Why Great Products Still Don’t Sell

0:00 This is Beyond Confidence with your host, Divya Parikh. Do you want to live a more fulfilling life? Do you want to live your legacy and achieve your personal, professional, and financial goals? Well, coming up on Divya Parikh's Beyond Confidence, you will hear real stories of leaders, entrepreneurs, and achievers who have stepped into discomfort, shattered their status quo, and are living the life they want. You will learn how relationships are the key to achieving your aspirations and financial goals. Moving your career or business forward does not have to happen at the expense of your personal or family life, or vice versa. Learn more at www.diviapark.com, and you can connect with Divya at contact at divyapark.com. This is Beyond Confidence, and now, here's your host, Divya Park.

0:46 Good morning. It's Tuesday, and of course, I'm thrilled to be here with you all, because... I want to thank each and every one of you who reaches out to us. You know, you take that time. And some of you have been part of this show as long as the show has been around. So I want to thank each and every one of you who reaches out, continue to reach out. Let us know how we can serve and support you. So it's Tuesday and we're just going to jump into things right now today. So let's welcome our guest, Colin Hodge. Welcome, Colin. Thank you for having me on, Divya. Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you with such a varied background. You bring so much to the table. So do you recall a moment from your childhood or youth where a person or it could have been a magic moment that left a positive mark on you?

1:46 Wow, I have so many moments and so many people who have touched my life and enabled the sort of growth that I have been able to experience through my career. I think it starts with my mother. So she was a Montessori preschool teacher. She really, really instilled in us as children the importance of continuous learning and being curious about the world and growing through experience. And so when I was a child and then going through high school, I really developed this knack for observing things, experimenting and trying, even if there was potential failure at the end of that trying, because that's how I learned that I could grow as a person and how I could acquire new skills, new knowledge. And recently, though, I've started working with a lot of university students and their entrepreneurship programs, professors or student groups. And I've also been able to connect and see that her knack for teaching people and helping others in that way was also instilled upon me. And now I really enjoy helping others, teaching them through my experiences and the work I've done, hopefully giving them that boost and helping others discover. who they are as a person and how they can leverage that for a better life and a better career.

3:14 Yeah, that's beautiful. Because when we help others, there's something so different about that experience. And of course, our brains are wired to help others. So tell us about your journey. How did you arrive at that? My journey has many twists and turns. It's pretty unexpected. I definitely, you know, I was growing up, I grew up in the middle of Pennsylvania in a rural town of barely 2,000 people. I like to tell people there are more cows than humans. And as I was growing up there, you wouldn't expect that I would be super into tech and I would become this poster boy for a while of startup founder. But I did have this early interest in technology and computers and that exposure to those, everything that came with it, the tinkering and the fixing and the building of software and hardware together led to me studying computer science. And as I studied computer science, again, the typical path is you go straight into, at the time, the Microsoft or the Googles of the world. big tech.

4:31 And I did internships at Microsoft and Amazon. And I just felt like after I started there full time, I was missing something. I was missing the impact that I really craved. And even though my colleagues were great and the companies treated us pretty well, I just knew that I needed to strike out on my own. When I did that, I started to build apps on the side. That was my little, you know, testing the waters, dipping a toe in and seeing how it felt. And after one of them kind of took off on Windows Phone, which was a competitor platform to Android and iOS that fell by the wayside by now, I realized I can do this. I can be a founder. I can be the all-around person doing not only the programming and building something, but doing the marketing and figuring that out, doing the product work and experimenting and learning along the way. So as I started to create apps and I started to really figure out what it's like to be a founder, I returned to my roots. And one of those roots is that curiosity I mentioned. I love to observe how people are just interacting. Why do we make the choices we make with who's our friend, who's our partner? What relationships do we like? What makes a good fit with somebody?

5:55 And that led me straight into the dating industry. And when I got into that, I realized how awfully broken it was and how, frankly, just dishonest it was. And my first startup was an extension of that, just really drilling down to what if we could be extremely transparent and honest about who we are as people and what we're looking for when we're dating. Yeah. You're speaking my language because it's so important to have that integrity. And to me, integrity is making those choices, whether someone is present or not. And in so many things, as you mentioned that, you know, you design apps. So during product designing and product marketing, how can you still use those principles where like you're using those cognitive biases and this, Understanding your target audience and their personas ethically.

