 for United States government small business innovation research or also known as SBIR program awardees. Rachel's expertise and experience makes her a valuable asset to any startup or to a small or medium-sized business. She has a proven track record of success in leading large-scale projects developing and implementing business strategies and building and managing high-performing teams. Prior to founding BVV, Rachel led numerous large-scale projects worldwide, checked us out Tesla, Inc., including the company's first Gigafactory, flagship showroom construction in Japan, a $1.2 billion state compliance program launch, and a $37.5 million education and workforce development initiative. Wow. In addition to that, Rachel's 30-year Navy career included key posts at sea and ashore, such as principal advisor to the chief of Naval operations and the master chief petty officer of the Navy. So without further ado, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce every one of you to Rachel Costello. Rachel? Right. Hi, everybody. Rachel Costello here. Super excited to be talking to you today and talk about one of my passion project, which is customer discovery. So whenever, should I go ahead and start, Nick? Yes, you should. Share your screen with us, please. This is going to be a very interactive presentation, so please feel free to come up and ask me questions or drop a question in the chat box, and then Nick or Michael will take care of that. So what you learned today is customer discovery concept, business model canvas, creating your persona or avatar, interview basics, assumptions, validation, and interacting with total strangers. Like I said, if you want to ask questions, feel free. You have time to do that between lectures or use the Zoom chat box. I know Nick's already told me about me, so I'm not going to deliver here. But I want to think I'm going to ask you right off the bat is asked each of you in this workshop to write down who your spirit animal is. Mine happens to be border collie. So I'm not sure what Nick's is or Tammy or Michael, but for all of you in this webinar, please just drop in what your spirit animal and maybe Nick or one Michael will read it off to me. It's just a little icebreaker. So we'll get started. What is customer discovery? So customer discovery is a secret sauce you often hear about behind every successful startups and businesses. And why do we need customer discovery? Because you know what, it's tough enough for all of us in each of you to be a startup or business owner. You need a process in order to make sure that you're tracking your KPI and watching your business grow on scale. Startup failure rate unfortunately stands at 90% of a business formation to five years on. And businesses fail, and I will not belabor you. I'll just go cut to the chase and go straight to why some of the start businesses fail. It's because they executed a business model without validating the ideal solution. Basically, built the wrong thing. The number one reason for failure, you built the wrong thing. So if you built the wrong thing, you're going to hire poorly. And you're going to lack focus as an owner or startup founder, and your sales will suffer because your sales team have no idea what they're selling. So as you can see, becomes a daisy chain effect of failure. So about according to the study done by Harbor review, about 4000 companies that have failed. That's exactly what happened with them. They built the wrong thing. And they built the wrong thing because they didn't talk to any customers or users to see that was what people wanted. Let me talk about some of the case studies here. You may remember some of these big name companies blockbuster Kodak and even taxi services. Each of these industry and companies share one thing. They failed to continue the customer discovery. Once they had the market and our product market fit down and they had the market share. They failed to keep up with the customers needs and desires. Blockbuster was doing great. Every blockbuster in that each store in every state and most of the towns, but eventually you got caught up by Netflix, and they went bankrupt. Why, because they failed to keep up on the needs and the trends of the market and their customers. They had 99.9% share of their film processing for many, many years. Nick and I were just talking before the webinar started about Polaroids, but codec also failed to keep up with the trends, the digitization of images. So once that got became a mainstream codec to fell because they felt to do continuing to do the customer discovery. The story behind the taxis, the old days of large uncapped cars, rude drivers and very sketchy operation in the taxi industry was caught up by the ride share, the Lyft, the Ubers, and now we have a cruise taxi, roll up taxi right around some of the cities like in Austin, San Francisco. They failed to keep up with the customers needs and desires because they thought, well, customers are always going to need taxi. Yes, but they did probably not predict the rise of the ride share industry. Some of these may be familiar to you. The codec had their disposable camera, although it's coming back now with the younger trends, younger assets. You have Blackberry, who was the market leader at one point. Even Apple had their failure when they brought out their message had the Newton in the early 1900s. They all failed because they kept failed to keep up with the customers and also to continue to customer discovery. A little bit about me and my stories. The reason why I teach this webinar and this workshop. The reason I start doing customer discovery as a business is because I too failed to talk to my customers and gauge the market. It's a medical device as my first startup. In fact, it's probably somewhere in the DAV archive when they interviewed me for my first PVC. It failed because I did not talk to my customers. I also started doing wargaming because I was one of my roles that I had in an AB. That too failed because I didn't talk to my customers. The software startup that I have founded with my co-founders, we had a great product that could have gone very far, but we didn't do customer discovery. So I want to just point out that I'm passionate about making sure that your business and your ideas grow and scale. And I hope that you can learn from my failure and use that