blah, blah, blah. And then you can create some kind of a, you know, again, an estimate to say, like, all right, well, this is where we are today. This is how much we can charge. And so then in order to get to that optimal pricing, we have to eliminate steps, we have to make it more efficient, user friendly, add additional functionality, automation, AI, whatever, to get to the point where literally you just think of it and it's done.
[00:24:37] Speaker C: I think the Magic Wand question or that version of it is I think, a key thing. Everybody listening should probably be asking this right now, right? One of the things that I love about that though is that it takes away from, hey, can you make this button rounder or can you move this over here on this screen? It gets away from the feature ABC and all those small minutiae things and really gets them to open their mind like, what is it they really want or what is it they really value at the end of the day, which is what you're after. And then sort of that. How far along are you? I think that's the piece a lot of people don't ask, right? So what do you want? How far along are we? That could also give you some insight into, you're solving, you know, you're halfway there, you're quarter of the way there, you're 90% of the way there's can really help you understand how much of that value you can capture based on how much of that, how much of that vision you fulfilled, right? At the end of the day, another.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Thing, it, it unroots them from existing solutions too. So if I'm, if, if there's a solution out there that costs 50 bucks and even if it's garbage, right, they're anchoring the price against $50. They're not anchoring it versus the magic wand. And so I really want to understand how much is the problem worth to them, right? Not how much they think they should pay for a solution, but how much is the problem really worth and anchor it to that to say, how good are we at actually solving that problem? Not basing it against whatever, you know, weird random pricing decisions our competitors have made.
[00:25:56] Speaker C: That's right. Which you'd never want to anchor to their decisions. Right. You're sort of giving them the keys to your kingdom. So I think that's, that's super strong. So everybody, if you had like a customer a day conversation for the next two weeks, five days a week, that's 10 conversations, I guarantee there's going to be some insight in those notes for you to take forward. And so speaking of taking forward, let's move from rewind to play, which is what's going on today. Now, you, you talk to so many different entrepreneurs and folks come to you because they want to grow, right? They want to unlock, they want to continue to, on their journey. And so what are some of the biggest tips and techniques that you're seeing help unlock them and maybe get a little bit more clarity on what they're charging for, on the value they're trying to capture, on the customers they're serving, on the markets they're in. Anything there you can share, that's really become top of mind.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: So everyone's talking about AI right now, and AI is a beast that has a lot of power, but people don't really know how to use it yet and they don't know how to build with it yet. And where I see us as being like, really on the other side of and starting to come down the hype cycle where customers are not only attracted to an AI solution, but they're actually becoming sort of repulsed by a very AI forward solution because it's. A lot of the solutions out there have failed. And the reason for it, again coming from like a product designer perspective, is we don't control the experience. The AI controls the experience and it can go off the rails. There isn't consistency in the experience. So I can talk to ChatGPT or any of these AI solutions and you and I can have the same conversation. But because a just like whatever random stuff is happening in the quantum foam or whatever in the, in the supercomputers or the language that you and I use to interact with it, we're going to have a very different experience versus something that is more, you know, that, that's more a traditional UI design where, you know, you're selecting buttons and dropdowns and so on, where the designers control all of the variables basically, and can control the, you know, the experience that you're going to have. And so there's just been a lot of the hallucinations and a lack of interface. Right. A Completely obtuse interface. Customers are getting really frustrated and disillusioned by it and are churning and then that obviously is hurting the growth of these companies, that's hurting the fundraising in these companies. So we're seeing the first like I would say kind of wipeout of the first generation of post ChatGPT AI companies. And so now the next wave and the folks that are sort of rebuilding are saying like, how do we create a more consistent and really just user friendly experience? And so we're actually creating like, not to get too into the technical stuff, but creating a more bespoke designed project manager or like state machine that's sort of controlling the conversation and then allowing the AI to like have the conversation but keeping it within its boundaries, right? Not to just let it access the whole Internet and talk about any kind of topic, but to give it like a goal and to say, you know, your job right now is only to get this information so that we can move on to the next step in the process. And so it's kind of this blending of like old school and new school technology to create a more consistent experience. So that's what's what I'm helping a lot of, you know, especially all the AI companies right now, but even the non AI companies that think they need AI or like trying to shoehorn AI into it is you are risking everything basically by compromising the user experience and user interface. And just to think that this thing can solve every problem, you know, magically is naive.
[00:29:35] Speaker C: Yeah, there is a lot of magic out there or magic speak when it comes to AI. And so I look at it, there's the reaction of wow, I can't believe it just said that to me. To wtf. I can't believe it just said that to me.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: Right?