6:59 Yeah, so I wrote about this in my book I just recently became a bestseller and I am so one just it feels surreal to say that but to as I was writing the book I Came across this feeling of I really need to be careful with these this tool these set of tools that I'm handing my readers because as you mentioned I there's an ethical side to it that you need to consider. And because these are cognitive biases that can affect people's decisions, we need to, as builders, as creators, as marketers, whatever role you're in, we need to be considerate of how they're used and are we using them in an ethical way. So that integrity I talk about in the book as if you are helping your customers or your users get to a point of progress make progress in a way that fits their life goals or the goals with using your product or service then that is usually my ethical guide to deploying these sorts of things If you're simply manipulating them by using these biases to spend more money without reward to get deeper into your product and addict them when it's harmful, those are the things that obviously for me are on the unethical side. And I think using this as a guide has really helped myself. And I talked with my team and regularly revisit it with my team.

8:32 about how we can continue to be aware of what is the ethical line and what are we pushing people toward? Because it is important to keep that integrity while, of course, balancing, you know, the most pure and ethical stance with running a real business and what your competitors are doing. So knowing what that red line is, is very important. Hmm. So what resonated with me, Colin, over here is that you mentioned that is it taking your audience, your user, your reader, whatever it may be, like, you know, whichever capacity you're serving someone from point A to point B, you're alleviating some of their pain because there you are coming from a place of empathy because you care for your.

9:24 Customer. You want to give them value so when you're doing that then that definitely has an impact that's beyond just making money so here what you're sharing is that definitely making money is good you're creating impact and as a side product of it you're getting income from it you talk about method mindset technique can you shed some light. On that Yeah, absolutely. So that empathy is so useful for basically bridging the gap between the users intention and their action. We call that in behavioral science, the intention-action gap.

10:06 And we can use many techniques to get there. One of the key ones is removing friction, which you might be, your listeners might be aware of. So that's looking at what is... What are the barriers or what are the slow points and things that people are getting tripped up on? And how do we reduce or remove those? So closing that intention action gap for our users is something that I do with empathy, which is really feeling and understanding what your users are feeling in the moment and going through when they're approaching this action that they are trying to get to. So One of the methods I talk about in the book, and I kind of base this on Hollywood. So in Hollywood, big actors, a lot of them use something called the method acting technique. And it's basically the idea of living as their character for sometimes weeks or months or years on end. So if they have a job as a their character has a job as a janitor, they will go shadow or work as a janitor for a long time so that they know what it feels like. What are the motions? What is the body language they use? What are their muscles ache?

11:22 What are they thinking throughout the day when they're doing the job? And I try to apply the same sort of thing called the method mindset technique to doing product and marketing development. And what that enables us to do is to, like I said, really feel that empathy and know what your users are going through. Now, it might sound like a lot of work and it kind of is, but I have a really fun example of a time when I did it. So, you know, at the time, this was a few years ago, I was around a 32, 33 year old man. And I was working for a live streaming app from Asia, the top one. And my job was to recruit new content creators, these influencers, who would be on our platform live for hours on end, almost every day, creating content, engaging their audience, recruiting new fans, earning attention and points in the app. from their fans.

12:19 So this was hard work, but it was the furthest thing from who I was and what my life was like, because I wasn't even on Instagram. I disabled my account years before that. I wasn't using any social media. I didn't have any desire to be an influencer. So all these things were just complete opposite of my life. And I realized that if I really was going to do a great job of recruiting them, setting up a good team to continue that work recruiting them, I needed to understand what was their life like and what was their experience using our app like. And so for many weeks in a row, I became one of our live stream creators. I went live for two to three hours at a time and I had to figure out how do I fill this dead air? How do I fill this content?

13:06 How do I get people engaged and get them to send gifts and create fans out of it? So Through that process, I ended up singing a lot of karaoke because I love to sing. So there I was with my phone, you know, live, a ring light around it. I would be cranking out Aerosmith. I would be pulling in a friend or a co-worker to be my co-star. I would be just, you know, making sure that I'm hyped up on caffeine and have plenty of water and I have a playlist queued up. So all this prep work that goes into it, all the understanding of basically walking in the shoes. of the target customer in this case was when it dawned on me that this is something that I could do repeatedly. And it's very similar to what actors do. And so I write about it in the book because I want other people to know, even if you're not recruiting or building for yourself right then, there's a way to really feel what they're feeling and build that empathy.

