Claudine Claudio
Welcome to the Half Geek, half Human Podcast, where we explore the intersections of technology, business, and life. This podcast is powered by Atiba, a custom software and IT services company in Nashville, Tennessee. Now to your hosts Annakate Ross and Joey Baggott.
Annakate Ross
Hey everybody. Today on the show we’re joined by Josh Oakes, a product marketing and customer acquisition guru. Josh is the creator and principal of Who First? Which helps its clients better understand its customers through a framework we’ll talk more about today. Josh is a friend and colleague of mine. I’ve personally worked with him for several years now and I’m so glad to speak with him here on the podcast today. So welcome, Josh.
Josh Oakes
Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.
Annakate Ross
Yeah, awesome. Well, let’s dig into this. Tell us a little bit more about Who First.
Josh Oakes
I would be thrilled to do so. Let’s first though conduct a little exercise, or the first half of a little exercise for our listeners and everybody on the call. And that is I’m going to give you a new business initiative, top down, coming straight from the CEO. And that initiative that you’ve just been handed is the CEO, in this case is your partner, who has said, next Tuesday we are hosting a dinner party. So, as we continue, we’ll talk a little bit about who first and whatever else comes up. But pay attention to having been given that critical initiative, what the first couple things that pop into your head are, how are you going to make that initiative happen? So now we’ll come back to that. But to answer your question, what is who first? Hopefully the name is a little bit of a clue. The philosophy here is that we need to think about who the audience is whenever we are talking about marketing, customer acquisition, product development. If you’ve ever picked up a sales or marketing or business book, or seen blog posts or LinkedIn posts, or increasingly these days, responses from chat GPT that tell you, here’s how to solve a business challenge like marketing, customer acquisition, product development, right. The step one or the first chapter of those books are always say, well, first it’s important to really understand your buyer. What are they afraid of? What keeps them up at night? What is their day like? And then for talking about a business book. It goes on for 100 and 5200 pages and ten more chapters with very specific tactics and advice and even templates and things that kind of tell you what you should do, whatever the premise of the book is. But doesn’t give another thought ever to how you develop that understanding of your customer, where you should focus what aspects are the most critical for being successful with the tool. And if you skip that very fundamental foundational work that is the first step or the first chapter of every kind of sales, marketing, product instruction out there, you’re going to struggle to put the rest of those tactics into successful deployments, right? Those books are all correct, even chat GPT when it tells you step one to successful marketing campaign or product development is to really understand your customers, but not just with platitudes or reductive personas or targeting criteria. I call that the chapter one problem. And Who First is an approach to extracting insights from your customers, developing a documented, validated actionable measurable understanding of who your customers are that you can then deploy in those scenarios, whether we’re talking about sales or marketing or product development.
Annakate Ross
Okay, so let me make sure I understand this. Chapter one is telling you, make sure you know who your customers are, but it’s not giving you much of advice on how to go about that. The framework helps to create really a framework to understand who your customer is in a more thorough manner, right.
Josh Oakes
And the core of it comes down to we need to talk to our customers. If you’re established business that has customers, we go and interview the customers who are successful. To be more specific, we equip your team to be able to do that on an ongoing basis. And the components of the framework help businesses set that up as a process with templates and how to conduct those interviews effectively, where to focus, the kind of things you need to learn. If you look at a typical marketing persona, it’s going to have things like what social media networks this person uses. A lot of them have for some reason started to have like a Myers Briggs profile, which is the introvert extrovert continuum. And with who first. We create what we call audience profiles that are distinct from personas because your understanding of your customer needs to be load bearing in every sort of respect, right? Like, I get shown a lot of personas, people who say, we think we understand who our customers are, but we’re having trouble putting into action. They show me these personas and it says, oh, this executive uses Facebook and Instagram and this executive uses Twitter. And I say, how do you use that to make any sort of business decisions like trying to reach out to these folks? Are you saying that you run Twitter ads for executive B and you run Facebook ads for executive A? They say, oh no, we just put that on there so that we can kind of understand them. Right. But here’s the thing, functionally, everybody uses Facebook, right? So what’s the point of putting it on a profile unless it is like a distinctive aspect of how you understand and reach out to that person and you validated it, right. If you’re just pulling these things out of the air, you might as well say that they like driving a clown car. It has nothing to do with reality.