[00:29:46] Speaker C: So there's a lot of stuff going on out there. Not all AI is pretty equal and not every product or experience or service is ready for AI. I think there's this massive, hey, everything should be, you know, moving towards AI or adopting it. So what you're saying, and if I'm hearing you right, it's just like, hey, there's, there's focused AI that's making sure that it's doing something specific and valuable and measurable and that people can understand versus kind of the wide open, hey, you know, what should I have for dinner tonight? And then it's just can get, you can get almost anything in the world. So I think there is a, a big shift and I've talked about this earlier this year where we're going from this play I To May I, which is everybody kind of goofing around with AI to now, it's okay, you better step up and deliver me some value, AI Right? Before I'm willing to pay for anything. Before it's willing to be integrated into the product.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: And so now, too, we're moving into the world of agentic AI Right? AI Agent, where we're giving AI Agency, we're giving it control, we're giving it the ability to do things on our behalf. So that's like, I'm giving you my credit card number, and I'm allowing you to book a plane flight or, you know, make purchases for me. I'm allowing you to make phone calls, book me a reservation at a restaurant, or hire a handyman to come over. So that's kind of like. You think about that, right? Like, what I was talking about before making a problem go away is like, hey, you know, I want to take my wife out to a fancy dinner. Well, what do I have to do today? I gotta go on Yelp and I gotta. I gotta research, and I look at the reviews and I look at the price, and I look at the neighborhood and all these sorts of things. I try to figure out, you know, I'm the one in control. Then I have to call and I say, okay, what time? I look at my schedule. Okay, fine. Versus the. AI Knows me. It knows my calendar, knows my preference, knows my wife's preferences, knows our dietary restrictions. And I can just say, hey, AI, book me a reservation for my anniversary, you know, your choice. And it'll. It'll call and it'll talk to a person and it'll say, hi, I'm booking a table for two, and I wanted at this date at this time, and she's a pescatarian, and he doesn't eat red meat or whatever it is, and. And they really like the table by the window or whatever. And all I have to do is just maybe say one thing down to, like, I've got a camera in my fridge that sees that I'm out of eggs, and it just, like, orders eggs. And I don't even have to ask it, it just does it. Or like, once a week, it just orders groceries from Instacart or whatever, and it does it by scanning the fridge. And it knows what I. The brand and the size and everything, and it just, like, places the order. That's the promise of AI but we're still a long way off from being able to deliver anything close to that. And until. So I'm speaking to the founders out there. If you are going to ask your customers to trust you to that level, to take control and to make purchases and so on, you better make damn sure that that thing is not going to go off the rails. And that's hard. And that's the hard, that's the frontier that we're at right now in product development is how do we solve that hard problem of got this really cool magical tool that kind of goes insane sometimes. And like now we want to give it control and give it agency. Don't mess it up because if you do it's going to sour the entire industry and we're going to see, we're going to see stories. I mean, because wouldn't that be funny if my fridge orders a thousand cartons of eggs or something? Not funny. Like my self driving car drives off a cliff. That's where we're at right now.
[00:33:10] Speaker C: That is where we're at. It kind of reminds me of this news article or this news anchor that was on just saying something on TV and then the Alexa was listening. And this is not even like the AI level, like not, this is pre chat GPT. Right. The news said something and then the Alexa ordered like a bunch of stuff and sent it over. Right. So there is this like this open ended piece of going off the rails and then some of the consequences could be, you know, funny but some of them could be not funny like you're saying. Right. And so, you know, how do we manage that as we start to give something control which I think you, you called it out and it got me thinking a little bit. It kind of planted a seed in my head is how much control in the experience or in, in context and information you want to give AI and being very explicit about that and just carefully watching and maybe not going, you know, full swing to the right but kind of moving your way through that, that, that answer of how much control do we give it? That's a big one. I don't know how to solve that though. I'm sitting here thinking like how do I figure that out? But do you see any, any frame or anything that anybody kind of thinks about when they're trying to dip their toe into AI or trying to see if this journey works for them?
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I think again, I mean the stuff I'm describing is like this is the, the absolute frontier of, of new product development right now that you know, the YC company, the Y Combinator companies and so on are working on. But for, for most of us especially Ones who maybe we're not developing an AI solution. We're trying to figure out how to blend AI into our, into our products. It is, you know, keep it in a cage, right? Like start small, give it a little bit of responsibility just to maybe facilitate an interface a little bit. So like, let's go back to like chatbots, right? Because that's all we're talking about here, is chatbots. Chatbots have been around for quite some time and when chatbots first came out, you had to program everything that they said. They didn't generate any kind of conversation on their own. It was just, I'm taking you down a branching pathway of a conversation to give you some kind of solution. The plus side of that is it worked, right, that you could get them to the answer quickly. But the downside of it is it couldn't account for all the things that people would want to say and ask about. So again, it's all about kind of maybe blending things at this point. But I would rather, let's just say as a, as a user, I would rather use a dumb chatbot that only did a limited number of things, but did it really well, than an open ended conversation thing that obviously didn't do whatever it was, especially whatever, right? So, yeah, so start small. Don't get sucked into the magic of it. It's just a tool. So if you're going to use a tool like know how to use the tool, know how it works, know how to control it, know how to make it do what it needs to be done, and above all else, make sure that it actually makes the customer experience better, not worse. Just because everybody else is doing AI doesn't mean that you need to do it or doesn't mean that it needs to be. You know, replace everything else in your, in your product, Find a niche or a little segment of it where conversing with an AI or using AI is objectively and consistently better than whatever's out there today.