to your advantage. I'm very fortunate over my 30 years in an AB and also in the last 10 years as an entrepreneur because there were people that believed in me. People that gave me resources and people that connected me to resources in capital. I'm excited to give it back to all of you in the fellow PVC fellow, the several American veterans to learn from my mistakes and hopefully this will be a starting point for your successful business. So think of customer discovery as a continuous and arduous journey. Many businesses that I just talked about earlier failed because they didn't want to do customer discovery. Customer discovery can be very tedious. It's not sexy, but you know what, it's really, really important. Because once you continue and incorporate customer discovery and development strategies into your business plan, you're going to be the risking yourself, your businesses, and you'll be the risking you and the business for the investors. People that want to give you money and you increase your success fivefold. I'm not sure there's a baseball man out there, but it's one of my favorite codes, quote, that was given to me by my mentor at capital factory in Austin. And everybody has will to win. What's far more important is having the will to prepare to win. So think of customer discovery and customer development as preparation for you to win. If you haven't seen this business model canvas, it's available for you for free at the strategizer, which is a company that started by August riser that developed us. It is a, I would say a living document, a business plan, if you will, to allow you to plan your business by going through the blocks and make and writing down what those, what your plans are for each of those blocks, and by completing down nine blocks, you could have a potentially a very viable business plan. To create a nonprofit space, there is another model canvas called the mission model canvas, and this is designed for social impact nonprofit organization that may not be necessarily be making money, but it allows you to measure your, your impact through, you know, what you've done for your community. So to recap the business model canvas and a mission model canvas, you got three major blocks, you got the desire ability. Does your customer in your market. One, what you're sort of what you're producing or what you're servicing feasibility. Can it be scaled and viability. Can you make money or make an impact. Over time, I, as a practitioner for business model canvas, I come to realize that there's two really important blocks within the business model canvas. In fact, I would even venture to say, unless you have this two blocks under your belt. You may need to pause what you're doing to ensure that you're saving time, money and effort. So that is the discussion for today is our ability block. And I even go granular, I'm going to cover customer segments and value proposition blocks. So customer segment is a what you call your customers and your users. Right. So you need to be able to tell us tell you yourself and tell others investors, you're, you know, me, which customers and users are you serving, and which jobs they really want to get done, they mean the customers. Value proposition is, what are you offering the users and customers. How would it benefit them. And most importantly, why should they care. It's what's called a product market fit. When you have a customer segment down. You know who they are. And if you have a value proposition identified, you have what's called a product market fit. And these are the two things you need to move and move forward with your business. This is a campus at UC San Diego. And I tell the faculties and students, unless you have the value proposition customer segment down for a product market fit, don't even start anything because you'll be wasting your time and money. This is another free resource available to you through strategizer. It's called divided proposition campus and I will go in detail this in a minute. There's a lot of time. People business owners, students with ID idea, or even a Bible business will come to me and say, Here is my customer segment. I don't understand why my business not scaling. I don't understand why I'm not making sales. If you have more than, say, three customer persona identified in your business block, you're probably have too much. You're trying to boil the ocean, so to speak, you're trying to sell everything to anybody, everybody, which means you're not going to sell anything to anybody. So you need to make sure that if you are going forward with different customer segments, you need to make sure you complete this by proposition campus to understand better who your customers are to make sure it's a product market fit. The customer discovery by number. As I said earlier, it can't be tedious. And, and the reason is you need to actually get out of building and talk to your users and customers. So unless you are expert at interviewing, I'm not even I may still learning, you need to do about 20 interviews, talking to strangers in order to get your muscles, you know, flex and start to learn how to interviews total strangers. You need about 40 to get used to talking to total strangers, and about 60 to start seeing patterns. I don't know if you guys all heard of this test call the mom test right so when I say talk to your customers and users is not talking to your mom. It's not talking to your siblings is not talking to your friends at the bowling alley it's not talking to your former colleague at the bfw or recognition. It's not talking to strangers people that have never met you before, they're the people is going to give you a true assessment of your business ideas in your service. Because, as you know, if Nick had an idea. And if you went to his mom is a mom, I had this wonderful idea for a business. What would Nick's mom say. Of course just going to say Nick that's wonderful idea you're going to make millions is calm mom tests. This is the reason why you need to talk to strangers. The goal is to have 100 plus interviews under your belt, and this is just not people with just ideas for talking people that's currently in business, you should be always be talking to your users and customer in game, more insight. Because when you have 100 plus insights, and it's inside data driven, not emotion driven. You have a