Joey Baggott
I will say I do sales here at a Atiba. I’ve done sales for around 12 years. I’ve done it ever since I stepped out of college and I’ve read so many of these books. And when I was reading the notes and the outline of today’s show, it did kind of stick out to me that now, I have heard you explain this chapter one problem, and it makes me think back. And I can’t get into specifics of every single book, but I do feel like that the entire first chapter is telling you to understand your customer, but it’s not telling us how to understand our customer. It’s telling you it’s more of a do as I say, not as I do. I feel like sometimes, but hearing you explain it makes sense, and you’ve kind of validated this problem that’s out there that no one I feel like is talking about, that all these books just seem to be a copy and paste of another book. And it’s just like, hey, you need to get to know your customer. Well, how the heck do I get to know my customer?
Josh Oakes
Right? Exactly. And I won’t name names, but I’ve kind of made a hobby of collecting the books that start like that. I just go down the business book section and flip it open and find them. I have a whole shelf here behind me of the books that are pulled out because they are chapter one problem books. They’re not organized by topic. They’re organized by look at these terrible first chapters.
Annakate Ross
The other thing I can say on that, when I’ve seen personas developed for various marketing campaigns over the years, a lot of times it’s gut instinct. I think there isn’t any kind of proper analysis that’s been done or any prescribed method to gather info. I mean, there have been times where there are various focus groups and surveys people have filled out to try to grab some of that. But a lot of times, I think the summary or the definition of who your audience is or who your customer is sort of just your gut, and it’s not based on much else. I like the idea that you have here of making it a more prescribed manner of getting this information from various resources.
Josh Oakes
Yeah. And the thing that’s a real shame, I think, with that is a lot of businesses do know their customers, or know them generally, but the people who are tasked with creating personas, I can tell you because I ask these businesses when I have conversations with them, when is the last time you spoke to a customer? Like, who was a stranger? Not like your nephew or whoever, who also happens to be a customer. Right. When is the last time? Usually, it’s never right. The marketing department does not in customer acquisition scenario, marketing department does not view their job as talking to customers. Sales does. In a product development scenario. Most product leaders realize that there is some form of talking to customers, but they tend to be data heavy. They focus on surveys and things like that for initial information gathering, which is the wrong way to go about it if you have an existing customer base, even if you have to start with a gut feeling or when I have to do this with organizations. I call it a hypothesis, an audience hypothesis, rather than an audience profile. If you have a regular flow of customers, you have a fantastic tool for validating your hypothesis about who your customers are right in front of you, and that is you’re probably doing an NPS or a post purchase survey or an onboarding survey. Or if you have a high touch implementation scenario, you have a bunch of opportunities to collect that information from people right then and there. You can either develop your new personas or take your existing personas and create a couple of survey questions that try to tease out whether you’re on the right track there. I write questions like this for organizations all the time. It’s a multiple-choice question that says just pick a facet of your persona. What was the biggest challenge that you were trying to solve by buying our product or signing up for our service or whatever, and ABCDE and have those be customer language that are distinct across your different segments. Right. So this is not like, don’t put price on there. It’s always wrong. But I was trying to solve this problem, or we had this big audacious goal that I needed to reach and so on. Right? And if you’re closing, if you have a lot of customer throughput, you can validate or invalidate those personas really quickly just by asking your existing customers, look and see in your customer database. Like, is this persona actually represented among the actual people that pay us money?
Joey Baggott
Yeah, I think that’s one of the problems when it comes to the sales world and previous jobs that I’ve had. I feel like you identify your typical buyer more than you identify a buyer persona. You don’t really get into the psychology of that buyer. You are more just identifying the type of person, the type of role, and then you kind of send your organization out to attack that role. From an outbound sales perspective, I do appreciate what you’re saying about understanding the customer better, interviewing the clients, which is something that’s probably not done enough in a lot of the world, because I feel like we could talk about this one topic, our first topic now, all day.
