How do you recruit B2B research prospects when you don't know them beforehand?

I asked the Indie Hackers community "What was stopping them from talking to their customers?" and I got this response from Pragyan Tripathi: "Hi Shavin, my principal challenge is making the first contact with prospective customers if I do not know them beforehand. I am not sure if cold emails

Resources

Do's and don'ts, Validating Statements & Process related questions to get people talking

When you're getting started out with customer research it can be difficult to get people to open up to speak about their experiences. This post has a set of do's & don'ts, validating statements & questions taken directly from Michele Hansen's amazing book, Deploy Empathy. It'll guide you to being an effective

Jobs to be done

What are the principles of a JTBD interview?

These are directly taken from Bob Moesta's book Demand Side Sales. They're meant to act as guardrails that safely keep you on the right path during an interview. I'm writing it here so I can prime myself before an interview. If you find it helpful please buy Bob's book! [https:

The opportunity cost of "we've added it to the backlog!"

Let's imagine a customer has requested you to build super-fine role-based permissions into your app. You know that building it would mean that it causes more issues than it fixes or at least that's what it feels like from the sound of the request. How do you respond? One option

Design

How do you convert a Job Story into a Problem Statement/HMW when ideating?

From my last post, I broke down how Intercom uses Job Stories from JTBD theory as an input into their design process. Whilst writing it, I noticed how much the process could benefit from a design thinking exercise called a How Might We. How Might We notes (HMWs) are a

Design

How Intercom designs valuable features with Job Stories

When you've got a good grasp of a customer's Job to be Done (JTBD), what are the next steps to craft a solution? There's a lot of advice on how to conduct your own JTBD-style interviews, cluster the data, and synthesize the findings. It's common to reach a point where

How do you get stakeholders to buy into variable scope product pitches?

When you're starting to adopt Shape Up [https://basecamp.com/shapeup/] at your company it's common to feel like the concept of fixed time and variable scope [https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.2-chapter-03#fixed-time-variable-scope] is daunting to both stakeholders/leadership and builders: * Stakeholders are unsettled by the fact that they

Design

How do you craft a good problem statement/HMW note?

How Might We notes (HMWs) are a great way to reframe challenges as opportunities in the form of questions. When faced with a design challenge, it's important to consider a variety of options early on rather than limiting yourself to a few viable options. In Design Thinking, this process is

Design

How do you build a bare minimum feature?

Have you ever felt it was difficult to ship on time? Isn't it true that understanding what works is nearly impossible without having to build and ship different solutions to understand which one works? Is there any better advice than to "ship it before you're ready" in order to learn

Design

Helping independent creators to practice writing on Twitter with Idea Bakery

[shavinpeiries.com/building-in-public]Want to see more like this? Visit my portfolio [https://shavinpeiries.com/portfolio]

Design

Designing a conversational medicine ordering experience for customers with non-communicable diseases at Healthnet

To read the rest of this case study, get in touch. [shavin@verybadwizards.io] To read more case studies have a look at my portfolio. [https://shavinpeiries.com/portfolio]

Design

Increasing customer acquisitions through Hunter's blog

Hunter.io lets you find professional email addresses in seconds and connect with the people that matter for your business. I noticed that the founders of Hunter.io mentioned that they wanted to add search functionality to their Ghost blog when I applied. This document proposed some experiments to add

Building in Public

How Idea Bakery is going to change

The first launch of Idea Bakery was a flop. The problem domain and solution were too narrow for anyone to be interested in and stick with long enough to form a habit. To add insult to injury I wasn't using it myself. It was supposed to be a scratch your

Design

Feature Pitch to improve the publishing workflow of the Ghost Editor

Ghost.org is a non-profit organisation building open source technology for journalism. It's what this website is using to host the words you're reading. While using this product is a pleasure, I continuously encountered a problem with the publishing workflow once I was done writing a post. As a result,

Resources

6 Helpful Resources to Land your Dream Remote Product Design Role

I posted a Tweet on the work I've been doing to get my product design portfolio together: > The portfolio is mostly done. Now it's about the polish and pizazz. Here's the background section pic.twitter.com/MXAtZnw6QY [https://t.co/MXAtZnw6QY] — Shavin Peiries (@shavin47) September 17, 2021 [https://twitter.com/

Raw Thoughts

How to get unstuck after a failed product launch

For the last couple of months, I haven't put much effort into Idea Bakery. After a rather unsuccessful launch and my main service business running out of money, I felt emotionally drained to work on it. My last update was close to two months ago. To recover, I took a

Business

Start something

I remember wanting someone to create Idea Bakery [https://ideabakery.app/] for me by sharing it in a public pitch [https://shavinpeiries.com/should-i-build-this-in-public/]. I come from a front-end development background, and the backend was always scary for me to touch. * Should I use Ruby on Rails or go with

Product Reviews

Short-form podcasting — Thoughts on Racket.

Companies are making it easier for everyday people to utilise their favourite method(s) of distribution. As a business, we thought that podcasting would be an excellent way to do content. But the idea was always too much because there are many things to do before you even get started.

Building in Public

Idea Bakery open beta launch 24-hour stats & reflections

I launched [https://ideabakery.app/] an open beta version for Idea Bakery on the 16th of June 2021. Here's how it went. * 5 sign-ups. Most of them were from the Visualise Value community [https://twitter.com/visualizevalue]. * On my launch post [https://twitter.com/shavin47/status/1405160146934722561], there were 881

Design

The four forces model - how customers justify purchases

Behavioural change has to happen for a reason. So there needs to be a causal set of events that drive the customer towards making a switch. Customers switch with the expectation that they'll get their job done better than the way the previous solution did it before. For this purpose,

Design

How do you choose what features to build?

I soft-launched Idea Bakery with a login flow that included a username and password. The intention of the app was to be used by independent creators who use Twitter. The starting point of this app was a little convoluted in hindsight. I had used the base of it from a

Business

What makes a product successful in the eyes of the customer?

When McDonald's hired disruptive innovation theory pioneer Clayton Christensen to improve milkshake sales, they identified half of their milkshakes sold before 8.30 am. It was the only thing those customers bought, they were always alone, and once they bought it, they drove off with it. When Christensen's team confronted

Building in Public

Update on Idea Bakery & the new work cycle

When I first started building idea bakery, I released a version that was just good enough to get some feedback. I sent it to a trusted few I thought would've found it useful & Tweeted if anyone was interested in early access. This is the feedback I received for the first

Productivity

How do you differentiate between important and urgent tasks?

A to-do list is a must for anyone trying to get anything done. Either you're writing it on a post-it, a whiteboard, or simply writing it down on a piece of paper. The most satisfactory part? Crossing it off as done. But after a while, those methods stop working. You

Building in Public

Asking Open AI's CTO for access to GPT-3

Context: I emailed Open AI's CTO, Greg Brockman [https://twitter.com/gdb] about getting access to GPT-3. In this email, I wanted to tell him about the position I wanted to take, helping independent creators talk about their ideas on Twitter, how it's going to be utilised and how it's