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Consulting invoice for Production

the next question is if I'm just getting started with a new consulting business and I've thought of a problem I think is worth solving what should I be doing as a next step I love this question thanks for this one okay so the first thing I would I would ask is who has the problem and that could be a vertical like dentists or it could be it could be more of a demographic type of segmentation like females over 30 in the United States or you know and who make X dollars per year or soccer moms you know or it could be a psychographic segmentation like people who believe that renewable energy is important to them and they want to support renewable energy every possible way so you know I just described like a vertical segmentation a demographic segmentation and a psychographic segmentation so I would say the my first question is what's segments of people how would you define this segment of people who have this problem this problem does don't exist in a vacuum someone has to have it so who has it how would you segment the audience down to the people who have that problem and then if there if there are more than one or if it's a really broad segment who has the problem the most like who has the most expensive problem that's where I came up with that name like everybody's got problems but they're not all expensive problems so who's got the most expensive version of this problem and assuming that you can get some answer to that and if you if you do have an answer to that go ahead and put it in the chat once you have that and you've got a problem I'm assuming when you say you have a thought of a problem that you think is worth solving I'm assuming they have some kind of solution in mind perhaps multiple solutions but you I'm assuming it's something it's it's implied that you know you think you know how to solve this problem of course so okay great so you've got this problem that you believe that you can solve so what I would do next is I would take that segmentation of people let's just say it's people who believe renewable you know people who think renewable energy is really important to them I would connect with those people I would ask my network I'd say hey everybody it's me you know so reach out to your friends and family and colleagues who know you well and would jump on the phone with you and say hey everybody it's me I am considering putting together a you know SAS or I'm just considering writing a book I'm considering doing some thing putting some effort into something and but before I do that I want to make sure that there's an actual problem there that I'm solving I'm not just making this up in my head so do you know anybody who thinks renewable energy is important to them or do you know anybody who drives a Prius you know some sort of outwardly evident something that you can this piece of evidence that is visible from the outside that you could presume you could like make the connection that oh they must care about the environment they must care about renewable energy anybody who has solar panels solar panels on their roof I'd love to talk to them about this problem or I'd love to talk to them and to ask some very specific questions and say if you know anybody hit reply and let me know and a bunch of people will do that they'll say yeah I know somebody Oh would it be okay to which mine make an introduction for me just tell them you know blah blah blah and you know give them a little short short concise clear explanation of why you want to talk to them how long it'll probably take and reassurances that you're not gonna sell them anything or anything like that it's just a research phone call so once you set up all those phone calls then you would talk these people for however long it takes you know 5 10 15 30 minutes whatever it is and say ask them you don't want to say hey if would you buy something like this you don't want to say that you want to ask them about things related to the problem so let's say the problem is something like let's say we're talking about renewable energy here and let's say they do have solar panels but they don't have a good way to know how much how much power they're contributing back to the grid I don't know just making something up and you said oh you know I have solar panels right yes we do the last time you checked how much power were you sending back to the grid and they might say tried no idea I wish I had a way to find that out like oh that's interesting why do you wish you knew that and you'd start to have a conversation around that you're not talking about the solution that you're planning on on putting together to address this in fact it's probably wrong the solution that you're thinking of is probably wrong it's probably not exactly what people want or the problem that they actually have might be adjacent to the one that you think there might be a problem around there but your hypothesis is probably wrong and talking so you don't want to come forward the hypothesis and say hey would you buy this or hey does this sound good to you you want to ask about the problem not talk about the solution that you're planning so as you're asking back and forth about this you know oh well what do we say tracking yeah how did you check to see how much power you contributed back to the grid they might say I would love to know that or they might say I don't know and why would I why would I care about that and then you could say something like oh well you know why did you put these on your roof then you start asking a lot of why questions the same way you would if you were going to be putting together a proposal to do some custom project for a client it's the same kind of thing you want to get at their motivations the why questions why does this problems once you've identified that they they do have a problem or the problem that you're that you're hypothesizing about then ask them why it's a problem because then you're going to start to figure out how much it would be worth to them to solve it so that's where you'd end up with your pricing so that's the very beginning so figure out who the thing is for and figure out what it is you want to help basically figure out who you want to help and then figure out what is the problem that you want to solve for them or what is the opportunity they want you to capture help them capture so basically the difference between sort of aspirin and vitamin seen as sort of aspirational versus reactive okay so a little bit of update at the moment my target markets too broad business owners and startup founders who find working with developers very difficult due to communication problems yeah that's super broad I mean I agree that that's a common problem but you've a fairly specific founders that's ginormous I mean business owners is you know half the population that could be anything from freelancers to over drivers to the guy who runs the local laundromat and it's way too broad startup founders a lot is a lot more specific but still are we talking about bootstrapped are we talking about funded are we talking about you know how big are we talking about Facebook that's a startup right or are we talking about you know I don't know whatever the latest flavor of the month are these SAS people what startup industry probably says if they're doing a lot of software is a blockchain you know whoo-hoo when you think about it who are the ones you won't know this without doing research but my thought process would be like okay startup founders if we were working together on this