Josh Oakes
Absolutely.
Joey Baggott
But one thing, Josh. What did Josh used to do? How did you get to the point where you are now? What was your journey leading up to? Who first?
Josh Oakes
Yeah, great question. I was born at a young age, the most recent transition. I’ve been doing this for a while, but I was kind of head of client services for a consultancy here in Nashville where we all are, and transitioned from there into self-employment, kind of as an advisor and consultant around customer acquisition and both as the head of client services and then self-employed. Working with companies would come to us and me with these big challenges that kind of didn’t fit into a specific bucket, right? They would say, like, we have a problem with our go to market, or with our marketing automation, or with our analytics optimization. We’ve got these bottlenecks and we’re not sure how to tackle them because they don’t neatly fit into a silo. And we would tackle and solve those problems. Some of it would be like highly technical, okay, we need to build a data lake, we need to get the data in there, and then we need to get a bi tool so that you can analyze it, and self-service analytics, all of this stuff. It’s not exciting. I would work with these organizations three months, six months, twelve months longer sometimes, solving these challenges. And we would get a solution in place, we would wipe the dust off our hands, stand back, hands on hips, look at the situation, and then nothing would change. And they would say, I thought if we got analytics, everything would get sorted out. I thought if we figured out how to optimize this, everything would be sorted out. I thought if we set our marketing attribution up correctly, everything would be sorted out. So then we would go and try to figure out, okay, this thing was broken, right? Like the engine wasn’t running and now it’s running, but you’re not getting where you need to go, so what’s going on, right? And time after time, the investigation would lead us to the conclusion that you don’t know what you’re doing because you don’t know who your customers are, right? Like you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall hoping that this campaign works or that this new approach to paid media works, or adding this new feature to a product would work, right? We’re doing the activity, but we don’t have a fundamental understanding of who the people that we’re serving are and how to meet their needs. And so you could think of it as like an existential, a B test to try to survive as a company, right? Like, well, let’s try this and see if that works. Let’s try that and see if that works. Instead of just going to a customer and say like, hey, we have you as a customer now, what can we do to just make this massively more valuable? What problem are you trying to solve? And so on. I’m reducing that because I had developed the interview approach yet there. But then we would start to be able to, now that the engine is running, get the plane going in the right place, get the people where they needed to be. And instead of just throwing features at a customer or throwing ad dollars at Onboarding and users, they could frame that, understand the problem that the customer has, the world they are trying to get to, and what the traps along that path would be. Once we solve that fundamental, then it’s off the races, they can actually start putting that engine to work. And so the who first framework grew out of solving that problem over and over and seeing the commonalities and putting that together into a tool set.
Annakate Ross
Yeah, and I want to ask some questions about product marketing because that’s something that comes up, or product ownership rather, is something that comes up in our business a lot. But just before we do that, in terms of how you built the framework, you’ve been in marketing in various capacities for many years now, but how did you go about building the framework? It was probably I would guess it was an Iterative response, having experience with so many different companies. But what best practices did you bring together to build this framework that you’re now helping your customers with?
Josh Oakes
There’s a lot of ways that that question can go. So let me give you a I’ll give you a nitty gritty overview and then we can decide what the best way to proceed from there would be. When I started working with clients and saying like, well, let’s just call up customer X, who’s super successful with, with you and figure out like, what works great, why they are so happy. Right. You would think that I’d suggested, like, moving the corporate headquarters to Antarctica companies when you say things like that, but you very quickly figure out like, okay, well, we obviously need to set expectations about what the conversation is going to be like. And then when you try to transition that to say, like, okay, let’s get the product leadership or let’s get the marketing leadership to figure out what the commonalities among these customers are, what their problem state is, what the future that they envision is, and so on. Let’s try to figure out have your directors talk to ten customers, which is where you start. The questions that I would get back would be like, wait, how many interviews do we need to do? Who should do the interviews? What do we ask? These questions that you get back, they’re pretty predictable. And so to construct the framework, it would just set those pins up and knock them down, right? Like identify who the most effective people in an organization to do the interviewing would be. Give them a framework for asking the questions, which means you need to know what kind of information to extract is the most valuable for the organization, for the challenges they are trying to solve. So the framework consists at a high level of the interview, the Learn Who interview, and how the materials to get to equipping a team to run those interviews and then extract what you learn from it. Creating and validating the audience profiles, which again, if you want to think of them as personas, that’s the closest parallel. And then techniques for validating them and then how to put them into action. Because if you haven’t worked with something like that in the past, it can be a little bit challenging. Does that give you enough of a sort of overview?