pretty good idea of your product market bit. And imagine how the investors will feel, imagine how the grant writers or grant givers will feel that you go up to them said I've interviewed 100 plus people, total strangers, and my product market fit assumption is based on the data that I've gotten from them. So this really no excuses. Now you all parents I've told you, I told my kids, don't talk to strangers. So this is your one time license to go talk to lots of strangers. Any questions so far. Rachel we actually we actually did have one question. I'll throw it out there. John asked us and chat. What was what space was your med device startup in and he's been a device for 10 years and currently with a startup in pulmonary space. Okay. So, I had it was actually a medical device to allow post operative patients asleep sitting up. So I had three brain surgeries in my life. I was a benign brain tumor called acoustic neuroma. And it grows in your brain very silently until one day you have facial paralysis and you go deaf. I was very lucky that I, the tumor was identified early. So it was a small size of my face is usually a lot bigger. When you have a brain surgery. And I found out later cosmetic surgery or shoulder surgery, you have to sleep sitting up. And because your head is the heaviest part of your body, you can't sleep right and with no sleep, no recovery. So, I, my partner I created a device that allow is not a horse collar because you know when you have brain surgery have tubes coming out of your everywhere. So it's basically a kind of a hard to say, which is why it didn't go well. It was basically a PVC pole with a with a head rest that we created, and it was great idea people loved it MBA hospital, but I didn't talk to anybody, I thought well, I'm the customer. It works great for me is it's going to sell a lot. So that's, that's why, yeah, I hope that answer a question. Should I continue Nick. I think that's all I think that's all the questions we have for right now Rachel. Yeah, okay, great. Yeah, what do we start. We need to first create your customer persona. If you already done it before. Great. If you haven't never done it this be perfect opportunity to do it in a very safe environment. So I like you to me Andre Andre's my persona. Andre Andre is not organization. Andre is not a company. Andre is not everyone. And this is one thing to really remember, because oftentimes when I talk to start up founders and small business owners when I ask him, tell me your customer, who your customers are. I'll say, everybody. I'm trying to sell my device to Department of Defense. I'm trying to sell my, you know, my medical device to all the hospitals. And that just becomes too large, because then you're boiling the ocean. And you're maybe spending a lot of time trying to enter the market entered organization. And without really seeing any success. So the idea is to be specific as possible. Andre, I need to know Andre's age, where he lives, his employment status and his family. That's called demographic. Psychographic is his motivation, his goals is challenging his pain points right. Let's say Andre is 25 years old. He lives in Mountain View. He works for Google, and he's married. And just him and his wife. His motivation is to buy a home in San Jose, which is pretty next to impossible right now. His goal is to own a home. So if you start a family, his challenges are driving from East County, which is based across the Bay, in order to get to work in Mountain View at Google. His pain points are long drives, not enough time with this wife. He's tired from commuting. So how do I solve his problem? Demographic is easy to solve because you have an idea of who he is, but oftentimes, and myself included, when you could solve their psychographic problem, which is their motivation goals and challenges, it's a better time of identifying their needs and actually solving their pain points. So why create customer persona? Because you need customer persona in order to create a cohesive customer segment, right? Remember under three customer personas for this one. So customer pain points, build an assumptions list and test and validate those assumptions list, which will give you insight. And by reiterating pivot, you could define your product or services based on your customer segment and customer persona. So I'm going to do a quick personal exercise and I don't know how many people we have on the webinar, but this actually is good exercise if you've never done persona creation before. Give you two minutes to create a starter persona. If you already have one, great. And we can talk about that a little bit more. And this would be available. I think, yeah, the recording will be later. So feel free to use this as a starting point. If you have a customer, what is it that you're creating for them, right? So what is their pains? And what is their gain? Gain meaning that if you have a service and product already developed, what would they gain from using your product? And the customer job, what is their daylight? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to accomplish? In case of Andre, he wants to make enough money to buy a home, but he also needs to make sure he gets to work on time so he can keep this job. So any questions on that? So I'm going to give you, actually, give you one minute to come up with your persona. And once you have it, I like you to drop it in a chat box and then we have Nick read it out to us. So I'm going to time you guys. I'm here and I'm reporting for duty, Rachel. I have something to report. Yeah. And if not, it's just a, it's just a really good way to think about who your customer really are. Can you go back to that previous slide so everybody sees that, that, I guess you would call that a chart or a graph or something. Yeah. This is good one, but this is, this is good one here too. Because you need to be able to say, I was solving next, next pain point. I don't think he has one, but if he did, I would be really granular on who Nick is. Nick is from Northern Kentucky. He lives in down, he's very familiar with downtown Ohio. He currently commutes from his home in Ohio to the DAB headquarters in Kentucky. He's married, he worked with DAB, his motivations are, you know, doing a fantastic job as a director of PBC, looking to scale and grow, maybe more investors. Challenges could be