14:06 And that is such a key word that even though You're not actively present in your user's life, but there's a way, as you mentioned, that you're bringing that empathy in and walking in their shoes, understanding who they are at. So there are so many millennial and Gen Zs who are very self-starters, and they're going out and creating startups. So what are some of the lessons you have learned, not only in terms of your personal growth, whether it's resilience, what you went through that you would tell them in terms of mindset along with, let's start with that and then we'll come to the next question.

14:52 Yeah, thank you. So I think resilience is one of my favorite principles of the framework that I lay out. The framework that I lay out, by the way, I talk about it in two parts. And the first, and it's really foundational, is the mindset of outrageous growth. So as an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur, how do you cultivate this mindset and mold it so that you are really ready to plant the seeds for more growth in your product, in your career, and all that good stuff? Resilience is a key part of that because... Most of us, if you're listening to this, you probably have already had some track record and built some resilience through some tough times in your career or in your personal life. And running any team, definitely running any startup, you should know that it almost always feels like it's on fire on the inside for every company and every founder, every person I talk to or I try to coach. that's when you need to remember your resilience. And the resilience is built by one, just recognizing how much you've already accomplished and been through all those challenging times, those things that seemed super daunting or even impossible in the moment, you found a path forward or around it and navigated your way to some form of success to continue on. And then the going through and taking the moment to really feel

16:23 who you are and what you're feeling in the moment. Give it time to process and then put a deadline. For me, it's usually I like to sleep on decisions and hard moments. And then the next day is when I start to allow myself, okay, now you can go into strict problem-solving mode. But that resilience that I remember in the meantime is so quintessential to continuing and to building upon those hard times, those challenges, so that we can meet the next one. The second part of my framework, which we'll get to in a bit, I hope, is about that mindset for understanding your customers. And that's what we hinted at before with how do you, these cognitive biases and how do you design your environment or create excellent magic moments for your customers?

17:14 Very powerful because we'll definitely come to the customer's part. What you're telling me is so real. because as I coach a lot of different CEOs in their different timelines of their journey, so especially few CEOs, they have good financial backing. They are productizing their company. So going from the grassroots, going to the productizing the company, what happens is that they may have co-founders, they may have advisory board members, And smack in the middle, when everything is coming to fruition, they are seeing that things are starting to happen. And that fear grips them. So any message for them?

18:08 Yeah. So I have a chapter titled What's Holding You Back? And pretty much every project I've ever worked on. And, you know, you mentioned you're coaching others. So you've seen this, I'm sure. fear is the one word that it always comes back to, right? It's always fear of something. It could be fear of failure, could be fear of success, could be fear of change. And so often when we are working on something, we kind of put on these blinders and have tunnel vision and kind of lose sight of what we're really trying to do and we get in our own way. This fear kind of has a way of weaseling its way into all these different areas.

18:52 So my message in that, whether you're in a company and that's growing well, but then you are being held back by this, or you're starting something new, or you have a big daunting task or project, like writing my book was, is tap into that fear and identify what is the root cause of it, what is actually fueling this. And then push yourself forward in a way that you can understand, yes, that fear is valid, but the worst case scenarios are so unlikely and they're actually often not even that bad. So working through, for instance, for my book, I was worried that nobody would read it. What happens if I spend years writing it and marketing it and my book is about marketing and then it doesn't even get noticed? That's embarrassing. But what I realized was I really just wanted to tell my story. and I wanted to try to help other people. And it was in that attempt where the value lied. It wasn't in necessarily blowing up and becoming a bestseller. So as I was exploring that fear and understanding better where it was, I was able to overcome it and push through it by stacking all of these different logical points and then working through the emotions, some positive ones as well.

20:21 That is definitely powerful. And we talk about leaders, professionals. They're in different journeys. You may be working for big tech companies or smaller tech companies. And at the same time, you have your startup. So can you share... how that mindset of entrepreneurship weaves into both for the founders as well as for the professionals who are within the thick and thin of tech companies or for that matter, any companies. Yeah, so for me, the commonality between entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs or CEOs and operators of current businesses The common thread there is knowing that as long as you have a growth mindset, you can keep improving and overcoming these challenges.