Annakate Ross
Yeah, it’s nice to put it into actual terms of what this thing looks like once you get into it. Let’s talk a little bit about product leadership on this. Every time I hear you talk about who first or when we start kind of discussing the framework, my mind always goes back to this concept of product leadership or like the role of the product owner. This is a concept we talk with our clients about quite a bit. It’s the person in the custom software build. It’s the person who’s owning the end product. Whether it’s a mobile app or a web application or some sort of plugin or additional new feature or something to an existing tool, the person who is the product owner is often the client contact. The person that I, as a project manager, am working with to iron out the requirements, do the QA testing, that kind of thing. But one thing that I’ve found is people go about this in really different ways and it’s probably worth I pulled a definition of kind of what this person is too, just for the sake of the discussion. But in the Scrum methodology, the Scrum product owner is usually a project’s key stakeholder. It’s typically someone from a marketing or product management perspective or it’s the lead user of a system and they have a deep understanding of users, the marketplace, competitors, and trends. So, when we’re building something, you come at it with you’re building something to solve a problem for your customers. And the person serving in the product role really needs to make sure that they’re understanding the customers. And people go about this in really different ways. Sometimes the person who’s helping gets the product built isn’t that close to the customer. We end up asking a lot of questions kind of in hindsight, and this is going to a lot of the conversation we’ve already had here today, but I just kind of wanted to hear your thoughts. I know you’ve served as a product owner role on a few projects I’ve worked on before and have worked at both ends of this challenge. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on product ownership, how that fits in with your framework and kind of how one goes about that.
Josh Oakes
Yeah, the terminology, depending on how much of a sort of religious war about development practices you want to get into, the terminology varies. Product Owner product Manager if you’re working with a small company, that role might be a director of product or product management or VP, et cetera. But really my observation is this is kind of a GIF versus GIF language thing, right? Like there’s a lot of inks build around. Is this a product owner responsibility or not? I just try to circumvent the entire discussion because it’s not very productive. But I just generally use the terminology product leadership because somebody is in charge of leading that product to profitability and satisfied users or customers. The challenge is often that I can imagine in a custom software scenario that the stakeholder in the relationship or the engagement is probably actually somebody who’s kind of at the signing authority at the executive level, but the person who’s down in the day to day is going to be somebody else, right. And when you are working with multiple stakeholders on the other side of a project like that, making sure that what’s in each individual person’s head aligns on the client side on the people who need the software. And that that is effectively communicated with you all as the team that is building the software. If you just constrain the conversation to requirements, obviously that’s a major source of misunderstanding and a lot of people trying to, a lot of work goes into trying to create a shared documented understanding of what we need this system to do. Who first? I apply it in a product scenario all the time doing it right now because to use the airplane and engine analogy, a product that works, an engine that runs are necessary, but not sufficient kind of requirements to have a successful project, right? Like if your plane can take off and land safely and get people places, that’s fantastic. If people buy tickets for Portland and instead of Portland, Oregon, you deposit them in Portland, Maine, then you are fundamentally failing at delivering value for your customers, right? Every product has a similar distinction, right? Like if you’re making I’m just going to let’s think of an example about small business accounting software. Super boring, with apologies to anybody who’s running small business accounting software company or product development initiative. But what a small business accounting software? Or let’s even tack on HR. What it needs to do is fairly straightforward, right? Like help you. I’m not an accountant, so maybe I picked a bad example. But you need to keep your books. You need to track expenses and income, accounts receivable, et cetera. HR, you need to onboard people, you make sure they’re getting paid, that you’re doing taxes correctly. It’s not super engaging, but it’s super critical for every business, right? But completing all of those functions successfully on a daily basis is table stakes. For that you can’t differentiate by saying like, yeah, we’re exactly 