[00:36:22] Speaker C: It gets trendy, but it's still a tool at the end of the day, right? So making sure you do it in pieces. I think that's a fantastic place to land here because a lot of folks are probably thinking about it, should I do it? There's infrastructure, it's proliferating very quickly, but there's. You really should stop and think about how am I using this tool integrated in a thoughtful, very sequential path. That means, is this additive to what we're trying to do? I don't want to have AI just for the sake of having AI. Right. At the end of the day, we took it a fast forward end play at the same time because we're now looking into the future. So all is good, man. I wanted to give you one last opportunity here to give everybody listening, these entrepreneurs, these founders, one last message that you want them to take home.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: The theme of today is around empathy. It's around connecting with your customers, getting to know them better than they know themselves. That's a Steve Jobs paraphrase, right? Get to know your customers better than they know themselves so that you can anticipate their needs and design really elegant solutions to their problems that make their lives easier. Save them time, save them money. There are thousands upon thousands of technology tools out there that do various things and customers are pretty burned out, you know, and we're seeing, you know, the SaaS market contracting, we're seeing funding contracting. I'm sure every single one of your listeners, if not right this moment in the very recent past or not too distant future, is stressing about their next round of funding, or maybe even their first round of funding and, you know, cutting through that noise and actually solving a problem, you know, better than the competitors or better than existing solutions. It takes a craftsman mentality, right? It takes really understanding the problem. You're solving the ergonomics of the problem and designing something that just is really like beautiful and elegant and, and works really well. Then you can charge whatever the hell you want for it. So again, to get back to pricing, right, like if you're not first, you're last, right? If you, if you can't be the premium solution, then it's a race to the bottom and nobody wants to be the cheapest. You want to be the best so you can charge the most. Well, how do you be the best? Because you're the one that knows the customer better than anyone else. You're the one that's the master at this. You've got all the best practices. You, you understand the ins and outs of this thing better than anyone and can design a solution better than anybody else.
[00:38:38] Speaker C: Can you maybe want to go build a product right now? I love it. I love it.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Anytime, man. Let me know.
[00:38:42] Speaker C: No, man, but, but you're right. The ergonomics before the economics, I think it makes a lot of sense that that makes me. Yeah, it makes me really think. I think everyone here really would love to apply this in their businesses to help them grow. You've been phenomenal. I feel like you've done something like this before, Eric, so thank you for.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: I always say I'm a. I'm a Sherpa. I've been up and down this mountain more times than I can count. And you know, every client, every founder that comes to work with me, I'm just like, don't trip over that rock. Don't fall off that cliff, you know, and help them get to the top.
[00:39:13] Speaker C: That is it, man. I applaud that work. I want to invite you back for the future, see how things are evolving. Would you be willing to come on back on the show?
[00:39:21] Speaker A: Of course. Anytime.
[00:39:22] Speaker C: Terrific, man. I have one last question for you before I let you run. This is my favorite question to really understand a little more behind Eric. And my question is, what was your favorite jam, favorite song growing up? Don't overthink it just. Is there a big song that just lights you up every time you hear it?
[00:39:38] Speaker A: It's got to be Metallica. Wherever I may roam, that is just a banger that just keeps on banging.
[00:39:45] Speaker C: Oh, fitting.
I love it. And shout out to Metallica. That's fantastic. Eric, man, you've been great. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your. Your wealth of wisdom and team. That was Eric Weiss. He runs chaos to clarity. Follow him. His content is amazing. You heard some of it here. And I think if you're thinking about how to unlock, how to unstuck yourself, I think Eric is a fantastic resource for that. So just take everything you learned today, try to apply it, get 1% better, try to improve how you're capturing that value, and remember, stop guessing and start growing. Until next time, thank you and much.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Love for listening to the Street Pricing podcast with Marcos Rivera. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And don't forget to like and subscribe. If you want to learn more about capturing value, pick up a copy of Street Pricing on Amazon. Until next time.