21:18 So that growth mindset is so important for my own success and everything I instill in my teams because without it, you stagnate. And then when you start to stagnate, things start to decline. I've noticed that from our metric standpoint. I've noticed that from a team morale standpoint. So it doesn't mean growth at all costs in the traditional sense or maybe the negative sense that Silicon Valley kind of has come with. What it means is You just are hungry to improve and keep learning and keep evolving who you are, who the company is, what the product is. And through that growth, you're going to find success. I'd like to say that progress begets progress. Stagnation begets decline.

22:07 And so it's really important to just keep growing there. The second aspect, and this is key to all of the successes and the failures that I've seen in my career, it's that understanding your customer psychology is the key piece that determines whether a company or a product is going to be long-term successful or if they're just a flash in the pan and they're going to just wash away. So my failures, that's when I didn't really understand who the target customer was and what the target audience was, or I didn't adapt to it well enough. And what my success is, that's when I hit on this very visceral or key piece of insight about who they are, what their motivations are, and how to meet them in that moment.

22:58 So then that brings us to the second part of your framework as to how do you understand that customer and how do you create those magic moments for them? Yeah, so I love, I'm curious. I'm endlessly curious about customers. And to understand them, it builds on empathy and some of the stuff we talked about, like the method mindset technique. So that's building things like a full psychological profile about them. It goes beyond biographical data and builds into questions like, where did they first encounter my product? Where would they be using it every day if they are using it?

23:40 You know, for apps, we got to be honest, a lot of people use apps on the toilet. So what does that mean for their usage? You have to think about that. It's probably quick usage and you don't want to take, you know, on something super complicated. They're going to be distracted if they have kids and partners and all that stuff. So all this, all these considerations need to be pulled together to better understand them. And then once we understand them, we can start to build what I like to call magic moments. These magic moments, I split them into two types. But the first type, you can take this and you can start looking for them immediately with your team this week. These are minor magic moments. And the whole idea is that as your customer goes through their usage of your product or service, they have different moods and different mindset about using your product, what they think of your brand, and what goal they're trying to get to. And so when you through surveys, through user interviews, through observing them and the data, when you understand their mood and what they're feeling in that moment, you can ask them or do an intervention that is timely and meets them in that moment. And it has an outsized impact. So I'll give you an example. Oftentimes when customers are first using our products, they're at their most hopeful. That's when they're like, I'm ready to invest.

25:03 I'm ready to set up a full profile. I'm ready to maybe even spend some money because I really hope this is the solution I've been looking for. And that is the moment to ask for some of those big asks. Could be a bigger investment of time, effort. It could be a commitment from the user. You know, hey, this takes a bit of time to get to success. Do you commit to spending three days with us to make sure that you get to the mountain you're trying to climb? Things like that, understanding that and asking in that right moment lead to outsized impact. And that's a minor magic moment because on its own, it looks like a little moment of magic. It's really nice. But cumulatively, they definitely compound and they lead to bigger magic. The second type of magic moment, it's a huge one. It's a little more elusive. Not every product needs it to find it, frankly, to be successful. But a lot of the biggest, most successful products have had it. And that's a major magic moment.

26:07 This is basically, some people call it an aha moment. It's the moment when, if you're using a product, the value of it just clicks for you. You suddenly get like, oh, this is for me. And I get the value. I get what this is for. I'm going to stick around because it just makes sense. And so that moment is all about trying to find your users that are finding success and they are super loyal. What is the behavior pattern? What are the actions they take to get to that successful point where they are much more likely to stick around and much more likely to have a high satisfaction score?

26:50 And then once you do that, experimenting to drive more and more users to take those actions, to see if you can increase the set of loyal customers. So those ones, it's a lot easier if you have a data team established already. They can look at and pour through the data and then run lots of experiments. But I walk through in my book exactly the formula you can use to try to find that and then build upon it. That's powerful. So as you're describing, it involves a lot of different steps. And what you're doing is you're providing user experience. And another thing that's happening over here is you're making them successful. It takes us back to the beginning of our conversation, creating impact. And when you're driving impact for the users to be successful, you stick with it.

27:41 For example, if we just kind of take the brands like Apple or Android, people stick with them for years. So similarly with apps, as you mentioned, you know, there are a lot of different dimensions involved, data teams, understanding. So for a smaller company, or even if it's a larger company, a lot of times what happens is that, I'm sure you're familiar with sunk cost bias, you know, they've, okay, this is a brainchild of one of the sponsors, one of the stakeholders, let's run with it. And sometimes it doesn't even find its feet. So what happens is there's a lot of revenue lost for the established companies. And for the smaller companies, what is the shortest way to finding that minimum viable product and knowing whether it is the product that people will buy into, they lean into?