PBC and DAB partnership is fairly new. So, you know, how do, how does he get out more and find more investors and get on his, his new venture out in the wild. And the pain points, this is where I will be interviewing Nick to ask him, tell me about your day, what are your pain points? That's kind of good. Yeah. Because oftentimes I'll ask people, you know, business owners and students and faculty, tell me about your customers. Like, I don't know, he's, he's a guy and, you know, he's missing San Diego. And I'm like, okay, well, go deeper. Okay, he's a college student. Okay, what grade? You know, where does he live? And that's kind of detail you need to know because, because then you can start really going deep and finding out what their pain points are because Nick's pain point may be different from what Michael's pain point is. Maybe certain different from what Tammy's pain point is, right? So if you start trying to solve everything for everybody, you're not going to get anywhere. So that helps. Yeah, is, does anybody, if anybody wants to share, plop it in the chat, otherwise we'll continue. I think that was a really good example. And I, if you don't mind me saying Rachel, I think it's important, like no, no venture is too big or small to think about what the customer is. And I think that many people who, who have started a business realize that their idea of a customer, like I said in the opening remarks, really when it comes down to what the customer who's actually buying their product could be fundamentally different than the person you assume that it is. So that's why we're talking about this. I think it's awesome. We do have a few messages rolling around rolling around. So Richard throws in there. Moss is his, his, his, his name Moss and Moss is a 28 year old male in Atlanta, Georgia with a spouse and a young child. He's a security analyst for a Fortune 500 company. He wants to know conclusivity, whether the infrastructure he is responsible for is properly configured and up to date. So his organization doesn't get hacked. He has a lot of infrastructure and doesn't know where to begin. That's great. That's a great awesome. Yeah, that's great. Well, I tell you what, let's move on. I'll jump off of here and you can drive on. Okay, so I'm going to keep repeating this is you need to interview 60 plus potential customers to gain valuable insight in order to de-risk your idea of a 50% MC. I'm going to move on to creating your value proposition. So value proposition is the other blog that we talked about. What are you offering them? You mean the small business owner or start founder? And how will your service or product benefit your users and customers? And most importantly, why should they care? Just because you think that your service or product is best ever, why would they care about that? Right. And how would it benefit them? It's all about them. It's not about your idea, but it's all about your customers. Because if they don't care about it, if you can't tell them why it's going to benefit them and what are you offering them? They'll most likely not even talk to you or buy your product or service. So this is the other block of the value proposition canvas. Remember the circle was your customers. So the customers, you need to write down, you need to identify their pains. What would they gain if they had a magic wand? And then what are their job, you know, gain in life is like. Then what you as a business owner and start off founder are creating and it's called the gain creators and pain relievers and a product and services. So basically, if you put those two blocks together, as you can see in this presentation here, if you see a pain on the customer side, everything that you're offering as a product and service need to be built to address that. So your pain reliever is relieving the pain point of your customers. And what they're seeking to gain is what you're creating through your product and service. So before you, if you already have a product and service develop, that's fine, because you could still talk to customers and users to refine your product. But it's best to first identify customer segment that needs something. An example is again going back to the Department of Finance. What do they need? I even go granular. What the special operations command need, but then special operations command have smaller entities, they have Navy, Army, Air Force, even Coast Guard, right. So instead of boiling the ocean, you need to pick an enterprise for me would be I'm picking the Navy SEALs because I'm from Navy. So I'm going to see what needs they may have that I could solve. This is for you to use. It's called Valid Proposition Worksheet. It will allow you to write down your customer, Moss or Andre in my case, write down their pain, write down their gain, job to do meaning what are they, you know, what are they trying to solve, how are they trying to get their job done throughout the day. Valid Proposition is what is it about your product and service that's going to help them do their job or go through their life better by solving their pain and gaining something out of your product and service. Any questions? Okay, so this is another exercise. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but Jason has a question and Jason, if you want to come on, you can come on and ask me. That's so great. Rachel, thank you for being here today and all your experience. This is all very relevant to providing a service to customers and I think it's worth me asking the question, perhaps others have the same question through the lens that you're kind of explaining this. My service that I intend to create is a service for an art therapy program for veterans and there's no forensic takeaway. It's very much intrinsic, I guess, in terms of the experience the veterans would have. I'm wondering how this model that you're talking us through might pertain to that and nonprofit or if a service isn't necessarily a tangible product. Thank you. Okay, so art therapy, it's interesting that you brought that up because Naval Medical Center here in San Diego just completed their three year studies on PTSD through surfing. So, I guess what you're asking, you know, how, how would this be relevant to nonprofit? Is that you're asking? I guess how could I better identify my clients through a service aspect provided internally