Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:34:12 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:34:12] S0: Yeah. Very close. Remember, there was no retail back then. Apple retailers, none of that stuff. Most people don't know how on the ropes Apple was back in 2001. [00:34:22] S1: So many stories, but I want to come back to the customer journey thread that you touched on, which I think is really, really important for people listening to this podcast to hear, something that you kind of reinforce again and again in the book. And you have this awesome image that we're going to show of the entire customer journey. And your point that you make is so many product builders focus on building the product and think, build the best product we're going to win. And you have this very important advice of there's so much more to it. Especially the marketing piece, talk about what you think builders don't really get, even though they hear this advice in many ways.
00:34:54 · Tony Fadell
[00:34:54] S0: When we build products, we define products when we build them. We have a good sense of the context when we are defining those things. We're living in that world. And so we're like, "Oh, we're like this and these are our issues and this is who we are." And maybe you put on personas. We would strip out and figure out who our target customers were with their personas. Is it a single mom with kids or is it a dual income, no kid family, or is it senior citizens or whatever? And we would come up with these personas and we would live inside them as we're thinking about the product. But you have to also remember that these people, they live in the context, but they're not aware of your product in their context. And so you have to bring it home to them and meet them where they are. And so your marketing, your website, your Instagram ads, your whatever, your owned and earned and owned media that you do, you really need to put your product in their context and make the visuals and make the words and everything sing to them. And if not, they're not going to get it. And so too many times we just say," Well, if we just make the perfect product." No, you have to put all for a consumer thing specifically, and it's also really good for a B2B product as well, is make sure you understand your customer. And when you say the right word, they go, "Oh, they get me. Oh, I want to listen to these more." And this is before they ever got the product. You need to get them to convert in some way and they need to hear that you've already thought about their issues, or you know and you're living in their shoes. And they're like, "Yes, yes, yes. More of that." Is this an emotional point? Is this a rational point? And you're weaving this tapestry to get them to come to some kind of trial or purchase or conversion or something of the product. And the best way to do that is word of mouth by other early adopters, but you got to do the same thing for the early... and I mean not the earliest early adopters, but the early adopters who other people trust to talk to. Because a lot of other people who are late adopters, they know, "Oh, that's wacky George, he tries everything and then [inaudible 00:37:20]. No, no, no." But if so-and-so's tried it, oh, I should take notice to that.
00:37:28 · Tony Fadell
And so what you want to do is make sure you understand the gestation of your customer and where they are and where they are in the thing. I also updated the crossing the chasm graphic in the book saying how we go about this in your product developments. Because you really have to think about who your target user set is and your target marketing based on the version of product you're in and how you're going to get those higher and higher volumes. And it really means about speaking the context. So maybe when you first ship, you can speak to those early adopters and you can put it in enough words that they're going to convert. But then the second version of the product, you're getting these later adopters. And you've got to speak in their language. And the third set of adopters who are really laggards, you've got to really speak to them and go through that and it could be totally different. And so this was a very interesting story that it was so emblazoned in my mind. Back in 2001, '2, '3, still when Apple had no presence outside of the US, Apple was really, it was selling in the US, some Canada, and some in Japan, but that was it and that was the max. So we were selling iPods into those areas. And so we had the early adapter, and then we had some other language. And then by the third, fourth version of iPod, we had some really refined language for those late adopters. So then we said, "We're going to go back and get a push into Europe." Because iPod hadn't taken off in Europe, so we're going to push iPod into Europe. And so we're on, I think the fourth generation or something like that. And so what did we do in Europe? We ran the same marketing as we were doing in the US in Europe. And the thing is it didn't resonate with the early adopters. It didn't resonate with the later adopters because we didn't have the same messages. We were going for a different set of people and we're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sales aren't working. We got to change the marketing. We got to meet those Europeans where they're at, because they're slower to adopt technology. Versus it starts with the coast and goes inward in the US.
00:39:53 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
And so we're like, "Oh, we got to change things up." And so sometimes it's when you get to new areas, you have to rethink your marketing for that area and remember to meet them where they're at and where if it doesn't have an installed base for word of mouth, you're going to have to get that word of mouth started to work with those people to get that going. Now it's different with all software products and all these things and many products can go global right away, but marketing, you still got to tell a story. So it just reminds me that even though we've maybe compressed the time for some pieces of the adoption puzzle, because we can distribute faster, doesn't mean the awareness can get accelerated. And that we can get people to intelligently understand with this product faster if we just say the words of somebody who might have known about the product for three years. [00:40:53] S1: I got to ask about maybe the most famous, I don't know, tagline of all time when a product was launched, "1,000 songs in your pocket." [00:41:01] S0: Songs in your pocket. [00:41:02] S1: Is there a story behind that?
00:41:02 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:41:02] S1: Is there a story behind that? [00:41:03] S0: Back in the day at Apple, and maybe it's changed now, but back in the Steve days, there was the different functions of Apple. And because they were all lean because the company was only 4,000, 5,000 people and it was already doing Macs and everything, each function was very, very functional. And so the marketing didn't get into the engineering and the design folks. It was separate. Steve was the hub and he was in each of them putting them together, like I said, the opinion-based decision maker. And so when we heard the tagline for the first time, I was like, "That's genius." Now, how long that happened, what was the behind the scenes? We were just a tiny team. We were getting this done in 10 months. So everybody was just running for it. Versus iPhone, which was we had discussions of it, should we call it the iPod phone or should we call it the iPhone because Cisco had the iPhone back in the day, and there was copyright issues and trademark issues. So we were into that because it was also a two and a half year development, and we were in [inaudible 00:42:20]. And it was betting the farm and we were going to cannibalize iPod. So there was a lot more discussions, but in those early days of 1,000 songs, it was everybody running in literally it was really five to six months everything got done. Because we really started it in April and it shipped in end of October.
00:41:03 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:41:03] S0: Back in the day at Apple, and maybe it's changed now, but back in the Steve days, there was the different functions of Apple. And because they were all lean because the company was only 4,000, 5,000 people and it was already doing Macs and everything, each function was very, very functional. And so the marketing didn't get into the engineering and the design folks. It was separate. Steve was the hub and he was in each of them putting them together, like I said, the opinion-based decision maker. And so when we heard the tagline for the first time, I was like, "That's genius." Now, how long that happened, what was the behind the scenes? We were just a tiny team. We were getting this done in 10 months. So everybody was just running for it. Versus iPhone, which was we had discussions of it, should we call it the iPod phone or should we call it the iPhone because Cisco had the iPhone back in the day, and there was copyright issues and trademark issues. So we were into that because it was also a two and a half year development, and we were in [inaudible 00:42:20]. And it was betting the farm and we were going to cannibalize iPod. So there was a lot more discussions, but in those early days of 1,000 songs, it was everybody running in literally it was really five to six months everything got done. Because we really started it in April and it shipped in end of October. [00:42:40] S1: So I think one of the core takeaways from what you shared here is even if you may have the perfect product, the marketing may be the gap that if something isn't working, it may-