See Through the Eyes of Your Customer

Posted on June 29th, 2009 by Keith Ferrazzi
Alan Webber, FastCo Founder and Author of Rules of Thumb

Alan Webber, FastCo Founder and Author of Rules of Thumb

Alan Webber, the co-founder of Fast Company and a friend, had a book out just a couple months ago, Rules of Thumb: 52 Rules for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self.  These are honest, practical rules -- and earnest. Webber learned them all firsthand.

One of my favorites: Rule #22, Learn to see the world through the eyes of your customer.

Alan writes about learning that lesson when he was looking for a backer to launch Fast Company. He and his partner pitched everywhere, passionately telling everyone how cool, how hip, how evolved their new business magazine would be. No one was buying. Finally they gave the same pitch to Fred Drasner and Mort Zuckerman, the owners of The Atlantic Monthly and US News & World Report. The gentlemen stopped them short:

"Fred and Mort weren't interested in our idea. They had a problem and we were a potential solution. Their problem was excess capacity: They had built a big pipe -- ad sales staff, paper and printing contracts, relationships with advertisers, distribution contracts -- and they needed another magazine to use up that excess capacity. It could be Fast Company, it could be Senior Golfer, it could be any publication that interested them and had a decent chance of succeeding.

"That's when I realized that, like many entrepreneurs, I'd been looking at the situation through the wrong end of the telescope. Absorbed as I was in the brilliance of my own idea, I'd overlooked the other end of the telescope: I'd neglected to consider how the world looked to the people I was trying to sell on my idea....I realized that the other magazine companies had passed on Fast Company not because it was or wasn't a good idea but because we weren't a solution for a problem they had. Now it I wanted to sell Fred and Mort on my magazine, I first had to buy into my responsibility to help them solve their own problem."

How to get better at "flipping the telescope"? Alan's great advice:

1. Talk less, listen more.
2. Make few claims; ask more questions.
3. Focus less on output, more on feedback.
4. Buy fewer ads; collect more data.

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