like on a weekly basis I would say alright startup founders I know a bunch of startup founders they're all different in many ways you probably know some I probably have other students I know I have other students who have we could probably make a list of 45 startup founders who would take your call then in they would all be different so I'd say to make a spreadsheet of all these people and and talk to them about it's you know try and set up a quick phone call I don't think it has to be too long where you try to explore this particular problem just like I said before so you know think of some symptoms that stem from bad communication with your developers like features implemented in properly or release cycles are way too long or you know wasting a lot of money on on staff augmentation so think of some symptoms and or maybe the like a lot of turnover they can't keep developers happy and they're quitting like what are the what are the obvious business problems that stem from bad communication between management and developers and just keep asking about that don't even decide what you're gonna do about it don't even be thinking about that yet just see if there's a real problem there like you and I agree there's a problem there but is there a problem there that someone's gonna spend this going is there a solution to that problem that you can offer that's credible enough for them to pay you to do it because it strikes me as one of those things that people just kind of throw up their hands and be like developers you know they're just speak Greek you know it's like the it's like being a beekeeper you can kind of keep them happy but you really can't tell them what to do so you know I agree that there's a there's a epidemic problem of like business people trying to talk to developers and vice versa that's definitely it's definitely big so I would explore that with these people and figure out which ones have the most expensive version of that problem if they recognize that it exists and and from them I would be very careful to capture all of the emotionally charged language that they use so you jump on the phone with somebody and you just simply ask hey how many you have a bunch of developers right you know like my friend Bob who introduced us said you're managing six teams of you know to developers plus a designer across all these business units oh yeah you know VP of engineering or whatever and I've got 16 leads that report to me each then as a team of three so okay great well that must be a how do you guys communicate to you slack or email or what do you guys do there look Oh buh-buh-bah we have weekly stand-ups whatever it is or daily stand-ups and you just talk to them about about communication with the developers and look for them to express exasperation or use words like hate or drive me crazy or I absolutely or you know I it would be over the moon if and you can ask all sorts of questions you don't want to lead the witness too much you know you you don't want to sort of you don't want to pull them in a direction where you're kind of hoping they're gonna answer in ways that support your plan that is not what you're doing here what you're doing here is exploring the problem from every angle and capturing all of the emotions from the person you're interviewing to to be like okay I get it you want to build an empathy with that person like okay I see I see I understand how you see the problem that's what you want because if you know people being what they are it's probably there are other people like that person who have that problem and are going to the the words that this person uses are gonna trigger the same thoughts from other people who are in the same situation so unless you have I don't know the answer to this but unless you have experience managing developers and having a hard time communicating with them you won't you won't be able to just guess what these other people who are in some you know somebody else's shoes you can't just guess what they think you need to put yourself in their shoes and you do that by talking to them and listening you know with empathy to try and capture all of the pains that they're experiencing in the way that they experience them and then set about fixing those specific things okay see if I missed anything here working with director okay so so the problem is very broad and the target market is very broad so I would the first thing I would do is forget about business owners go straight to startup founders just to pick one because business owners is too big to even know where to start but if you say that if you reach out to your network and you say hey everybody do you know when he would start up founders who you know hey everybody it's me do you know any startup founders because I'd love to talk to them about how they communicate with their developers like what are the communication channels they use for their developers and it could be for and the reason that you want to have that conversation be that you're thinking of addressing this problem with a piece of software or you're thinking about your not trying to sell them anything you're thinking about designing something to fix this or you're thinking about writing a book about it or you're interviewing people for an article or you'd like to get people on a podcast where you interview them about communicating with developers so there are all these different ways that you could sort of frame the conversation it's for an article it's for a book it's for a podcast it's for a product I'm considering making its first service I'm thinking about making its first assess that I'm thinking about making also you know whatever the reason is and just have a very non-threatening invitation to send these people through your network and get on the phone with them and start asking and you don't need to focus it down too much at first it'll start to focus itself you like oh interesting all the Silicon Valley ones that are already have a seed round but I don't have series a yet they're the ones that are really suffering but maybe they don't have any money to solve it so I'll go up a level to people who are going for a series B or whatever I'm probably making these names up I'm not really into the VC space but you get the idea you want to you want to just optimize for conversations talk talk talk to these people and if it you you might find out that they don't really see this as a problem they just think that's that's the part of the beast cost of doing business developers are hard to communicate with you know they might you they might just not be willing to pay for a solution but you could find while you're talking to them that there is you know they might say something like now you know what I really want is a slack bot that would allow me to do X Y & Z so maybe you're like oh maybe I could make that instead maybe you don't care maybe you do but you you know if you talk to them like in that way it's a sort of empathy and not pushing them to what you want to sell to them but instead just really trying to put yourself in their shoes that is where I would start to if I was if I was gonna start over in consulting that's what I would do um yeah and this is the kind of thing you can do while you're still at a full-time job or doing doing whatever you're however you're currently making money this is something that you can do on the side on lunch breaks and things like that so it's it's good groundwork to lay say if you're still at a full-time job you can do it in advance and sort of test your hypothesis before you even take the risk of jumping ship