 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, digital marketing, and blockchain courses online and at our 15 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams, and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Hi. My name is Dan Mascola, founder of Musico, which is the simplest way to learn guitar on the Internet. Today, I'm going to talk about how to take a good idea and bring it to reality. And I'm going to use a company that I started and I'm continuing to work at called Musico to talk through some examples and key learnings that I've had. So how many times have you heard someone say, that was my idea? They see a product or a strategy and claim as if they had ownership of it. They kind of get very protective about it. I have this kind of theory and it's not really grounded in any data or survey or anything, but I think if a thousand people had the same good idea, out of those thousand people, only 10 people would actually try it and maybe only one to three would be successful. So my point being is that having good ideas is the easy part. Knowing if they were going to work and executing them is the really hard part and this is the reason why I have good idea in quotes. So as an aspiring product manager or an existing product manager in a company, you're kind of sitting at the center of this world. So your job is to figure out what good ideas are going to work and execute upon them. You're going to have good ideas. Your co-worker is going to have good ideas or CEO will have good ideas and you have to figure out if they're actually going to work. And as an entrepreneur, it's even harder because in a company context, you kind of have a background, you have some guidepost, you have a history of success with a product and customers in a market. But as an entrepreneur, you have no history of no precedent and you have no track record to lean on. So you're really starting from scratch and just kind of going out into the wild. And so today I'm going to be talking about my good idea and the process of how I went through to figure out if it's going to work and kind of continuing to go through and what I've learned along the way. And I kind of hope that this is a mini case study that will shine some light into how you can take your ideas and turn them into reality. So three high takeaways for today. Kind of once you have your good idea, what's the very next thing that you need to do? What's your first step after the good idea? Then the next thing is learn, learn, learn. Kind of after that first step, how to expand to kind of a non-sustainable testing ground and learn as much as you can. And then based on those learnings, picking a niche or picking an early market and early customer base and going from there. So some background about my good idea. So when I was a kid, my mom wanted me to take piano lessons. And it was with a private instructor. We had to drive about 20 minutes to the instructor's house. I didn't like it at all. We played boring exercises. We played songs that I didn't like. It was kind of in this house that wasn't the most comfortable. Actually, my favorite part of the piano lesson was getting Burger King after. So that was probably when I was seven or eight. And I did it for a year and then stopped taking music lessons. And it wasn't until college when my roommate had a spare guitar that I kind of picked up and I just taught myself a couple of songs on YouTube. And this took me a couple months to kind of really learn the basic parts of the guitar, basic chords. But I really kind of fell in love with playing music and kind of writing my own music and being a musician after that. And since then, I've really learned a bunch of other different instruments. So I learned the harmonica, where I remember I went to a music store, I bought a harmonica and I'm like, OK, where do I start here? And I went to the music book section. And of course, there's like hundreds of books. You know, I don't even know which one to pick. The ones you do pick are just kind of, again, boring exercises. I learned the banjo and kind of had a similar problem, where me and my friends like to play music together. And we often play wagon wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show. So I wanted to learn the banjo to play wagon wheel. So I bought the banjo. And I was kind of like, I just want someone to tell me how to play wagon wheel. Like, what's the first thing I need to do to play wagon wheel? And so there was a kind of a pattern, as I was learning all these instruments, of like, I don't even know where to start. Private instruction was too pricey, especially when I was in college and too inconvenient. YouTube was free, which is nice, but it was kind of confusing. And I didn't know which videos were good and which videos were bad. There were so many options at the music store. And kind of what I developed is, you know, I just want a step-by-step instruction on how to play my favorite song. I just want someone to tell me what's the first step I should do after I do that, what's the second step I should do. And that was kind of the problem that I personally felt and I wanted to solve for. And so this was my good idea. So the first thing I did was I kind of created a basis for my good idea. And I kind of had these kind of core functional principles that I wanted to solve specifically to hopefully alleviate some of my pain. So the first was accessible. I wanted to make something obviously online that was accessible to a lot of different people. The second thing was not boring. A lot of the online video instructions, YouTube, it's a lot of talking. And when you're listening to a video, you're not playing an instrument. You're not learning how to play an instrument. So I wanted it to be kind of very specific on a specific song so that a user and myself could have an emotional attachment to what they were learning and hopefully, you know, it'd be fun. Simple, simple, simple. So this is something that, you know, is really, really frustrating. Looking at videos, listening to instruction is just everything seems so complex. But when I think about back learning the guitar, you know, you put your hand into this position and then you put your hand into another position. We all use smartphones every day and we all know how to text, which is a lot more complex than playing the guitar. And