to them of their experience conducting art therapy, versus trying to push a product that they may purchase at a demographic or an area, I guess, would identify a client base. This client base is very specific and the service is an experience. So, your customer base would be a, you say therapy, so I'm making an assumption that it's therapy through PTSD or is there specific? I guess generally it would be a forum that veterans could come to with a guided art therapist and work on a project and the project would be kind of like the medium for them to just kind of further discuss some of, you know, their situations in the military and it provides a forum for them to kind of express it without going to a psychotherapy group. Okay, okay. So, I would probably start with, I guess my question would be, why would, what would be the reason why the people that one will come to the art forum is that are they active duty are they retired. Are they disabled and start, that's why I would start because then I will start with talking to a group of potential users, so to speak, of your art therapy forum. Why, you know, the reason why they would come to create an avatar, right, or persona. Rachel, Rachel was a command master chief in the Navy says pretty, you know, when you're more senior you are less people you could talk to, right, and be safe. So what would compel me to go to our therapy forum. And I guess one of the reasons would be it's safe space. It's art, expressing my grief or my joy through art, which will relieve my stress. And is that kind of, am I getting close to what you're asking. Yeah, I think you're asking it through the lens and what you're trying to teach it and so I appreciate it. I'm following along with you. It's very helpful. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, great. So, I know that, but thank you for that question, but I understand that customer, when I say customer to do it could be seen as specific. So think of it as if you want to flip to go back to mission model canvas. So, this is very specific to mostly product right, but, and some services, but this one is more impact so maybe it will help if you think about it, not as a customer but as a beneficiary. Right. And then the beneficiary, instead of having a revenue streams, you'll have what's called the mission achievement which is like how your impact that your art therapeutic forum have for your beneficiaries. So, I'd be happy to talk to you more offline and I'd be happy to share my, my, you know, my, my contact information through Nick, you want to talk more about it because there is a little bit of a difference between these two. But it's basically the building blocks the same. I really appreciate your insight and you've got me thinking differently about how my customer base might benefit from this service even though it's not tangible. So thank you for the opportunity to ask in your presentation. Yeah, first. Yeah. Okay, so in the interest of time, if you have a proposition identified, feel free to put it in the chat box. And when you're doing that, I'll just keep going. And then this is another important part aspect of customer discovery because they need to go talk to strangers. There's no point in sitting in the room or sitting in the library or sitting in the business center, thinking about how great your business going to be or your services, you need to go out and talk to a human. So you need to first ask yourself what assumptions are you trying to test. It's kind of we just had that discussion just a few minutes ago is you have a list of assumption you need to write down and it could be an Excel spreadsheet. And those are the assumption. So you need to go talk to strangers and validate or invalidated, right. Because by asking your users and customers to validate your assumptions, you can identify customer needs better. And by validating your solutions, you have an insight. So you have an assumptions, you go talk to customers or users, which is called experiment. You have an insight based on your interview. Then you come back to assumption that it validated the invalidated and you keep going to the loop. And this is another aspect of customer discovery that can be considered a little tedious because you're basically talking to a lot of people and getting your insight and going back and to a drawing board so to speak and you know, tinkering with your idea or your product. But by doing so, you're really refining your idea, your service and your product to need to meet the customer's needs. So how do you interview, how do you go talk to these strangers. I get questions about is video conferencing and in person better than surveys and phone calls. The survey is great. It's very expedient and you could talk to a lot, you could ask a lot of people a lot of questions in a very short period of time. Email is cold email same way cold calls are same way, but you know what you can't you can't get emotional response from them if you're just doing surveys and emails and just cold calls. Like I said in the slide here, if you can see their people's dilate when you see that the light bulb light up and you know, figuratively, when you talk to them about your idea. That's when you gain a true insight. So I would suggest to you that video teleconferencing and there's zooms or in person interview over a cup of coffee is much more insightful and productive than a cold calls cold emails and surveys. There's a lot here so I would suggest you watch this webinar and then, you know, if you have any questions, you know appropriate to contact me and ask me. You start with your assumptions, right. You could do that through social media. Find out through Facebook, Instagram. What do people care about, you know what is it, what is the biggest pain they're facing right now, and what would be the biggest game that we get. You can do prepped and it's a lot come up with hundred names target list. Network with your friends you can network here you can network through me network through your local veteran service organization. There's one million cups everywhere. Just get the names right and then develop a plan of how are you going to discovery again going back to what assumptions trying to test and how you validate or invalidated. You can reach 100 customers connect with me on LinkedIn, feel free to my LinkedIn connections. People are actually more willing to talk to strangers. If you connect through connect with them through Facebook or LinkedIn. And I have a template that you can use here. Say hello, my name is Rachel. I trust you are doing well and adjusting to the new normal. I have a DAB PPC entrepreneurs, and I've just taken a master class on customer discovery. I'm investigating whether art therapy forum would be valuable solving today in the post pandemic world. I got your name from Rachel, who said that you're the smartest person in the industry government and that you really had a valuable advice to offer. This is important. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just need 15 minutes of your time to ask a question. Thank you in kind regards. This is a template you feel free to use your email or even in LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn has a word count limits. So you may want to put this on a chat GPT or barred Google bar and shorten it. But if you want to connect to them to any anybody, especially on LinkedIn said I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just need 15 minutes of your time to ask a few questions. Most likely don't answer. And I've used this template for my students and my SBIR awardees, because they do have to talk to lots and lots of people, and it's actually got pretty good rate of return. So feel free to use it. Thank you, people. You need to be making sure that you're asking open ended questions, not leading questions, and always ask why five times. Nick man had noticed when I was talking to earlier, but I asked a lot of questions, and I may not ask why, but by asking one question and then going deeper and deeper. I'm amazed on the insight you get from people and Nick, I wasn't really doing it on purpose, but it's just, it's my nature that I'm curious person. So I'd like to know I'd like to know people so it's why I was asking all those questions, but I got to know you though pretty good during that short discussion. Just remember that discovery is not selling your idea. The moment you try to sell your idea. What you're talking to will shut down. So always make an effort to listen. And here we are, listen to understand, bite your tongue, sit on your hand, do whatever you got to do to let the person you're talking to interviewing speak, you be amazed that most of the people love to talk about their life and what they're doing. If you just let them talk, you're going to gain all the knowledge that you need to refine your, your ideas. And if you are, when you are talking to your interview, you need to either write fast, or ask permission to record, because as much as you think you're going to remember, most likely you are. If you have a team, be great if one person can interview and the other person to take notes. But most time is probably just you so write fast or just be open say do you mind if I just record you, if they say no, he's going to write fast. You should be talking to everybody right user buyers CEO mom or their kids, but don't forget the more people that you speak to. There's potential to do the customer segment canvas they saw earlier, which is tedious. What are some of the good questions. This question. No, this question. No. There are leading questions right. This one. It's a great question. If you had a magic wand, if you had a magic wand, how would you solve this problem and they'll probably talk 20 minutes. Again, leading. Good question. So, if you get this answer. Great. Keep me up there when it launches. It's a bad one. They're just being polite and saying no compliments are not data delays, even worse. Right. And compliments are not commitments. They may say it's a great idea. Unless they say, let's talk next week, or here's my card. That's, that's a no. This one's a little tricky. Those are good signals, right. It's the commitment to meet again. Introduction to someone in a company like a CFO, right, especially decision makers and commitment to a trial. You want to get to this. That's interesting. Can you tell me more about that. So you're thinking, well, so what, what's all this tedious customer discovery? Where does that matter? Another case study. Do you remember your first car? So I actually did this with the high school students two weeks ago. And I challenged them, okay, you want to get your first car. You want model three, or you want the Ford. And how would you present this to your parents? So I made him do a customer discovery on their parents. And the assumption they all said was like, you know, that's going to be a hard sell because my mom wants to save car for me to drive. So she's going to definitely go for Ford. And my dad will think that, you know, I'll get a lot of tickets for having a red sports car. So if you'll not, you know, allow me to get that car. So I had him do a customer discovery on their parents. And I said, look, figure out your parents, you know, them best, and create a valid proposition. And tell me what their, what their personas are like. And actually the students came back and the teenage, you know, a teenager, I think they're all 15, 16. You know what, I was able to come up with a valid proposition to tell my dad, who's a, you know, trying to the very frugal person that dad, model three has a $7,500 federal tax incentive right now. And because there's only one gear, the car, you know, doesn't has a longer, lower cost of cost of ownership in five years. And my mom, who's a safety freak, and thought the on the four is a safe car, but it turns out that this particular model has a kind of a spotty track track record when it comes to safety or smaller three doesn't. They were able to come up with a interesting valid proposition by doing customer discovery in your own parents to potentially push for a car purchase. They have a homework to come back with me in about two months to see whether they got the car or not. So we'll see. This one is assumption exercise, and I will not make you do this, but I will give you this particular creation worksheet. Now, what I want you to do for this one in your own time is make sure that when you're creating the assumptions to be ready for interviewing, you know who the customers are, what assumptions you're making. How are you going to test your experiment? And because how are you going to know that your assumption was wrong or right? What key learning