100% compliant and therefore we’re the best solution for you, right? Like a user who is the needs of a small business for small business accounting software, like let’s say a plumber who has ten employees and needs to track inventory et cetera, and a law firm with 25 attorneys or something like that have very different needs functionally, but also from a needs met perspective. Right. The creating audience profiles helps you differentiate what the desired future state of those users and purchases are and meet their needs more effectively. Right? If your software offers inventory management, that’s great for the plumber, doesn’t matter for the attorneys, right? Presumably I’m also not an attorney, but a plumber is worried about losing inventory or losing track of pricing what was paid for those materials and charging for them correctly, not important need for the attorneys. I’m trying to be abstract to be more accessible for more of your listeners. Hopefully the example is clear. But I am worried about losing money on inventory is not a functional spec. Right. It is an understanding of the decision makers and the users that needed to be captured and accounted for both during your marketing and onboarding for those folks, but also in their day-to-day experience of using the product.
Joey Baggott
Sorry, Annakate, I didn’t mean to talk over you, but I had a question that kind of came up when you were talking about that because you’ve talked a lot about kind of the consulting with these clients and talking to them about their buyer personas and how you need to market this product. You’ve got the product that works. It’s great. But to take a step back to more focus on the people you’re consulting.
I kind of see there being issues with adoption of the process of when you’re talking to a client where you have some maybe on the executive level that would agree with your framework and how it’s laid out. But then you have the boots on the ground, the people that are actually out there dealing with clients every day that may disagree with some things in your framework. I imagine that from the ownership of your product that you’re also having to fight that internal battle. Or am I completely off base? Because I look at, even Atiba you’ve got a lot of different people with a lot of different opinions and personalities. When you’re coming in with some big ideas and establishing how you’re going to market your business, how you’re going to market your product, that there’s even a lot of challenges internally that you’re having to deal with before you can even execute the full framework.
Josh Oakes
You are on the right track. I wouldn’t say that it’s that much of a fight. The way to help this is well, let me go up one level and say a key component within the who first framework is that is understanding and documenting the desired future state of your users or customers and then helping them envision you as part of a world where they’ve achieved that desired future state. A very boots on the ground example of how we create that desired future state for folks in the product world. Here’s a great example and how I go about this, which is to help people kind of understand that some folks are just bought in on like, look, we haven’t new leadership, we haven’t talked to customers in 18 months, right? Like, we have no idea what we don’t know that’s not going to convince somebody kind of in the trenches to take on this new discipline that they’ve never done before. And they have those kinds of questions that I, what do I ask them? How many? I have to talk to customers, like, that’s not my job is we take an example of a piece of work that the team produces and with hypothetical audience profiles illustrate how they can streamline their workflow and produce better results. And this is very hands on, depending on the context of the organization, the way that they approach work. But a great example on the product development side is let’s take a user onboarding experience, right? It’s a critical time for most software products, particularly if you’re a freemium or just a free app, right? If you don’t get people through that onboarding, you don’t have them as users. And there’s a lot of products where onboarding is absolutely essential to some degree. The way that a lot of teams design onboarding, because I’ve been through this exercise with them, is they say, okay, well, here’s the things that we want our users to be able to do during onboarding, because they align with what data we need to capture or information that we need. Here’s the things that they absolutely must do. Now, make that as easy for them as possible and then let’s measure the success rate. However, we measure them getting through onboarding and see how it works. And then the UX team comes back with some designs of the steps of the forms and the permission that you need to grant for your in the case of a mobile app, right, maybe you need to grant location and a couple of other things. Let’s take the small business accounting and the plumber for example. You need to set up your inventory and maybe it’s out there scanning items that onboarding flow comes back from the UX team with maybe amazing