so it's very similar to kind of Rosetta Stone or Duolingo, if you've ever used these language learning softwares, where you start simple. They don't start you with a paragraph of text. They start with man and woman. And then they introduce Apple and then they do woman eats Apple. And so you start simple and you kind of build on top of it. I want to take that same approach with learning and instrument. The next thing, effective. So one of the things that I kind of was continually frustrated with, with online video instruction was listening to video was not helping me practice. It wasn't telling me how to practice and learn the guitar. So I kind of have a flat out rule, no video instruction and focus on practicing. And focus on practicing because if you can practice correctly, you can learn very quickly. And then finally, kind of, you know, this goes with making it accessible and easy is make it visual and make it extremely simple. So those were kind of my core ideas of this new product. So how do I test this? How do I see if this is actually effective? So at the time I was living in New Haven, Connecticut, it was like, okay, I just got to find one customer. So I put up a craigslist ad and it was simple, you know, just like the rest of them, you know, a free, free guitar instructor. And I wanted to test out this new methodology. And someone from Yale, a student, a med student actually from Yale reached out to me. It was like, hey, I want to learn sweet home Alabama. And so I'm like, okay. So I whipped up kind of the method that I had always dreamed about in PowerPoint, went over to her dorm room and walked her through the lesson, kind of gave her the lesson. I didn't provide any instruction on how to play the guitar. I just said kind of like, this is a new methodology. I'm trying to want to see if it works. And I, you know, I left, left her with the PowerPoint. I said, you know, in a couple of days, send me what you have. I can come over and provide additional tips if you need it. Well, the next morning she sent back an audio file and it was kind of, it was like a perfect rendition of Sweet Home Alabama. And that was kind of my aha moment, like, oh my God, this could actually work. So once I validated with one customer, I was like, okay, well, is this just a really kind of smart and fast learner here? Or can this be used with many more people? So what I went out to do was create a kind of repeatable, non-scalable product. And this is really getting into kind of the learning aspect of creating, you know, starting a new idea. So I created about 30 lessons using PowerPoint. I reached out to all my friends and family, asked what songs they wanted to learn on the guitar and kind of sent them the PowerPoint. And I said, you know, here's a lesson. Just open it up on slide one and start and go through the whole lesson. Call if you have any questions. I provide lots of one-on-one instruction where necessary. And kind of with each user, I kind of got feedback. They were confused on this part. They didn't understand the nomenclature. They didn't know how to tune their guitar. And kind of each aeration, I would add kind of more detail and more refinement into each lesson. So this whole process took about two or three years. And I learned a lot of different things. So the first thing was I learned that people have lots of excuses for not wanting to learn the guitar. My hands are too big. My hands are too small. I'm not musical. I'm not strong enough. And this was a really kind of key insight into not necessarily a product question, but more of a market question, that if I wanted to roll this out, I'm going to have to overcome some of these mental barriers that people have. I learned a lot of mechanical mistakes that people made and worked that into the product. Kind of tuning and getting the guitar set up is really important. It's not super straightforward. You have to kind of adjust pieces on the guitar. And so kind of thinking through how to make that really, really easy was a big piece of it. Surprisingly, a lot of interest from women. And I don't exactly know why this is the case. My hunch is that there are a lot of resources for learning the guitar for men and not a lot for women. If you think of kind of all the websites out there, they're all targeted for the male rocker. So guys with long hair, the websites are like black and red and yellow color palettes. And they're all kind of hard rock, electric guitar, loud music type of instruction. And maybe a lot of women don't want to learn heavy metal and hard rock. So another kind of interesting, maybe a gap in the market. That I could target and kind of tailor the product to help a group of people that doesn't have a lot of resources today. And then the other kind of big thing I learned was that competitors are not the things that I've been talking about. It's not YouTube. It's not other music learning apps. It's actually just lack of time and distraction. So things like Netflix and Facebook and Instagram. That's what's preventing people from learning the guitar. And so whatever method that I need to kind of work into the product to overcome that main competition is something that I've spent a lot of that. So two or three years, I learned a whole bunch of stuff, tested it with a lot of different users. And I think kind of this point in time is when you really need to know if your original good idea is working or not. And I think it's really important to say that a lot of times a perfectly good result is that your good idea is not working. But if you really have done a thorough job testing it, going to users and getting feedback, you're going to learn why it's not working for X number of reasons. And I guarantee you that if you do your due diligence and do that correctly, you will uncover probably dozens of much better ideas than you even had in the first place. So after all these learnings, now it's kind of actually time to really go to market. You might use the term MVP here, minimum viable product. You know, I don't like that term. I think it's often used as the cheapest product, which is defeats the whole kind of purpose of the acronym. But basically to bring the product together that meets those core initial assumptions that I had. So it was a web-based product, online lessons. And I really wanted to kind of test engagement here. So