insight did you gain from it? And then yes or no was assumption validated. And I'll cover the stakeholder type in a minute. So the stakeholders, you need to know the difference between a user and a customer. Okay, users are the people that are going to be actually interacting with your product or benefiting from your services. But they're not necessarily the buyers. In fact, users usually are not the buyers, right? The Model S or Model 3 that I just showed you earlier, the red car. The users are the teenagers, right? But the buyers are the parents. So you need to know the difference because the parents may have a different needs and different desires, different pain points than what the teenager has, right? So I also have what's called a several tour, who is probably the one person that's going to, whose sole mission is to derail your idea. For example, let's say your digital device to a clinic in San Diego, right? Your job is to make sure that you don't come bring that new product because that new product that you just new device may cause him to have to rethink about his supply chain. And it may, if it's an AI based product, it may cost him his job. So he's going to be, you know, he's going to make sure that your product or server doesn't get into to the purchasing agreement. The idea also is to, you know, is, if you could convert the saboteur into a champion, then you got it made, right? Then you have an insider that could potentially be your influencer to buy your product. So it's also important if you already know who the saboteur are, then you could do a customer or a profile sheet I showed you earlier and figure out what their pain points are. The tournament or champion example is let's say I'm trying to sell disabled American veterans a t-shirt and Nick is Nick is a t-shirt wire, right? So, but Nick's is a user. He's not a buyer. So you have to find out who within disabled American veterans is actually procurement manager and find kind of start doing a little customer discovery on procurement manager. If you go to customer, and he may not be willing to listen to you because like, look, I already got a t-shirt vendor. I'm good. But what if you go back to him's like, look, this t-shirt that I'm making is USA made. It's, it's the company owner is actually a disabled American veteran member. And he's a, you know, combat veteran. He's local. He's in Kentucky. He has a lower cost than what your current vendors are. And oh, by the way, you working at DAB, wouldn't you want to support a guy like that, a business owner like that? Does that make sense? That's kind of how you could turn a saboteur into a champion. And Nick, I'm sorry. It's a DAB as an example, but that's kind of what I, I've always tried to explain to the students and, you know, business owners and startup founders how to turn saboteur into a champion. So, knowing a difference, not just a customer, Andre or Psalm, you can also identify the stakeholder type. So I hope that made sense to everybody here. So, don't assume you understand a problem because you, unless you've done customer discovery, you don't. And even after you understand, the problem is going to always change. So you need to be doing constant customer discovery on journey. And you all are very smart people. Well, so it's harder when you think you know, especially if you're in that space already, it's hard to do a discovery. And again, by interviewing 60 plus potential customers or users of beneficiary, you gain a valuable insights and you risk your idea by 50, 60%. This is what I want to get to. Yes, sounds really, really interesting. Can you tell me more about that? In fact, why don't you follow me to my office? Here's my business card. We can talk more about it. That's what I want to get to. You want to get to past 90% failure and a 50% increase in your potential to succeed. Here's what you learned today. I hope it was helpful for you. I would love to hear from you to see how else I could help. And Nick, please feel free to share with them my email address. And then I'll have you talk to more of you when you have time. Yeah, thank you, Rachel. I know a lot of people in the chat have asked for the slides themselves. I've sent a few resources out for you, like some of the templates, the business model camps, et cetera, as far as the link goes. So they can find that. But yeah, we'll figure out a solution for that for those people who like that. But again, I want to thank you. I know we're kind of close on our time. Just like the Army, I mean, we train to standard not the time. So I do want to take a moment to have people ask questions. If that's something they want to do, if they have some questions, we want to always be able to answer some of those. So I don't know if we had any on social, Michael, but if you do send them over to me. But I did have one. I think this gentleman actually, I think Al Blake, he might have bounced off already. But he asks, first of all, he says hello, Rachel and a group. Thanks for sharing your life journey. Much appreciated. Thanks very sweet. From a constructive and critical perspective, curious what approach did you, did you exercise to overcome uncertainty and risk, while additionally gain the support of sponsors and stakeholders to assist with funding, given any respect to the past or ongoing handicaps. The basis of this question is rooted in how certain community programs enable equity and startups entering into the commerce market. Some, if not many, may only be able to generate sponsorship and reports through singular or alternate means. So that's kind of a multifaceted question. Yeah. So when I started my journey with my medical device startup, it was completely strapping. I was able to gain a lot of free resources through organizations like SBDC, Small Business Development Centers, and PTAC, which is now called APEX. There are tons of accelerates and incubators through universities. I would definitely suggest that you go to local academia, city college, their office services. Also, there are grants out there that you could apply for. So I would definitely keep in touch with them. Then I asked your question. I'm trying to. Yeah, well, he's gone, but I mean, I think it's a nice to just address it. And yeah, there's lots of resources that the key ingredients are lots of resources out there. You just have to get created. And I