28:42 So if you're a smaller company and you're looking to find minimum viable product or a product market fit, the place that I recommend starting is looking for a specific segment of users that you can really find that fit for instead of looking holistically as a product. The reason I say that is because product market fit and finding something that is truly viable in the market, that takes understanding the psychology of a specific segment of users rather than 100% of your users. And a lot of the mistakes I see people making is they try to please everybody all at once. And when you do that, you're really pleasing nobody. So when we force ourselves to say, all right, what is the segment that we want to go after right now? And we want to ensure that they are we're serving them the best, they're the happiest with their product, they're finding success at reasonable levels, they have high promoter scores, all that stuff. When you narrow that down and you pick that and then you just continually iterate on experiments in that segment, you're a lot more likely to find that MVP that really works for them.

30:02 And you can always come back later and add wider features or even a different products that fit other segments better. But once you really focus on that first segment and you nail it, then you're going to have a repeatable playbook that you can do for others as well. Definitely. So as we have covered, almost a whole product cycle as much as we could given the time we had. Are there any other salient points that you'd like to share with our audience? Yeah, most of our decisions as humans, as consumers, even at work, they're not driven by logic. They're driven by emotions.

30:51 And so we generally have two brains in our head. The first one is very much emotional pattern matching. It's our system one thinking, if you're familiar with Daniel Kahneman's work. But this one is all about that fast thinking and fast decision. And that's how we make most of our decisions day to day. That's how we generate a lot of our emotions, because we are pattern matching based on all of these different signals that we can read, the social proof, the sunk cost bias. authority, all of that stuff. That is our emotional side. The logical side is slower thinking, and it really is not engaged very often because it's expensive and it's slow. And so we ourselves need to recognize that's how we make decisions and that's how our customers make decisions. So as we want to drive better decisions for our customers or for our staff, We need to just consider what is that environment that we're creating around it so that the first type of thinking, the emotional side that is using all these different somewhat inaccurate signals sometimes are placed in a smart way so that they still lead to the best outcome, the best success for our customers.

32:07 Absolutely. Tell us a little bit more about your book. Where can people find it? You have hinted upon what the book covers, but share with our listeners and audience more about it. Gladly, yeah. So the book is called Outrageous Startup Growth, Uncovering the Secrets to Sustainable User Success. So the reason I wrote it, I wanted to help other people Through it, I tell... It's not your typical boring business book. I tell a lot of fun stories. I tell insider stories from the dating industry, from the live streaming industry, from running companies and growth teams across the world that led to this 100 million plus users.

32:50 And. I'm still thrilled. It feels surreal to say, but it's a national bestseller. And I'm so happy to just hear the feedback from people, see the ideas it's sparking, and frankly, to see how people are already putting it into effect. So you can find it at my website, ColinHodge.com. And you can also, of course, look it up on your favorite bookseller. Fantastic. And if somebody wanted to reach out to you, what are some of the best ways to connect with you? Sure. So feel free to reach out on my website. And if not there, you can find me on LinkedIn as well.

33:32 Is there anything else you'd like to share? Thank you so much for having me, Divya. This was a pleasure. Thank you for joining us, Colin, because you have definitely dropped some magical moments in there. And How can entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs create those magical moments for people they serve? Because when you drive impact, that's when you create magic because you're making someone's life better. And thank you for joining us. And thank you, wonderful audience, because without you, the show would not be possible. Reach out to us like as you always do. Let us know how we can serve and support you. And thank you, Juan, a tech genius. We will see you next week. Take care and be well.

34:25 Bye-bye. Thank you for being part of Beyond Confidence with your host Divya Park. We hope you have learned more about how to start living the life you want. Each week on Beyond Confidence, you hear stories of real people who have experienced growth by overcoming their fears and building meaningful relationships. During Beyond Confidence, Divya Park shares what happened to her when she stepped out of her comfort zone to work directly with people across the globe. She not only coaches people how to form heart connections, but also transform relationships to mutually beneficial partnerships as they strive to live the life they want. If you are ready to live the life you want and leverage your strengths, learn more at www.diviapark.com.

35:07 And you can connect with Divya at contact at divyapark.com. We look forward to you joining us next week.