measuring everything from website visits to product page visits, who are signing up, who's using the product and using it a second or third time. I'm starting to get into a lot of user interviews and really understanding kind of the reasons why. And for me personally kind of in my career as a product leader, I've really harnessed the jobs to be done theory. If you look up just jobs to be done, Clayton Christensen is a kind of an innovation academic who founded this kind of theory and promotes it. And it kind of talks about a product isn't just the functional components, but it's also the social and emotional aspects as well. And so what I'm the kind of stage I'm at right now with Musico is to understand those components and kind of bring everything together in a holistic product that solves a user needs in a delightful way. One of the ways, so now I've kind of like built a product that I can launch to market and kind of getting into like, okay, who is the niche market? Where do I actually go and test this initial product? And one of the things that I have come up with and like to use is what I call the airplane test. So it works like this, if you've got an idea or you've got a product, as you board an airplane and you're walking down the aisle to your seat, look at each person that you pass and imagine them using your product. I mean like really internalizing. And ask yourself, are they all using your product the same way? And you're going to see people from all walks of life and it's going to force you to think about how your customers use your product from their perspective. So in this photo here, you can see that we've got men and women of all different ages. There's probably people with more money, people with less money. There's people with different backgrounds and different races. They're going to be in various jobs. Is the accountant using your product the same way that the construction worker is? Probably not. There's going to be mothers and fathers with children. You can see on the left, there's a woman with a neck brace and on the right, there's a man with sitting with headphones. Are they using your product the same way? You know again, probably not. So this is going to force you to think about who will use your product and why and who won't be using your product and why. And this is really the mental path that you need to go down to hone in on that initial niche and go into really targeting and getting traction with your initial customer base. So this is that third step of picking a niche and go. So again, building from the learnings and the reasons why. Again, I'm going to stress you want to understand the functional parts of your product, the emotional parts of your product, and the social parts of the product. And if you can understand those things, you can piece together what really matters in your customer's lives and how you can improve their journey and the problems that they're trying to solve. So for Musico, what I learned through this process is like kind of our initial test market. And like I said before, one of the biggest things was distractions. And so people who had full-time jobs were kind of professionals working through their careers. It's going to be really hard for them to learn a guitar. Maybe they would pick it up for a couple of minutes and maybe they'd learn a couple of songs, but then it would kind of die off as they would get distracted. And so those aren't the kind of easiest customers that I could acquire. So okay, who should I target then? That's not that. Well, it's kind of people in life who are before their professional years and after their professional years. High school students, college students and retirees. And those are kind of the initial three markets that I'm going to test with Musiko in the coming months. The other thing I discovered was a lot of people wanted to learn guitar because they wanted to write poetry. They wanted to create music. They wanted to be their own band. And so I thought, well, kind of to be one person bander to kind of start a music career, you need an instrument and you need to be able to sing usually. So acapella singers are already halfway there. And so if I can target them, help them learn the guitar, they can combine a beautiful voice with a songwriting capability and hopefully become the musician that they've always wanted to be. So after you kind of identify these initial test markets, how do you go test them? There's a whole bunch of different ways to do this. You can get very creative. I often think creative ideas here on how to test is usually the best. Oftentimes you don't need to have a lot of money to test these ideas. If you can kind of get creative and think about how can I just get to these initial test markets. For me, because I have an online product, ads is very easy. I can do that relatively low cost through Facebook ads, Facebook groups and industry groups and try to kind of push out a digital strategy kind of initially. And then again, continuing to learn and iterate. And I'm just starting this process now. So as I start to target these markets through these channels, I'm going to learn a ton and we'll definitely be have to kind of improving and iterating on the product. So if you have any questions, feel free to email me dan at musico.com. If you're interested in learning the guitar, I encourage you to check out musico. Here's a couple screenshots. Just kind of highlighting, you're learning Brown Eyed Girl. It's very visual and kind of straightforward. And then we provide a song sheet so you can play and sing along after you've learned the guitar. So please get back to me with any questions about the product or the presentation. And kind of just to recap, after your first good idea, just find one customer and ask yourself, did it work? If it did work, create a non-scalable product to test with 50 more customers. And again, learn, learn, learn. Kind of continually asking yourself, is this working? Do the airplane test so you can help identify which niche and potential customers are a better fit for your product and which aren't? Kind of then build that product together, go to market with that specific niche. I think you're off and running and kind of in a good place to succeed. So thank you. Thanks Product School for having me host here. And again, reach out if you have any questions. Bye.