design, maybe absolute best practices, maybe world class micro copy. But the consideration of like, look, I am doing this because maybe we have identified a subsegment of users who did not have inventory management previously and we’re kind of doing in their heads and have lost a bunch of money and so now they are in an avoidance. We call that first, we call that running from a tiger. You only decide to change for one of two reasons. You’re running for a trophy; you’re maximizing or you’re running away from a tiger. They’re being driven by, look, I took a bath of whatever, $50,000 last year in inventory that we didn’t bill for. Knowing that motivation when you send that onboarding flow to the UX team, instead of just generic UX copy, admittedly, maybe world class design, great flows, et cetera, you can provide onboarding context for this user that is oriented around like, look, this is here. You’re doing this to get a solid foundation, never lose money again, always know where your inventory is, all of this stuff, right? Contextualizing for that person, here’s why we’re asking for location. Say your 2000 units of this are here, right? Here’s why this is why we’re asking you. I don’t know. I’m reaching way back into my inventory experience. But if this was all purchases a lot with the same cost or whatever, right, that’s a terrible onboarding experience. Inventorying all your items, right? But taking a specific necessary experience and saying like, look, it isn’t just important our users aren’t going to be successful if they only are able to complete the task. We must support their entire up and down emotional journey during that path. And we must contextualize it with the goal that they are trying to accomplish so that when the flow comes back and you have a dead end on that flow, where an error has occurred, we haven’t just said like, oh, UX copy goes there, right? We’ve said, okay, this person now has hit this dead end. Are they going to be frustrated? Are they going to feel like they have just lost all their inventory scanning work or whatever? And so how do we contextualize that aspect of the experience to show them, right? Like if that example, if they took a bath on inventory, we need to be bending over backwards to ensure that we are precise, we are accurate, we can keep track of all this stuff, right? If you throw an error into that flow, you’re going to, without providing that additional context within the experience, without saying if your error messages are cheeky, saying, like, whoops, we messed this up, but we still have all of your inventory, you entered 12,000 units or whatever, all that’s been saved. Then instead of panic, you are reassuring them with the error message and so on, right? So, I’m building on maybe not a fantastic example here, but when people say, well, what’s the point of deep understanding of our customers? The example is like, okay, well, let’s find where you have a breakdown now, or let’s find a process and let’s put what we learn into practice hypothetically in this scenario so that you understand. Like, this is how your job is going to be easier as a UX designer, for example, that empathy for the user isn’t going to live just in the head of product leadership or just in the head of the stakeholder with the client. When you get the assignment next time for a flow, as we are building the software, it’s going to say here are the profiles that we are targeting and here is what their biggest priority is in this context. And so instead of things getting kicked back with like, well, this needs to be more user friendly or whatever coming from the client, I don’t know what to do with that. But if we have identified here’s what’s most important to all these folks as they’re going through this process, you take care of that clearly cleanly and with that shared understanding on the front end of the process.
Annakate Ross
Yeah. And I think that really that speaks to my mind, keeps going to the importance of the planning stage. At the outset of a custom software build, we’re planning in that we’re gathering requirements, we’re making sure we understand the functional aspects of whatever it is we’re building. But even prior to that, there’s a planning component that should have happened on the client side where they really know some of these pain points and problems that their customers are facing and they’re building something that will accommodate that and have already maybe started having those conversations internally. From a UIUX perspective. I love the idea of kind of weaving that theme throughout so it’s more meaningful to the client both just kind of anecdotally and also the features of the product solve their problem as well.
Josh Oakes
Yeah. So that’s a great time to say, so the dinner party is coming up, right? What were the first couple of things that you thought, okay, we have this critical initiative, it’s a dinner party. What needs to happen in order to make that a success?
Annakate Ross
I mean, I can go first. My first thought was who’s hosting it, who are we inviting? Where is it going to be held? What do I wear? Those sorts of things are all coming top of mind. What about you, Joey?
