"We would have a conversation with founders. You're saying like, gosh, I'm I'm almost embarrassed to ask this question, but who exactly is your target customer? And three co-founders have three differe..."

"Today, my guests are Jake Knap and John Zeratsky. The framework that Jake and John share in this conversation is basically the missing manual for founders and product teams trying to refine and test t..."

"be the highest ROI days in the history of your product. And I highly encourage you to do this if you're in the process of baking an idea. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follo..."

"and receive money worldwide at lightning speed. You can get 20x the standard FDIC protection through program banks and you can earn industry-leading yield from your first dollar while still being able..."

"into all this? Well, these integrations are a pain to build. And that's why Paragon provides an embedded platform that enables engineers to ship these product integrations in just days instead of mont..."

"know, emails off. We're just Slack is off. We're just focused on running through these sequence of decisions building prototypes, getting them in front of customers, learning about a scorecard that re..."

"Okay, let's uh talk about these two days., How, does, how, do, you, lay it, out? How do you approach it? What should someone do if they want to actually try this at home? So there are three phases to ..."

"create the founding hypothesis. So the first phase, the basics as I mentioned that's identifying who's your customer what problem are you solving for the customer, what's the competition for solving t..."

"2. And it's it's almost silly how simple this thing is, but really powerful if for founders to have that that clarity about, okay, here it all is in one sentence. Now, let's go let's go test and make ..."

"progress you can see in those three and a half, four weeks, it's phenomenal. So uh let's let's talk about Latchet. So Latchet, a couple co-founders, Chris and James, who were they had left Substack th..."

"the differentiation the the structure of what they're building and to validate that with customers before they went all in on building a particular approach. And I think you'll see in this example how..."

"you said before is that we're going through a sequence of questions. Who's the most important customer for example is the first question the very first question that a team needs to answer. And as we ..."

"You know, if we if we jump down to the competition, their number one competitor is Shopify, but Etsy is another way people approach this as we mentioned. But there's also, you know, in-person sales an..."

"surprising. It's and I think it's also kind of a sense of relief that like okay, well, that's very reassuring that we have we have clarity about that and we've made it concrete. These activities that ..."

"by taking time to sit down and do this almost unnatural act of like wait why are we special and and you know certain when we're able to encourage teams to really think about that um it sets them up re..."

"in founders who are you know they're they're incredibly talented and they're smart and they have a background that is going to give them an advantage in building some particular product. But you're ri..."

"sequence of activities in the basics is to boot up the right context into everyone's head so that we're ready for the main event of this first day, which is differentiation. And I still have very firm..."

"it, if it gets in their face, they they want to not try it because we just are all bombarded by so many things and that's never been more true than it is now. And so we have defenses up to save to sav..."

"sprint, we're going to have a a 2 by two diagram that's going to look like a business school 101 diagram. And in fact, we often refer back to this Steve Jobs uh iPhone introduction slide where he talk..."

"understandable by any, you know, any customer. We're all sort of familiar with these kinds of things. So, okay that's great. Then we get into writing custom differentiators. So, we're going to write a..."

"scale. And you're gonna say, "Okay let's be honest. Let's be tough. Where do we really think we could stack up against the competitors on this differentiator we've chosen?" In great detail, plotting e..."

"we want to we want to have like a way of looking at the world that puts all of the competitors into Loserville. And then we want to say like, okay, if you can deliver on that and if that promise is co..."

"we've all seen 2 by 2 diagram, right? There's a ton of these. They're they're all over the place. And if you're anything like me, I just ignored these. I just thought these were pretty much BS up unti..."

"tested and proven that that that matters and that we can deliver on it. And so if you do all of those things and you do it at the beginning of the project, we think this has the potential. We've seen ..."

"showed here. anything more you can add here for helping people start to think about ways to differentiate beyond the obvious price and speed and I don't know couple more. So I'm just going to jump int..."

"It's not just the job of the person writing the pitch deck. It's not just the job of the marketer or the salesperson, but we're getting everybody's perspective in on it. And this is a great warm-up ac..."