think if I may, you know, understanding your target audience and understanding who it is that's buying or multiple segments is a really important. And like you said earlier, not sexy thing to do, but it's very necessary nonetheless. Yeah. So we don't have anything on socials. I'm going to ask one question before we before we get into some final announcements. I've got a whole list of them here just for this purpose and this purpose only. Can you share at least just one real world example of a company that has benefited from your like once when you work with customer discovery efforts but some that's worked with or maybe it's in is an academia, etc. Oh, benefit actually yes so the course I the course I teach at UCSD. Absolutely we just renewed a contract they actually did benefit from the customer discovery because we I did a deep analysis on, and that my own discovery process on what is it that the university students were looking for, as far as type of courses that that's been offered by by the university, and they had they hadn't done a real case base, you know real problem being solved by students before. So by asking the students what they were looking for we're able to go from two teams and eight students to 35 team 35 students and eight teams and three years. Wow. Yeah, I mean I'm sure there's I'm sure a lot of us do customer discovery, without thinking about it right. I mean would you would you say that the customer discovery process you know when you think about it from an academic standpoint or textbook style and looking at the different worksheets that you've, you know spoke about today. It that makes it seem very challenging because it's it's very step by step but in reality we do you believe I believe that we do this a lot. Yeah, all the time about whether it's our friends even in social settings. Things of that nature but it's, it seems like a very difficult process when you put it down on paper and you're sitting at it at your desk thinking how the heck do I find out who my customer is. That's the reason why I did the first card and now in case study for the high school students and you're right. We do customer discovery every day we do customer service and social setting dating, right, buying a product or trying to figure out okay how do I get my my mom or my dad or my brother sister do something so that is all customer discovered by knowing them knowing that pain points are knowing what they know that you're doing that. Yeah, so it's not it's but it's something that. There is a step but yeah, like you said it's it's a you do it every time. Yeah, well thank you Rachel for all that information I know it's fact it's almost so much information, believe it or not that there's probably another segment worth of that you can teach on. It's a continuous process as Rachel mentioned, you know it's it's you do you do it once but you don't just stop there it's continuous process much like the life cycle of a business so. Thank you for all the knowledge you share today and we'll be sure to connect you with anybody who, who asks that we are going to share your contact information and the event that there's people out there that really want to connect with you and a deeper level on this. So, I want to thank you specifically Rachel for coming on today. I know it's a little bit of your time we always appreciate that. I also want to thank all of our everybody out there and in time and space who's tuned in today to our dv patriot boot camp caffeine connect. We always appreciate your attendance engagement support, any way we can get it we're here for you. We have a few announcements before we part some part our ways today so our next caffeine connect is going to take place on November 16. Same time, 2pm same same time in place, and you can you can find this event on our website social media dv patriot boot camp and LinkedIn or Facebook, and also event right applications are going to be opening for our page our next patriot boot camp cohort which will be. The next one we're looking for is going to be in February of 2024, so we're eight through 10th. So stay tuned on our socials and our website look for that application to open up and we'll be sending that marketing out here in the future and if you're not aware of what dv patriot boot camp is your first time joining us. It is a transformative transformative program that we held we hold in person that empowers our founders and the veteran and military community, including spouses. We want to make sure we emphasize including your spouses with comprehensive startup education mentorship access to resources, and of course this wonderful community committed to your success. Another announcement, our next dv shark tank which is going to take place in November November 2 at 2pm is is going to be happening after we complete our cohort in October. So stay tuned for that one as well. And yes we do give away free money it's based on the popular TV show TV show shark tank so stay tuned for that it's always it's always a good time. And then, lastly, coming up Veterans Day is November 11. So we have dv has dv 5k we love to throw this out there for anybody who can walk, roll, run or ride. And what we're doing is raising funds to thank those who served and raise awareness for our ill and injured veterans. And so you can do this by participating in the dv 5k which is held in person here in Cincinnati on November 11, but also you can do a virtual program between November 11 and November 30, and you can register at dv 5k.org. So we hope to see you there I'll be there running the race with my family. So I hope to see in Cincinnati if not hope to see online. So, last thing, please if you haven't done it if you haven't taken the opportunity to follow us on social media please do so. We're starting to do more and more there and that's a really great place to stay connected with things coming up. So you can do that on Facebook or LinkedIn primarily at dv patriot boot camp. And so we'd love for you to follow us there. And if you can stay tuned for our next Friday tomorrow, I think Michael will be posting our next founder Friday, it's a great way to stay connected I think Rachel's been on there. And founder Friday once and if she hasn't she'll be there in the future. So follow us on social media and then until next time, please everyone activate mentor create and grow.