Joey Baggott
My mind’s a little selfish. I have celiac disease, so whenever I’m hosting a meal of any sort of anybody’s coming over to the house that I don’t already know, I’ll ask like, hey, do you have any allergies, any sensitivities we need to be aware of? It’s a little bit different from Annakate’s, but that’s just because I have that experience and I know that if I were going to a dinner party, I would love for someone to ask me like, hey. And it happens all the time. My friends have gotten to know me well enough. They’ll say, hey, is this okay for you to eat? Or if it’s someone new, just like, hey, do you have any allergies? Anything that you cannot eat? It would resonate so much with me. So, when you start talking about dinner, anytime food is involved, my mind goes like, just keep that gluten away from me and I’m a happy camper.
Josh Oakes
Yeah, those are great responses, Joey. We’ll do a follow up where we swap some recipes because I have been gluten free for twelve years or something now. I can empathize with that. The grade that I’m going to give you on that exercise, I didn’t tell you I’m going to grade you, but because your responses were so much better than typical, I’m going to give you both a B on that. The responses that if you catch somebody when they aren’t trying to be diplomatic in their responses, particularly you will get things like, oh, I immediately knew, like, oh, I have to get the carpets cleaned. Right? Or like, oh, what are we going to serve for the menu? Or how many courses desserts? Some people will say, is it appropriate to have wine at this? Do I need to go get some wine? And so on. Right? There’s a lot of details that need to happen to make a dinner party come together. Maybe in my case, I have two giant dogs. It’s like, well, what are we going to do with the dogs? The description of like, next Tuesday we’re hosting a dinner party can mean a lot of things. Right? It can mean the six-year-old wants to have four friends over for a fancy dinner for a birthday. Right? It can mean, oh, a new family moved into the neighborhood, so we’re going to have them over for dinner just to welcome them on Tuesday. It can mean I don’t know what million other things classic sitcom set up, right? Oh, the boss is coming over for dinner, right? Kind of thing. Not sure that happens anymore, if it ever did. But each of those dinner parties has drastically different needs. Right. And who we are hosting is the number one thing. Right. If it’s six-year old’s birthday party, do not let me just be clear for our listeners, do not bring wine to that dinner party. Right. But what’s the birthday cake need to be is a super valid question. Right. The details of what you need to do all fall out from that. Dinner party is your product, whether you are building it from custom software or whether you are marketing it in customer acquisition scenario, whose needs you are trying to solve need to be the number one thing that you consider. Right. So, like, you both gave me empathetic answers about who these attendees are going to be. And that is how you build a successful product. It’s how you have a successful dinner party. It’s how you’re successful in life. So that’s the illustration, right, of why this is applicable in that scenario.
Annakate Ross
There are so many different avenues that just something simple as having a few people over for dinner seems simple on its face, but there’s a lot of different trails you can go down.
Josh Oakes
Now you need to make small business accounting, HR and inventory software. How many more details and audiences do you need?
Annakate Ross
Yes. Seriously? Well, awesome. Josh, this has been an excellent interview. I’ve really enjoyed diving more into the who first framework. Where can people learn more about this.
Josh Oakes
A great place is LinkedIn. You will find me. Well, what I probably do over there is snark about why people don’t want to just listen to their customers that.
Annakate Ross
You do help them. I enjoy your LinkedIn post very much.
Josh Oakes
Yeah. But I’m Josh Oakes over there at LinkedIn and I predominantly talk about how important it is to understand your customers because they’re the ones with the money and how you can do it. That’s a great place to find me and start a conversation.
Annakate Ross
Excellent. We’ll drop the link to your profile into the show notes after this as well.
Josh Oakes
Great. Yeah.
Joey Baggott
And thank you so much, Josh. Thank you, everybody, for listening and have a great rest of the day.
Claudine Claudio
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Half Geek, Half Human podcast. Make sure to follow the half geek, half human podcast on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. We’ll see you next time.