"AI to solve problems that were previously unsolvable with software. So you know we have a company that we invested in called bindwell and uh they use AI to design precision pesticides and uh we ran a ..."

"can be a little bit cheaper. Yeah. For now. But it has to be a lot cheaper. It has to be, you know, I've heard people offer 10x cheaper than the legacy sort of um manual approach to solving that probl..."

"And and we find that going through this process where you're not just thinking about one differentiator at a time or you're not trying to win on all of them but you're looking across this scale of opt..."

"plan for startups. That's cooda.io/lenny to get started for free and get six months, of, the, team, plan., k cod.io/lenny. io/lenny. Anything else on differentiation before we move on to the third ste..."

"to it's easier to use an example than to describe this in the abstract. So coming into Character Labs, Latchet had sort of four approaches in mind, but they weren't sure which one to take. So they mig..."

"from the competition in the same ways based on the unique advantages that the founders Chris and James bring to this company. So these are not like wildly different product ideas or company ideas. The..."

"that happen. So what we're going to do on the second day of the foundation sprint or this sort of third phase which is the approach is to identify those different paths. So for latchet here they've go..."

"lens as well. And so what the teams will do is to plot these options on these lenses. They'll almost always create some lenses of their own, some custom lenses that matter to them. You know they might..."

"could save you so much of that time. And it's also the case that you start building something, it's exciting, you can move fast, it's easy to easier and easier to see progress now with AI tools. And t..."

"marching through you know the the swamps or whatever one phenomenon we've seen when teams are building things really quickly with AI is that the more AI generated or assisted they are the more generic..."

"worth my time. And so, uh, we think it's really helpful to basically put yourself in a situation where you can slow down a little bit and do some like some some hard thinking, some deep thinking about..."

"the power of AI it definitely creates this narrative that the the only way to build something new is to just create the product as quickly as possible and that that doesn't really match our experience..."

"engineers like non-product people because I think a PM brain would be like I want to do this uh intuitively whether they do it right or not. I think it's other functions almost that are like no just j..."

"conviction, run with it. But if you're not there, this is a great path to get you going. And if you're not sure if the thing you're going to build is going to turn into that, you know, $80 million exi..."

"the early days and we're seeing people make decisions. this is what drives those decisions. It's differentiation. And so if we look back across, you know all of the sprints that we've been a part of o..."

"the experiments and they change it. But the thing is they're keyed into differentiation as being crucial. They're not just thinking about the product and trying to get the right shape of the product o..."

"any team that reads the book and runs this process. And the special sauce that John and I bring is that we're obsessed with the the sequence of decisions that you make and how you work together with y..."

"So for them, the biggest risk is do people even will these artisans even want this thing? Are they actually going to want to have a community sharing sort of sales platform and they decide the key mom..."

"that's a helpful signal. Now granted these interviews are kind of a simulation. It's not like the real world but they're a helpful signal that we're on track for product market fit. If we see gosh thi..."

"uh time scale. That was such good context because I was feeling that. And to your point, most founders do not do this much testing iterating, learning in the first few weeks of their startup. They mig..."

"about different directions. So it's you're testing something very specific versus just generally testing at your general concept. As we go into the second design sprint for uh Latchet they're making s..."

"What? Everything is green. Everything's green. If you can't see every single one is green. Oh my god. And this is this is extreme, but it is a pattern that we've seen again and again. This is a real e..."

"together. So you go from here's the thing we should be building to how to actually test it. Let me ask you before we wrap up is there anything else that you think is really important for people to kno..."

"look just really quickly at what his prototypes look like. And in the first week, I can show you this prototype right here. And it's a marketing page. And on this marketing page, there's a link to a u..."

"becomes more important. We had a couple of teams in this current group of character labs where they jumped to vibe coding prototypes like right away, like at the very beginning. And you know when you ..."

"mark is ringing in my head as you talk about this. Just as soon as you make that prototype, everything from that point is a response to that first idea versus have I actually thought through what this..."

"be going to all the trouble. There are simpler things we can we can be going after. Um the the kind of cool thing we've found about working in this way though we've we've focused a lot on finding prod..."